She disentangles the snarls out of my mind.

… [William] James now undertook to raise money for a salary for Richard Hodgson, who was to be the paid secretary of the American Society for Psychical Research. In an effort to cure his intractable insomnia he tried a mind-cure doctor named

Annetta Dresser. Annetta Dresser, together with her husband, Julius, and Mary Baker Eddy, was among the first disciples of Phineas Quimby, the father of the mental-healing movement called New Thought. (Annetta’s son Horatio became a prominent New Thought writer, whose works James would treat with respect in The Varieties of Religious Experience.) James was dubious about Mrs. Dresser at first, unsure whether the mind cure was doing him any good, but determined to give it a full fair trial of a dozen sessions. “I sit beside her,” he wrote his sister in February 1887, “and presently drop asleep whilst she disentangles the snarls out of my mind. She says she never saw a mind with so many, so agitated, so rootless etc.” It had been sister Alice’s view of William all along, as he laughingly reminded her.

From : William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism : a Biography By Robert D. Richardson

In the 10 years I've been writing this blog this is the first time I've found evidence of some one connecting at the level of the mind like Quimby.

In The Philosophy of P. P. Quimby, With Selections from his Manuscripts and a Sketch of his Life BY ANNETTA GERTRUDE DRESSER , 1895 she wrote

“He seemed to know that I had come to him feeling that he was a last resort, and with but little faith in him or his mode of treatment. But, instead of telling me that I was not sick, he sat beside me, and explained to me what my sickness was, how I got into the condition, and the way I could have been taken out of it through the right understanding._{1} He seemed to see through the situation from the beginning, and explained the cause and effect so clearly that I could see a little of what he meant. My case was so serious, however, that he did not at first tell me I could be made well. But there was such an effect produced by his explanation that I felt a new hope within me, and began to get well from that day._{2}

He continued to explain my case from day to day, giving me some idea of his theory and its relation to what I had been taught to believe_{3}, and sometimes sat silently with me for a short time._{4} I did not understand much that he said, but I felt " the spirit and the life " that came with his words; and I found myself gaining steadily. Some of these pithy sayings of his remained constantly in mind, and were very helpful in preparing the way for a better understanding of his thought, such, for instance, as his remark, that " Whatever we believe, that we create," or "Whatever opinion we put into a thing, that we take out of it."

The general effect of these quiet sittings with him was to lighten up the mind, so that one came in time to understand the troublesome experiences and problems of the past in the light of his clear and convincing explanations, I remember one day especially when a panorama of past experiences came before me ; and I saw just how my trouble had been made, how I had been kept in bondage and enslaved by the doctors and the false opinions that had been given me. From that day the connection was broken with these painful experiences, and the terrible practices and experiments which had added so much to my trouble; and I lived in a larger and freer world of thought.”

Healing Without Medicine: From Pioneers to Modern Practice By Albert Amao breaks it down into four parts:

[1] empowering the patient

[2] personal persuasion

[3] hammering

[4] silent spiritual treatment (closing healing).