Suggestion exerted by the circumstances is about the same as what is often called "auto-suggestion" or "self-suggestion". A man falls and hurts his hip, and, finding his leg difficult to move, conceives that it is paralyzed, and may continue paralyzed for some time.
"Counter-suggestion" applies to cases where a suggestion produces the result contrary to what is suggested. You suggest to a person that he should do a certain thing, and immediately he is set against that act, though, left to himself, he would have performed it. Or, you advance a certain opinion and at once your hearer takes the other side of the question. Quite often skilful counter-suggestion can secure action, from children or adults, which could not be had by positive suggestion or direct command.
If suggestion succeeds by arousing the submissive tendency, counter-suggestion succeeds by arousing the assertive tendency. Suggestion works when it gets response without awakening the resistance which might be expected, and counter-suggestion when it arouses so much resistance that the suggestion itself does not have the influence which might be expected. In terms of stimulus and response, suggestion works when a particular stimulus (what is suggested) arouses response without other stimuli being able to contribute to the response; and counter-suggestion works when a stimulus (what is suggested, again) is itself prevented from contributing to the response. In counter-suggestion, response to the suggestion itself is inhibited, and in positive [{550}] suggestion response to other stimuli is inhibited. Both involve narrowness of response, and are opposed to what we commonly speak of as "good judgment", the taking of all relevant stimuli into account, and letting the response be aroused by the combination.
EXERCISES
1. Outline the chapter.
2. Which of the previous chapters have the closest contacts with the present chapter?
3. How does the popular conception of hypnotism differ from the scientific?
4. List 8 acts performed during the day, and arrange them in order from the most involuntary to the most voluntary.
5. Analyze a complex performance so as to show what in it is voluntary and what involuntary.
6. Mention an instance of practice changing a voluntary performance into an involuntary, and one of practice changing an involuntary performance into a voluntary.
7. If an individual is influenced by two opposing motives, must he act according to the stronger of the two?
8. Illustrate, in the case of anger, several ways of dealing with a rejected motive. i.e., in what different ways can anger be controlled?
9. How would you represent purpose in neural terms? How does it compare with "mental set"?
REFERENCES
On the importance of self-assertion (and of submission) in will, and on the relation of conduct to impulse and to reasoning, see McDougall's Social Psychology, Chapter IX, on "Volition", and Supplementary Chapter I, on "Theories of Action".
For a practical study of the question, how to secure action, see Walter Dill Scott's Increasing Human Efficiency in Business, 1911.
On hypnotism, see Albert Moll's Hypnotism, translated by A. F. Hopkirk; or James's Chapter XXVII in his Principles of Psychology, 1890.