I established a private practice treating patients suffering from melancholia or neurosis with the aid of hypnosis. I benefited from Artopoulos’s high-society connections and many of my habitués were members of the Baudelaire Society. My method was unique and controversial: first I would hypnotize, and only then would I analyze. My growing reputation began to attract the attention of the younger generation. Some of them courted my favors, intrigued by the reports of the breakthroughs my clients achieved, which they themselves could not replicate, no matter how closely they imitated me. Little could they guess the secret of my success—I was using the art of crossing to look inside the minds of those I treated. For my patients, there seemed to be something beneficial about it, something restorative and healing simply in the fact of, however briefly, no longer being held captive by an overactive imagination. And while visiting their bodies and minds, I would explore their memories, dreams, illusions, and delusions, their secrets, pretenses, and lies. This way, during the analysis that followed the crossing, I could detect every self-deceit, every avoidance, and every dissemblance. I came to know my patients better than they knew themselves. I knew when they were lying to me, and more importantly I knew when they were lying to themselves, an all-too-frequent occurrence.

Around this time, the profession of alienist was undergoing profound changes. It became fashionable, in certain high society circles, to seek the assistance of an altogether new kind of doctor. In March 1910, I attended the Second Congress for Freudian Psychology in Nuremberg and, upon my return to Paris, stopped calling myself an alienist and instead took up the title of psychoanalyst. My method, however, didn’t change.

If it was a sham of a kind, it was a sham with indisputable results. I was invited to lecture at the Sorbonne, and later at the Institut de France. I published essays in medical journals and popular magazines, and occasionally my name was printed in the newspaper society pages, usually alongside that of Artopoulos. He would tease me about my progress—his favorite joke was to beg me to hypnotize him. In the spirit of the joke, I always refused him good-naturedly, telling him we were too close, that I knew him too well, that he wasn’t suggestible enough. Joking aside, I never trusted him enough to hypnotize him. His friendship was akin to keeping a tiger for a pet: I never allowed myself to forget I might be mauled to death at any moment.