Rivers came to Craiglockhart from the treatment centre at Maghull - near Liverpool. He had not been a successful therapist there largely because of the nature of the research that was being carried out. The Maghull therapists had asked the soldiers from the ranks to give details of the dreams that they were having but the men thought that this analysis would determine whether or not they would be returned to the battlefields and so they refused to talk with the therapists during their sessions, answering only in monosyllables. Although Rivers used the Freudian concepts of 'repression' and 'the unconscious', in his work he did not follow the Freudian School. He treated the soldiers with 'autognosis' which involved dream analysis (and was a version of what is now called cognitive therapy). Rivers called shell shock 'anxiety neurosis' and he used catharsis and re-education by telling his patients how much faith he had in them in order to make themselves well again. Rivers used the power of suggestion to create self-belief in the patients.