From monotonous excitations which, whatever their part in inducing hypnosis, are, at any rate, such as can sensibly affect the organism, I come down to the trivial monotonies of watch-tickings, "passes," etc., which are still by a certain school regarded as capable of producing a profound change in the nervous condition of the person before whose face the hypnotiser's hands are slowly waved for ten or twenty minutes. I regard this as a much exaggerated view. The clock's ticking, for instance, if it is marked at all, is at least as likely to irritate as to soothe; and the constant experience of life shows that continued monotonous stimuli, say the throbbing of the screw at sea, soon escape notice and produce no hypnotic effect at all. It is true, indeed, that monotonous rocking sends some babies to sleep; but other babies are merely irritated by the process, and such soporific effect as rocking may possess is probably an effect on spinal centres or on the semicircular canals. It depends less on mere monotony than on massive movement of the whole organism.
I think, then, that there is no real ground for supposing that the trivial degree of monotonous stimulation produced by passes often repeated can induce in any ordinary physiological manner that "profound nervous change" which is recognised as the prerequisite condition of any hypnotic results. I think that passes are effectual generally as mere suggestions, and must primâ facie be regarded in that light, as they are, in fact, regarded by many experienced hypnotisers (as Milne Bramwell) who have employed them with good effect. Afterwards, when reason is given for believing in a telepathic influence or impact occasionally transmitted from the operator to the subject at a distance, we shall consider whether passes may represent some other form of the same influence, operating in close physical contiguity.
First, however, let us consider the point which we have now reached. We have successively dismissed various supposed modes of physiologically inducing hypnotic trance. We stand at present in the position of the Nancy school;—we have found nothing but suggestion which really induces the phenomena.
But on the other hand we cannot possibly regard the word suggestion as any real answer to the important question how the hypnotic responsiveness is induced, on what conditions it depends.[63]
It must be remembered that many of the results which follow upon suggestion are of a type which no amount of willingness to follow the suggestion could induce, since they lie quite outside the voluntary realm. However disposed a man may be to believe me, however anxious to please me, one does not see how that should enable him, for instance, to govern the morbidly-secreting cells in an eruption of erysipelas. He already fruitlessly wishes them to stop their inflammation; the mere fact of my expressing the same wish can hardly alter his cellular tissue.
Here, then, we come to an important conclusion which cannot well be denied, yet is seldom looked fully in the face. Suggestion from without must for the most part resolve itself into suggestion from within. Unless there be some telepathic or other supernormal influence at work between hypnotiser and patient (which I shall presently show ground for believing to be sometimes, though not often, the case), the hypnotiser can plainly do nothing by his word of command beyond starting a train of thought which the patient has in most cases started many times for himself with no result; the difference being that now at last the patient starts it again, and it has a result. But why it thus succeeds on this particular occasion, we simply do not know. We cannot predict when the result will occur; still less can we bring it about at pleasure.
Nay, we do not even know whether it might not be possible to dispense altogether with suggestion from outside in most of the cases now treated in this way, and merely to teach the patient to make the suggestions for himself. If there be no "mesmeric effluence" passing from hypnotiser to patient, the hypnotiser seems little more than a mere objet de luxe;—a personage provided simply to impress the imagination, who must needs become even absurdly useless so soon as it is understood that he has no other function or power.
Self-suggestion, whatever this may really mean, is thus in most cases, whether avowedly or not, at the bottom of the effect produced. It has already been used most successfully, and it will probably become much commoner than it now is;—or, I should rather say (since every one no doubt suggests to himself when he is in pain that he would like the pain to cease), I anticipate that self-suggestion, by being in some way better directed, will become more effective, and that the average of voluntary power over the organism will rise to a far higher level than it at present reaches. I believe that this is taking place even now; and that certain schemes of self-suggestion, so to call them, are coming into vogue, where patients in large masses are supplied with effective conceptions, which they thus impress repeatedly upon themselves without the need of a hypnotiser's attendance on each occasion. The "Miracles of Lourdes" and the cures effected by "Christian Science" fall, in my view, under this category. We have here suggestions given to a quantity of more or less suitable people en masse, much as a platform hypnotiser gives suggestions to a mixed audience, some of whom may then be affected without individual attention from himself. The suggestion of the curative power of the Lourdes water, for instance, is thus thrown out, partly in books, partly by oral addresses; and a certain percentage of persons succeed in so persuading themselves of that curative efficacy that when they bathe in the water they are actually cured.
These schemes of self-suggestion, as I have termed them, constitute one of the most interesting parts of my subject, but space forbids that I should enter into a discussion of them here. It is sufficient to point out that in order to make self-suggestion operative, no strong belief or enthusiasm, such as those schemes imply, is really necessary. No recorded cases of self-suggestion, I think, are more instructive than those published by Dr. Hugh Wingfield in Proceedings S.P.R., vol. v. p. 279. (The paper was printed anonymously.) Dr. Wingfield was a Demonstrator in Physiology in the University of Cambridge, and his subjects were mainly candidates for the Natural Sciences Tripos. In these cases there was no excitement of any kind, and no previous belief. The phenomena occurred incidentally during a series of experiments on other points, and were a surprise to every one concerned. The results achieved were partly automatic writing and partly phenomena of neuro-muscular excitability;—stiffening of the arms, and so forth. "It seems probable," says Dr. Wingfield, "that all phenomena capable of being produced by the suggestion of the hypnotiser can also be produced by self-suggestion in a self-suggestive subject."
Experiments like these—confirming with modern care the conclusions reached by Fahnestock and others at various points in hypnotic history—seem to me to open a new inlet into human faculty, as surprising in its way as those first wild experiments of Mesmer himself. Who would have supposed that a healthy undergraduate could "by an effort of mind" throw his whole body into a state of cataleptic rigidity, so that he could rest with his heels on one chair and his head on another? or that other healthy young men could "close their own eyes so that they were unable to open them," and the like? The trivial character of these laboratory experiments makes them physiologically the more remarkable. There is the very minimum of predisposing conditions, of excited expectation, or of external motive prompting to extraordinary effort. And the results are not subjective merely—relief of pain and so on—but are definite neuro-muscular changes, capable (as in the case of the head and heels on separate chairs) of unmistakable test.