In proof of this the fact is urged that the classical three stages and their grouped symptoms have only been reported as spontaneously occurring, so far, at the Salpétrière, though they may be superinduced by deliberate suggestion, in patients anywhere found.The ocular symptoms, the flushed face, accelerated breathing, etc., are said not to be symptoms of the passage into the hypnotic state as such, but merely consequences of the strain on the eyes when the method of looking at a bright object is used.They are absent in the subjects at Nancy, where simple verbal suggestion is employed.The various reflex effects (aphasia, echolalia, imitation, etc.) are but habits induced by the influence of the operator, who unconsciously urges the subject into the direction in which he would prefer to have him go.The influence of the magnet, the opposite effects of upward and downward passes, etc., are similarly explained.
Even that sleepy and inert condition, the advent of which seems to be the prime condition of farther symptoms being developed, is said to be merely due to the fact that the mind expects it to come; whilst its influence on the other symptoms is not physiological, so to speak, but psychical, its own easy realization by suggestion simply encouraging the subject to expect that ulterior suggestions will be realized with equal ease.The radical defenders of the suggestion-theory are thus led to deny the very exist- ence of the hypnotic state, in the sense of a peculiar trance-like condition which deprives the patient of spontaneity and makes him passive to suggestion from without.The trance itself is only one of the suggestions, and many subjects in fact can be made to exhibit the other hypnotic phenomena without the preliminary induction of this one.
The theory of suggestion may be said to be quite triumphant at the present day over the neurosis-theory as held at the Salpétrière, with its three states, and its definite symptoms supposed to be produced by physical agents apart from co-operation of the subject's mind.But it is one thing to say this, and it is quite another thing to say that there is no peculiar physiological condition whatever worthy of the name of hypnotic trance, no peculiar state of nervous equilibrium, 'hypotaxy,' 'dissociation,'
or whatever you please to call it, during which the subject's susceptibility to outward suggestion is greater than at ordinary times.All the facts seem to prove that, until this trance-like state is assumed by the patient, suggestion produces very insignificant results, but that, when it is once assumed, there are no limits to suggestion's power.The state in question has many affinities with ordinary sleep.It is probable, in fact, that we all pass through it transiently whenever we fall asleep; and one might most naturally describe the usual relation of operator and subject by saying that the former keeps the latter suspended between making and sleeping by talking to him enough to beep his slumber from growing profound, and yet not in such a way as to wake him up.A hypnotized patient, left to himself , will either fall sound asleep or wake up entirely.The difficulty in hypnotizing refractory persons is that of catching them at the right moment of transition and making it permanent.Fixing the eyes and relaxing the muscles of the body produce the hypnotic state just as they facilitate the advent of sleep.The first stages of ordinary sleep are characterized by a peculiar dispersed attitude of the attention.Images come before consciousness which are entirely incongruous with our ordinary beliefs and habits of thought.The latter either vanish altogether or withdraw, as it were, inertly into the background of the mind, and let the incongruous images reign alone.These images acquire, more-over, an exceptional vivacity; they become first 'hypnagogic hallucinations,' and then, as the sleep grows deeper, dreams.Now the 'mono-ideism,' or else the impotency and failure to 'rally' on the part of the background-ideas, which thus characterize somnolescence, are unquestionably the result of a special physiological change occurring in the brain at that time.Just so that similar mono-ideism, or dissociation of the reigning fancy from those other thoughts which might possibly act as its 'reductives,' which characterize the hypnotic consciousness, must equally be due to a special cerebral change.
The term 'hypnotic trance,' which I employ, tells us nothing of what the change is, but it marks the fact that it exists, and is consequently a useful expression.The great vivacity of the hypnotic images (as gauged by their motor effects), the oblivion of them when normal life is resumed, the abrupt awakening, the recollection of them again in subsequent trances, the anæsthesia and hyperæsthesia which are so frequent, all point away from our simple waking credulity and 'suggestibility' as the type by which the phenomena are to be interpreted, and make us look rather towards sleep and dreaming, or towards those deeper alterations of the personality known as automatism, double consciousness, or 'second' personality for the true analogues of the hypnotic trance. Even the best hypnotic subjects pass through life without anyone suspecting them to possess such a remarkable susceptibility, until by deliberate experiment it is made manifest.The operator fixes their eyes or their attention a short time to develop the propitious phase, holds them in it by his talk, and the state being there, makes them the puppets of all his suggestions.But no ordinary suggestions of waking life ever took such control of their mind.
