The stimulants and narcotics, to which our review next leads us, form a standing menace to human virtue. By some strange accident of our development, the impulse of our organisms towards certain drugs—alcohol, opium, and the like—is strong enough to overpower, in a large proportion of mankind, not only the late-acquired altruistic impulses, but even the primary impulses of self-regard and self-preservation. We are brought back, one may almost say, to the "chimiotaxy" of the lowest organisms, which arrange themselves inevitably in specific relation to oxygen, malic acid, or whatever the stimulus may be. We thus experience in ourselves a strange conflict between moral responsibility and molecular affinities;—the central will overborne by dumb unnumbered elements of our being. With this condition of things hypnotic suggestion deals often in a curious way. The suggestion is not generally felt as a strengthening of the central will. It resembles rather a molecular redisposition; it leaves the patient indifferent to the stimulus, or even disgusted with it. The man for whom alcohol has combined the extremes of delight and terror now lives as though in a world in which alcohol did not exist at all.[68]
Even for the slave of morphia the same sudden freedom is sometimes achieved. It has been said of victims to morphia-injection that a cure means death;—so often has suicide followed on the distress caused by giving up the drug. But in certain cases cured by suggestion it seems that no craving whatsoever has persisted after the sudden disuse of the drug. There is something here which is in one sense profounder than moral reform. There is something which suggests a spirit within us less injured than we might have feared by the body's degradation. The morphinomaniac character—the lowest type of subjection to a ruling vice—disappears from the personality in proportion as the drug is eliminated from the system. The shrinking outcast turns at once into the respectable man.[69]
But apart from troubles consequent on any intelligible instinct, any discoverable stimulus of pleasure, there are a multitude of impulses, fears, imaginations, one or more of which may take possession of persons not otherwise apparently unhealthy or hysterical, sometimes to an extent so distressing as to impel to suicide.
Some of these "phobies" have been often described of late years,—as, for instance, agoraphobia, which makes a man dread to cross an open space; and its converse claustrophobia, which makes him shrink from sitting in a room with closed doors; or the still more distressing mysophobia, which makes him constantly uneasy lest he should have become dirty or defiled.
All these disorders involve a kind of displacement or cramp of the attention; and for all of them, one may broadly say, hypnotic suggestion is the best and often the only cure. Suggestion seems to stimulate antagonistic centres; to open clogged channels; to produce, in short, however we imagine the process, a rapid disappearance of the insistent notion.
I have spoken of this effect as though it were mainly to be valued intellectually, as a readjustment of the dislocated attention. But I must note also that the moral results may be as important here as in the cases of inhibition of dipsomania and the like, already mentioned. These morbid fears which suggestion relieves may be ruinously degrading to a man's character. The ingredients of antipathy, of jealousy, which they sometimes contain, may make him dangerous to his fellows as well as loathsome to himself. One or two cases of the cure of morbid jealousy are to my mind among the best records which hypnotism has to show.[70]
But this is not all. The treasure of memory is mixed with rubbish; the caution which experience has taught has often been taught too well; philosophic calm has often frozen into apathy. Plato would have the old men in his republic plied well with wine on festal days, that their tongues might be unloosed to communicate their wisdom without reserve. "Accumulated experience," it has been said with much truth in more modern language,[71] "hampers action, disturbs the logical reaction of the individual to his environment. The want of control which marks the decadence of mental power is [sometimes] itself undue control, a preponderance of the secondary over the primary influences."
Now the removal of shyness, or mauvaise honte, which hypnotic suggestion can effect, is in fact a purgation of memory,—inhibiting the recollection of previous failures, and setting free whatever group of aptitudes is for the moment required. Thus, for the boy called on to make an oration in a platform exhibition, hypnotisation sets free the primary instinct of garrulity without the restraining fear of ridicule. For the musical executant, on the other hand, a similar suggestion will set free the secondary instinct which the fingers have acquired, without the interference of the learner's puzzled, hesitating thoughts.
I may remark here (following Gurney and Bramwell) how misleading a term is mono-ideism for almost any hypnotic state. There is a selection of ideas to which the hypnotic subject will attend, and there is a concentration upon the idea thus selected; but those ideas themselves may be both complex and constantly shifting, and indeed this is just one of the ways in which the hypnotic trance differs from the somnambulic—in which it may happen that only a relatively small group of brain-centres are awake enough to act. The somnambulic servant-girl, for instance, may persist in laying the tea-table, whatever you say to her, and this may fairly be called mono-ideism; but the hypnotic subject (as Bramwell has justly insisted) can be made to obey simultaneously a greater number of separate commands than he could possibly attend to in waking life.
From these inhibitions of memory,—of attention as directed to the experiences of the past,—we pass on to attention as directed to the experiences of the present. And here we are reaching a central point; we are affecting the macula lutea (as it has been well called) of the mental field. Many of the most important of hypnotic results will be best described as modifications of attention.