Where Breuer and Freud profited from the spontaneous or the provoked
somnabulistic state of the patient, and by questioning dug up the hidden
depths, Frank decided to be satisfied with a light hypnose, a state of
hypotaxie, which might be termed analogous to the half-conscious state of
the person who after taking a mid-day nap frequently denies having been
asleep. In this condition we can give an account on waking of what happened
around us. One sleeps and one does not sleep; the upper-consciousness then
can control what the sub-consciousness brings up.

Frank says that, except in the peculiarity that he is satisfied with a
lighter degree of hypnose, his method differs from that of Breuer and Freud
in that generally he does not question the patient when under hypnotism,
neither suggests. Experience has taught him, he says, that the ideas loaded
with affect, spontaneously discharge. They are the very ones which would do
so in a dream, but are differentiated from the occurrences in the dream in
the sense that these last enter phantastically dressed, while the first
express themselves with the mental affects belonging to them, precisely as
they were lived through.

Precisely as in the primitive-cathartic method, the affects pushing in here
are disemburdened here, but at the same time, the connection between the
existent sick-phenomena and the causes having a place here were
automatically conscious to the patient. In some cases suggestion is called
upon for help in order to free an affect or to direct the attention to the
expected scene.

In most cases the process goes on itself, after the introduction of
hypnosis. If the sleep is too deep, then the ideas are transferred into real
dreams, which the patient immediately recognizes as such, or the production
of scenes discontinues; the superconsciousness no longer works.