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Updated: June 25, 2025
On the whole, we might say that such suggestions given to the subject in his normal state are effective only when the subject is by nature a suggestible being. In considering the psychology of suggestion, we recognized at once that the degree of natural suggestibility varies excessively.
He is now unable to resist any suggestion, either suggestion of impulse or suggestion of belief, and as every one of the hypnotic phenomena can be explained in this way, we may claim that the hypnotic state is in its very nature a state of reënforced suggestibility.
The non-suggestible mind is only to a slight degree influenced by any of these proposed forms of suggestion as long as the suggestibility itself is not heightened. To be sure, the question whether the person is suggestible by nature or not cannot be settled simply by his own impression. Many of the most suggestible persons believe firmly that they are superior to any suggestive influence.
Ideas which arise merely from the associations of the subject himself have no especially favorable chance for acceptance. But surely we also know states in which the suggestibility for certain of one's own ideas is abnormally increased. Great individual differences exist in that respect in normal life.
Such experiments of the psychological laboratory can be varied a thousandfold, and it might not be unwise to introduce them into many practical fields. Everybody knows for instance how much may depend upon the suggestibility of the witness in court. The suggestible witness believes himself to have seen and heard what the lawyer suggests.
It is almost arbitrary to decide where those waking states with high tension of suggestibility end and the hypnotic states begin, and not less arbitrary to call the higher degrees only hypnotism and to designate the lower degrees as hypnoid states.
Hypnosis and hysteria thus represent the highest degrees of suggestibility, the one artificial, the other pathological; the one for suggestions from without, the other for suggestions from within. But between these two and the normal state there lie numberless steps of transition.
The heightened emotionality characteristic of this state bespeaks an increased tendency to outcropping, and so an increased suggestibility. Thus spontaneous autosuggestions are far more potent than in the normal course of life. But, happily, induced autosuggestions are aided by the same conditions, so that the mother awake to her powers and duties can do as much good as the ignorant may do harm.
The general characteristics of crowds are to be met with in parliamentary assemblies: intellectual simplicity, irritability, suggestibility, the exaggeration of the sentiments and the preponderating influence of a few leaders. In consequence, however, of their special composition parliamentary crowds offer some distinctive features, which we shall point out shortly.
They must have a meaning for us, they must be enriched by our own imagination, they must awaken the remnants of earlier experiences, they must stir up our feelings and emotions, they must play on our suggestibility, they must start ideas and thoughts, they must be linked in our mind with the continuous chain of the play, and they must draw our attention constantly to the important and essential element of the action.
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