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Updated: May 25, 2025
Within certain limits, we might almost say that this increase of suggestibility for autosuggestion is the fundamental characteristic of these diseases, just as increase of suggestibility for heterosuggestions characterizes hypnotism. Especially in earlier times, the theory was often proposed that hypnosis is an artificial hysteria.
From the most credulous to the stubborn, we have every degree of suggestibility, the one impressed by the suggestive power of any idea which is brought to his mind, the other always inclined to distrust and to look over to the opposite argument.
The mental process of the individual is profoundly affected when he thus thinks and acts as a member of a group. Suggestibility is then enormously increased; and we know how much suggestion means to us. Moreover, suggestions emanating from the group always take priority of those of the outside world: for man is a gregarious animal, intensely sensitive to the mentality of the herd.
Experiments in suggestibility are then easily mixed with experiments in telepathy, and those go over by gradual degrees to clairvoyance and premonitory apparitions, and from there the way is not far to the reappearance of the dead and the routine performances of the spiritists. It seems to many as if there is no point where they have a reason to stop.
The feeling that such group customs are right and that to depart from them is wrong, is perhaps based on a specific instinct, the moral instinct; but much more likely, in my opinion, is it obedience to leadership, fear of social disapproval and punishment, conscience, imitation, suggestibility and sympathy, all of which are parts of that social cement substance, the social instinct.
The evolutionary aspect has received its best handling in recent years in Trotter's "The Herd," where the social instincts are traced in their relation to human history. One writer after another has placed as basic in social instinct, sympathy, imitation, suggestibility and the recognition of "likeness."
Thus suggestibility is really a practical factor in every walk of life. And it is in the highest interests of psychotherapy that this intimate connection between suggestion and ordinary talk and intercourse, between suggestion and ordinary choice of motives, between suggestion and attention be steadily kept in view and that suggestion is not transformed into a kind of mysterious agency.
My experiments have forced me to the conclusion that there is no difference as regards suggestibility between natural sleep and the so-called hypnotic trance.
The amulets of a gypsy might secure the same resetting of the psychophysical system which the most sacred symbols awaken, and even many an educated person is unable to cross the threshold of a palmist or an astrologist, or to attend the performance of a spiritist, or to sit down with a purchasable trance medium without feeling an uncanny mental state which is objectively characterized by an increased suggestibility.
The psychologist may determine, for instance, the degree of attention with its resistance against distracting stimuli, the power of memory under various conditions and on various material, the mental excitability and power of discrimination, the quickness and correctness of perception, the chains of associations, the rapidity of the associative process for various groups, the types of reaction, the forming of habits and their persistence, the conditions of fatigue and of exhaustion, the emotional expressions and the emotional stability, the time needed for recreation and the resistance against drugs, the degree of suggestibility and the power of inhibition: and every result in any of these lines may contribute to the diagnosis and prognosis of cases.
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