fulfilment. The subconscious no sooner gets a conviction than it tries
to act it out. Of course it can succeed only up to a certain limit.
If it believes the stomach to have cancer, it cannot make cancer, but
it can make the stomach misbehave. One of my patients, on hearing of a
case of brain-tumor immediately imagined this to be her trouble, and
developed a pain in her head. She could not manufacture a tumor, but
she could manufacture what she believed to be the symptoms.

There was another patient who was supposed to have brain-tumor. This
young woman seemed to have lost almost entirely the power to keep her
equilibrium in walking. Her center of gravity was never over her feet,
but away out in space, so that she was continually banging from one
side of the room to the other, only saving herself from injury by
catching at the wall or the furniture with her hands. Several
physicians who had been interested in the case had found the symptoms
strongly suggestive of brain-tumor. There were, however, certain
unmistakable earmarks of hysteria, such as childlike bland
indifference to the awkwardness of the gait which was a grotesque
caricature of several brain and spinal-cord diseases, with no accurate
picture of any single one. This was evidently a case, not of actual
loss of power but a dissociation of the memory-picture of walking. The
patient was a trained nurse and knew in a general way the symptoms of
brain-tumor. When the suggestion of brain-tumor had fixed itself in
her mind she was able subconsciously to manufacture what she believed
to be the symptoms of that disease.

By injecting a keen sense of disapprobation and skepticism into the
hitherto placidly accepted state of disability, by flashing a mirror
on the physical and moral attitudes which she was assuming, I was able
to rob the pathological complex of its (altogether unconscious)