CHAPTER IX[ToC]
SUGGESTION IN SEXUAL LIFE—AMOROUS INTOXICATION
Suggestion. Cerebral Activity. Consciousness. Subconsciousness and Amnesia. Auto-suggestion.—The explanation of the phenomena of hypnotism and suggestion by Liébeault and Bernheim has been a veritable scientific revelation for human psychology. Unfortunately it has remained to a great extent unknown to the public and the majority of medical men and jurists. Even at the present day, this subject is regarded either in the light of magic and occult phenomena, or as being connected with imposture and charlatanism. This results from the incapacity of most men to think in a psychological and philosophical manner, to observe for themselves and to take into account the connection which exists between the mind and cerebral activity.
I must point out the common error of many physicians, who do not understand the psychological nature of hypnotism, and who place it, like Dubois, in antinomy with psychotherapy. Hypnotism and suggestion in the waking state are one and the same thing; but what the physicians I have mentioned understand by suggestion in the waking state—psychotherapy, action by will power, etc.—is only a chaos of misapplied terms and psychological phenomena, only half understood by them. Sleep by suggestion is only one of the phenomena of suggestion.
I must refer the reader to Bernheim's book on "La Suggestion et ses Applications à la Thérapeutique," and to my book on hypnotism ("Der Hypnotismus und die Suggestive Psychotherapie." Stuttgart, 1902), for I cannot enter into the details here. I will, however, attempt to make clear the action of suggestion in order to explain its connection with the sexual sensations and sentiments.
Suggestion consists in the action of ideas or representations on the activity of the brain in general, and on some of its activities in particular. The terms idea-force and ideoplasty have been employed; but all ideas are at the same time forces and are more or less ideoplastic according to the nature and intensity of the cerebral activity which corresponds to them. Every representation which appears in our consciousness is at the same time a cerebral activity. I will explain by the aid of an example the relation which exists between the play of our conscious ideas and what is incorrectly called our unconscious cerebral activity.
For reasons which are too long to explain here, I call subconscious all which is usually called unconscious, because I maintain that there is probably nothing unconscious in our nervous activity, and that what appears to be so is in reality accompanied by an introspection, subordinated like its corresponding activity to the great and clear introspection of the higher brain, which accompanies the concentrated and mobile activity of what we call our attention in the waking state. No doubt, we do not as a rule perceive our subconscious activities, for want of sufficient intensity in their association with the series of aperceptions (states subsequent to attentional activity). But we possess a number of observations, due especially to hypnotism, which allow us to infer by analogy the existence of subordinated introspections corresponding to the cerebral activities which appear to us unconscious.
For example, I think of my wife. This idea immediately calls to mind that of a journey that I intend to take with her, and in its turn the idea of the journey recalls that of the trunk I shall use to pack my effects. Almost as rapidly as lightning, the three ideas: (1) my wife; (2) the journey; (3) the trunk, apparently succeed each other in my consciousness. But, according to the old scholasticism, the idea of the journey is awakened by that of my wife, and that of my trunk by that of the journey, which would, therefore, be its "cause." But a little observation soon shows that the succession of our conscious ideas is not so easily explained, for at every moment representations appear which have no logical relation to those which precede them, and cannot be caused by them, nor by immediate sensory perceptions coming from without.