Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death

by F. W. H. Myers

Next take another group of massive effects produced on the nervous system by external stimuli;—those forms, namely, of trance and cataplexy which are due to sudden shock. With human beings this phenomenon varies from actual death from failure of heart-action, or paralysis, or stupor attonitus (a recognised form of insanity), any of which may result from a mere alarming sight or unwelcome announcement, down to the cataleptic immobility of a Salpêtrière patient, when she hears a sudden stroke on the gong.

Similar phenomena in certain animals, as frogs, beetles, etc., are well known. It is doubtful, however, whether any of these sudden disablements should be classed as true hypnoses. It has not, I think, been shown that in any case they have induced any real responsiveness to control, or power of obeying suggestion; unless it be (as in some Salpêtrière cases) a form of suggestion so obvious and habitual that the obedience thereto may be called part of the actual cataplexy itself. Thus the "wax-like flexibility" of the cataleptic, whose arms remain in the position where you place them, must not be regarded as a readier obedience to control, but rather as a state which involves not a more but a less alert and capable responsiveness of the organism to either external or internal stimuli.

So with regard to animals—crocodiles, frogs, and the like. I hold theoretically that animals are probably hypnotisable and suggestible; and the records of Rarey's horse-taming, etc., seem to point in that direction.[60] But in the commoner experiments with frogs, where mere passivity is produced, the resemblance seems to extend only to the lethargic stage in human beings,[61] and what relation that lethargy bears to suggestibility is not, I think, really known; although I shall later on suggest some explanation on psychological grounds.

It seems plain, at any rate, that it must be from stimuli applied to men and not to animals, and from stimuli of a special and localised rather than of a massive kind, that we shall have to learn whatever can be learnt as to the genesis of the true hypnotic control.

Now there exists a way of inducing hypnosis in some hysterical persons which seems intermediate between massive and localised stimulations. It is indeed a local stimulation; but there seems no reason beyond some deep-seated caprice of the organism why the special tract which is thus sensitive should have become developed in that direction.

I speak of the induction of trance in certain subjects by pressure upon so-called hypnogenous zones. These zones form a curious development of hysterical cliniques. Their starting-point is the well-known phenomenon of patches of anæsthesia found upon hysterical subjects—the "witch-marks" of our ancestors.

So far as we at present know, the situation of these "marks" is altogether capricious. It does not apparently depend, that is to say, upon any central lesion, in the same way as do the "referred pains," familiar in deep-seated organic complaints, which manifest themselves by superficial patches of tenderness, explicable by the distribution of nerve-trunks. The anæsthetic patches are an example of what I have called the irrational self-suggestions of the hypnotic stratum;—determined by dream-like fancies rather than necessitated by purely physiological antecedents.

Quite in accordance with this view, we find that under favourable conditions—especially in a hospital of hysterics—these anomalous patches or zones develop and specialise themselves in various ways. Under Dr. Pitres at Bordeaux (for example), we have zones hystérogènes, zones hypnogènes, zones hypnofrénatrices, etc.; that is to say, he finds that pressure on certain spots in certain subjects will bring on or will check hysterical accesses, or accesses of what is ranked as hypnotic sleep. There is no doubt that this sleep does in certain subjects follow instantly upon the pressure of certain spots,—constant for each subject, but different for one subject and for another;—and this without any conscious co-operation, or even foreknowledge, on the patient's part. Stated thus nakedly, this seems the strongest possible instance of the induction of hypnosis by localised stimulus. The reader, however, will at once understand that in my view there is here no simple physiological sequence of cause and effect. I must regard the local pressure as a mere signal—an appeal to the pre-formed capacities of lawlessly acting centres in the hypnotic stratum. A scrap of the self has decided, in dreamlike fashion, that pressure on a certain point of the body's surface shall produce sleep;—just as it has decided that pressure on that same point or on some other point shall not produce pain. Self-suggestion, and no mere physiological nexus, is responsible for the sleep or the hysterical access which follows the touch. The anæsthetic patches are here a direct, but a capriciously chosen avenue to the subliminal being, and the same random self-suggestiveness which is responsible for frequent determinations that hysterical subjects shall not be hypnotised has in this case decided that they shall be hypnotised, if you go about it in exactly the right way.

Next in order among forms of localised stimulus used for inducing hypnosis may be placed monotonous stimulation,—to whatever part of the body it be applied. It was at one time the fashion to attribute almost all hypnotic phenomena to this cause, and Edmund Gurney and I endeavoured to point out the exaggeration.[62] Of this presently; but first let us consider the few cases where the monotonous stimulation has undoubtedly been of a kind to affect the organism strongly. The late Dr. Auguste Voisin, of Paris, was perhaps more markedly successful than any physician in producing hypnosis in extreme cases;—in maniacal persons especially, whose attention it seemed impossible to fix. He often accomplished this by holding their eyes open with the blepharostat, and compelling them to gaze, sometimes for hours together, at a brilliant electric light. Exhaustion produces tranquillity and an almost comatose sleep—in which the physician has often managed to give suggestions of great value. This seems practically the only class of cases where a directly physiological antecedent for the sleep can be proved; and even here the provable effect is rather the exhaustion of morbid excitability than any direct induction of suggestibility. This dazzling process is generally accompanied with vigorous verbal suggestion; and it is, of course, quite possible that the patients might have been thrown into hypnosis by that suggestion alone, had their minds been capable at first of sufficient attention to receive it.

Braid's upward and inward squint has an effect of the same deadening kind as the long gazing at a light, and helps in controlling wandering attention; but Braid himself in later years (as mentioned above) attributed his hypnotic successes wholly to suggestion.