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If there is moral criticism against suggestive therapy, it is the duty of the community to consider it. This opposition argues as follows: Hypnotic influence brings the patient under the will control of the hypnotizer and thus destroys his own freedom. Whatever the patient may reach in the altered states is reached without his own effort, while he is the passive receiver of the other man's will.
If, on the other hand, the personality of the hypnotizer and the crime itself are repugnant to the hypnotic subject, he will absolutely refuse to do as he is bidden, even while in the deepest hypnotic sleep. On this point nearly all authorities agree. Again, there is absolutely no well authenticated case of crime committed by a person under hypnotic influence.
Is it admissible that the first comer should hypnotize one or more persons, and then do with them as he likes? And especially that the hypnotizer should be the first immoral individual who happens to come along? It is a frightful power in the hands of any one, no matter whom.
It is analogous to the hypnotic state in which suggestions made by the hypnotizer have for the subject the character of reality although he is not conscious of his surroundings, and auto-suggestions—that is the expectations with which the Yogi begins his meditation—apparently have the same effect.
Yet the psychologist must insist again that no new principle is involved, that even in the strongest forms of suggestion, in hypnotism, nothing depends upon any special influence emanating from the mind of the hypnotizer or upon any special power flowing over from brain to brain; but that everything results from the change of equilibrium in the psychomotor processes of the hypnotized, and thus upon the interplay of his own mental functions.
"Is there any particular form of words in which you like to be prompted, when you get to this point?" "Dr. Brayton might hypnotize him," suggested the lady whose shoulder Wetmore was looking round. The doctor answered across the table, "In these cases of the inverted or prostrated will, there is often not volition enough to coöperate with the hypnotizer.
He shows his inconsistency when he states that under certain circumstances the hypnotizer is in danger of becoming hypnotized himself.
In claiming that hypnotism depends upon the over-attention to the hypnotizing person, we admit that the increased suggestibility belongs entirely to suggestions which come from without. Only that which at least takes its starting point from the words or the movements of the hypnotizer finds over-sensitive suggestibility.
Cocke's experiment in hypnotizing himself. It will be remembered that a professional hypnotizer or magnetizer had hypnotized him by telling him to fix his mind on the number twenty-six and holding up his hand. Says the doctor: "In my room that evening it occurred to me to try the same experiment. I did so. I kept the number twenty-six in my mind.
And with a still more powerful hypnotizer, why could not a majority nay, all of those in a certain district, a certain State, a certain country, in the world be made to see and feel things which now, and to us, have no existence? In that case, Mr. Henley, would it be the majority or the minority who were deceived? All is mind, and the hypnotizer merely alters it."
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