There are certain points in the behaviour of a child with enuresis
which seem to point to this conclusion.

_(a)_ In the first place, the trouble is seldom serious or very well
developed in early childhood, and the reason for this, I take it, is
that an occasional lapse in a child of perhaps two or three years of
age is usually treated lightly and in the proper spirit of tolerance.
It is only with children a little older that nurses and parents become
distressed and begin unwittingly by urging the child to present the
suggestion to her mind, that the bed may or will be wetted. Hence the
usual history is that control was partially acquired in the second
year, but that, instead of later becoming complete, relapses began to
be more frequent, and that since that time all that can be done seems
only to make matters worse.

_(b)_ In the second place, the influence of suggestion is shown by the
behaviour of the child when removed to a hospital for observation. It
is the invariable experience that the enuresis then promptly stops. In
hospital the attitude of those around the child is entirely different.
She has the comfortable and consoling feeling that in wetting the bed
she is doing exactly what is expected of her. There is even a feeling
that otherwise she is showing herself to be something of a fraud, and
that she has then been admitted to the hospital on false pretences.
Hence, perhaps for the first time in many years, the child is free
from the obsession, and the bed is not wetted.

_(c)_ In the third place, it is easy to recognise in the history of
many of the cases, the ill-effects of circumstances which add new
force to the fear of failure or shake the confidence in the control
which had been regained. Thus a boy, an only child, who had suffered