A Beginner's Psychology

by Edward Bradford Titchener

The dream-incidents are derived, in the lighter stages of of sleep, mainly from the incidents of the preceding day, and in the deeper stages mainly from the remoter experience of the waking life. This is what we should expect from our knowledge of the temporal course of associative tendencies. Moreover, we know that, in profound sleep, the brain is comparatively bloodless; and it is reasonable to suppose that, in dreaming, the activity of the tendencies is local and sporadic. That would account for the incongruities that our waking judgement discovers in the dream-situations, and also for the general ineffectiveness of dream-thought. When, however, we enquire further into the nervous mechanism of dreaming, we must enter the realm of hypothesis. It is a real puzzle, for instance, that we do not oftener walk and talk in our sleep; for dream-ideas are vivid, and the vivid ideas of the waking life are ordinarily followed or accompanied by action. We may guess that there is a positive blocking of the nerve-paths that lead from sensory to motor centres in the brain, or from the motor centres to the muscles; else the dream would surely be talked or acted out; but we can say nothing definite about this motor inhibition. The organism at large seems to be under a ‘negative suggestion’ in regard to movement; for the pattern of action—though, like all the mental patterns, it may appear in the dream-state—is notably less frequent than the patterns of perception and idea and emotion.

We said that dream-ideas are vivid; and there is no doubt that dreams in general have an hallucinatory character; dream-images are extremely vivid, dream-scenes are staged in what is taken for objective space, dream-events occur without any felt dependence upon the dreamer. This impression of the reality of dream-incident is partly due to a negative condition; we have no means, in the dream-state, of testing or checking what happens. In the waking life we compare experience with experience; in the dream there is nothing with which the present train of ideas may be compared. It seems, however, that the hallucinatory character is native to our dream-ideas, that it is due to positive as well as negative conditions; though, again, we cannot say what the conditions are, until we know more about the nervous correlate of dreaming. The net result is that, in popular phrase, we take our dreams for granted; the dream-world, so long as we are in it, appears as real as the world of our waking existence. This does not at all mean that we accept, blindly, everything that takes place. We may protest and criticise in dreams, just precisely as we protest and criticise in real life; we may dream that we are dreaming, just as we sometimes say ‘I must have been dreaming’ when we give a wrong account of some waking experience or find ourselves mistaken in a recollection; and we may have a sense of unreality in dreams, just as we have it now and again in waking situations. It means only that the nervous system of the dreamer is stamped with the great biological tendencies that we have noted and discussed; the tendency to take things as real is present by night as well as by day.

The old common-sense notion that dreams are prophetic has no foundation in fact. The idea that underlies it—the idea that dreams must be of some use to the organism—nevertheless persists, and has found recent expression in a comprehensive theory of dreams. The theory is that all dreams, if one interprets them aright, represent the fulfilment of a wish, entertained in the waking life but repressed by circumstances. The organism attains by night, though in veiled and transmuted shape, what it has failed of attaining by day. This theory has been elaborated and illustrated with very great ingenuity; but its claims are too sweeping. Recent observations seem to show that the wish-dream is likely to occur in the hours before waking, rather than in the early hours of the night or in the middle period of profound sleep; that many dreams cannot be interpreted, even with the best will, as fulfilments of wish; and, in particular, that fear-dreams form a category as distinct and ultimate as wish-dreams. The merit of the theory is that it emphasises the feeling-processes of the dream-life; it does not give us the key to the psychology of dreaming.

[§ 80]. Hypnosis.—We have seen that there are two lines of development from partial or defensive sleep; and that hypnosis is the final term of the one line, as normal deep sleep is the final term of the other. Hypnosis may therefore be regarded as a state in which the organism is partly asleep, and partly alert and awake. The wakefulness is characterised by a high degree of attention; and the hypnotised subject is accordingly liable to suggestion by anything that fits in with the direction of attention.

The symptoms of hypnosis do not follow any stereotyped pattern; so that it is difficult to draw a generalised picture of the hypnotic individual. If, however, we are willing to run the risk of generalisation, we may distinguish three successive stages in the phenomena. The hypnotised subject is at first heavy or drowsy; his behaviour is like that of a man suddenly aroused from sound sleep, and not yet ‘come to himself.’ Then follows the stage of light hypnosis or, as it is technically called, the stage of catalepsy. The subject is to some extent anæsthetic; his sense-organs are closed to all the ordinary impressions from the outside world. At the same time, he hears what is said to him by the operator, and performs any action that the operator may suggest. He does nothing without the word of command; so that he will maintain a position, however uncomfortable it might be under ordinary circumstances, until the order comes to relax it. On waking, he remembers cloudily what took place during hypnosis. In the third and final stage, which is known as somnambulism, the anæsthesia becomes more complete; and the subject not only acts, but also perceives, at the bidding of the operator; takes coal for sugar, ink for wine, tapping on the table for the playing of a violin, and so forth. On waking, he has no memory of what has taken place.

We see, then, that there are four main symptoms of hypnosis: anæsthesia, motionlessness, suggestibility and amnesia; and it is worth while to remind ourselves, at once, that all these symptoms have their counterparts in the normal waking life. Thus, a child falls down and hurts itself; it may be crying bitterly; but you distract its attention by a toy, and the crying stops and the pain is forgotten; the diversion of attention has meant anæsthesia. Again, you are on a country walk with a friend, and you begin to discuss some topic of mutual interest; you both get more and more absorbed, and you both walk more and more slowly, until presently you find yourselves at a standstill in the middle of the road; concentrated attention has meant arrest of movement. If the lecturer in a class-room says: ‘I want you now to take down what I am going to say,’ the suggestion is immediately accepted, and the whole class makes ready to write. Finally, we are all forgetful of what happens in a particular situation if circumstances change and we are confronted by another situation; how many of us remember our dreams? The new day brings its novel situations, and the dreams drop out of sight; and the change from dreaming to waking is no greater than the change from the hypnotic to the normal state. Hence the peculiarity of hypnosis is not the introduction of strange or curious phenomena, but rather the grouping, in an extreme and unusual way, of phenomena with which we are in principle familiar.

It would seem to follow from this analysis that we are all and sundry liable, under certain favourable conditions, to fall into the hypnotic state; and that conclusion is borne out by the facts. Only idiots and infants are exempt from hypnosis; and they are exempt only because of the low development of attention, because they cannot, under any conditions, concentrate or ‘pull themselves together.’ When people tell you that Professor So-and-so tried to hypnotise them, but that their will proved too strong for him, you may reply that they do not understand what they are talking about; it would be as logical for them to assert that the champion tennis-player of the world had failed to beat them in a match, because they had refused to lift a racquet. The stronger the ‘will,’ that is to say, the stronger the habit of absorbed attention and the greater the power of dominant determinations, the easier is the induction of hypnosis. Moreover, as human beings are one and all liable to be hypnotised, so do we find that the animals, in their degree, are liable to something like catalepsy. The nightly sleep of birds and the winter-sleep of many animals is a cataleptic sleep; very many insects ‘sham dead,’ as we say, when they are surprised or handled; and animals may be thrown, by manipulation, into an artificial state which resembles catalepsy in ourselves, and which has received the like name of cataplexy (‘catalepsy’ is a seizure, and ‘cataplexy’ is a stroke).

So much for the primary facts: what, now, of the ‘operator’? Well, it is quite possible to hypnotise oneself, just as it is quite possible to put oneself to sleep by counting sheep or listening to an imaginary rain. One has only to mean or intend to oneself that the hypnotic state is coming, and—if there is no interruption—it will presently come; self-suggestion or autosuggestion may be as effective as the suggestion of an operator. For in every case the influence that the operator has over the subject is an influence given him by the subject; the immediate conditions of hypnosis lie in the subject himself, and not in the personality of some other man. The professional operator has, it is true, two advantages. He asserts emphatically that he ‘can hypnotise’; he advertises; and we tend to believe emphatic and repeated statements, however groundless they may really be; so that we are likely to give him an influence over us before we have even seen him. Secondly, the operator knows, from long experience with hypnotised subjects, how the individual shall most readily be brought into the hypnotic state, how (that is) his complete attention may be secured and directed: whether by coaxing or by bullying, whether by strokes of the hand that suggest a gradual flow of power or by a smart blow on the back of the neck that produces a momentary helplessness and confusion. All the ‘methods’ of hypnotising are so many tricks to bring about a state of undivided attention and a corresponding suggestibility in the subject. So the operator has genuine advantages, but they are advantages that might be secured by anyone who took the trouble; they are not connected with special gifts or superiorities.

Here, however, you may raise an objection; you will say that operator and subject are en rapport, that there is a special bond which connects them, and that the records of hypnosis prove it. Yes, there may be a special bond; and yet the preceding paragraph sets forth the truth about the operator. Do we not all believe in our own physician, our own family lawyer, our own clergyman? and yet our neighbours make different choices. Suppose, then, that you have first-hand evidence of the powers of some platform operator, or of some physician who treats his patients hypnotically; you may very easily come to think that this particular man has a peculiar control over you. You may suggest this belief to yourself, or perhaps the physician—not wishing to have his case interfered with by others—may suggest it to you; in any event, you are imbued with the idea that this man, and this man only, is able to treat you; and it then follows, naturally, that the required concentration of attention and the required openness to suggestion can be secured only when he is present. But the rapport is, after all, nothing more than an insistent belief of your own; it is neither more effective nor less intelligible than would be the contrary belief that a certain person of your acquaintance could not hypnotise you. So far, therefore, from invalidating our former conclusions, the occasional existence of the rapport serves to confirm them.

We now turn from the hypnotic state itself to its relations with the waking state; and the first point to consider is the fact of post-hypnotic or terminal suggestion. Suppose that an operator suggests to the hypnotised subject that a certain action is to be performed at such-and-such a time after waking; “before I wake you let me impress upon you that you are to drink two glasses of water at five o’clock this afternoon; you understand?—two glasses of water at five o’clock.” The subject rouses; has no memory of the command; and yet, when the time comes, obediently pours and drinks the water. The fact is, you see, that the suggestion of time builds a bridge between the two separate states, the hypnotic and the waking; the idea of time is common to both. Hence when the suggested time comes round, and the subject knows—by the clock, by the sun, by his occupation, by his organic sensations—that five o’clock is approximately here, this idea acts as a suggestion; the hypnotic state is reinstated for a while, though probably in weakened form; and the action is performed. As soon as it is over, the subject is his waking self again.