a-general-introduction-to-psychoanalysis-sigmund-freud

your knowledge of the relation between suggestion and transference you will
readily understand the capriciousness of hypnotic therapy which attracted our
attention, and you will see why, on the other hand, analytic suggestion can be
relied upon to its limits. In hypnosis we depend on the condition of the
patient's capacity for transference, yet we are unable to exert any influence
on this capacity. The transference of the subject may be negative, or, as is
most frequent, ambivalent; the patient may have protected himself against
suggestion by very special adjustments, yet we are unable to learn anything
concerning them. In psychoanalysis we work with the transference itself, we
do away with the forces opposing it, prepare the instrument with which we
are to work. So it becomes possible to derive entirely new uses from the
power of suggestion; we are able to control it, the patient does not work
himself into any state of mind he pleases, but in so far as we are able to
influence him at all, we can guide the suggestion.
Now you will say, regardless of whether we call the driving force of our
analysis transference or suggestion, there is still the danger that through our
influence on the patient the objective certainty of our discoveries becomes
doubtful. That which becomes a benefit to therapy works harm to the
investigation. This objection is most often raised against psychoanalysis, and
it must be admitted that even if it does not hit the mark, it cannot be waved
aside as stupid. But if it were justified, psychoanalysis would be nothing more
than an extraordinarily well disguised and especially workable kind of
treatment by suggestion, and we may lay little weight upon all its assertions
concerning the influences of life, psychic dynamics, and the unconscious. This
is in fact the opinion held by our opponents; we are supposed especially to
have "balked into" the patients everything that supports the importance of
sexual experiences, and often the experiences themselves, after the
combinations themselves have grown up in our degenerate imaginations. We
can refute these attacks most easily by calling on the evidence of experience
rather than by resorting to theory. Anyone who has himself performed a
psychoanalysis has been able to convince himself innumerable times that it is
impossible thus to suggest anything to the patient. There is no difficulty, of
course, in making the patient a disciple of any one theory, and thus causing
him to share the possible error of the physician. With respect to this he
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