Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death Part 14

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.

Yet, important though these and similar experiments in self-suggestion may be, they do not solve our problem as to the ultimate origin and distribution of the faculty thus displayed. We know no better with self-suggestion than with suggestion from outside _why_ it is that one man succeeds where others fail, or why a man who succeeds once fails in his next attempt. Within the ordinary range of physiological explanations nothing (I repeat) has as yet been discovered which can guide us to the true nature or exciting causes of this characteristic responsiveness of hypnosis. If we are to find any light, it must be in some direction which has as yet been little explored.

The hint which I have to offer here involves, I hope, something more than a mere change of appellation. I define suggestion as "successful appeal to the subliminal self";--not necessarily to that self in its most central, most unitary aspect; but to some one at least of those strata of subliminal faculty which I have in an earlier chapter described. I do not indeed pretend that my explanation can enable us to reduce hypnotic success to a certainty. I cannot say why the process should be so irregular and capricious; but I can show that this puzzle is part and parcel of a wider mystery;--of the obscure relationships and interdependencies of the supraliminal and the subliminal self. In split personalities, in genius, in dreams, in sensory and motor automatisms, we find the same fitfulness, the same apparent caprice.

Leaving perforce this problem for the present unsolved, let us consider the various ways in which this conception of subliminal operation may throw light on the actual phenomena of hypnotism;--phenomena at present scattered in bewildering confusion.

The word _hypnotism_ itself implies that some kind of _sleep_ or trance is regarded as its leading characteristic. And although so-called hypnotic suggestions do often take effect in the waking state,[64] our usual test of the hypnotiser's success lies in the slumber--light or deep--into which his subject is thrown. It is, indeed, a slumber which admits at times of strange wakings and activities; but it is also manifestly profounder than the sleep which we habitually enjoy.

If sleep, then, be the phase of personality specially consecrated to subliminal operation, it follows that any successful appeal to the subliminal self will be likely to induce some form of sleep. And further, if that form of sleep be in fact not an inevitable result of physiological needs, but a response to a psychological appeal, it seems not unlikely that we should be able to communicate with it without interrupting it;--and should thus be able to guide or supplement subliminal operations, just as in genius the subliminal self guided or supplemented supraliminal operations.

Now I hold that in all the varied trances, lethargies, sleep-waking states, to which hypnotism introduces us, we see the subliminal self coming to the surface in ways already familiar, and displacing just so much of the supraliminal as may from time to time be needful for the performance of its own work. That work, I say, will be of a character which we know already; the difference is that what we have seen done spontaneously we now see done in response to our appeal.

Armed with this simplifying conception,--simplifying in spite of its frank admission of an underlying mystery,--we shall find no added difficulty in several points which have been the subjects of eager controversy. The _sequence_ of hypnotic phenomena, the question of the _stages_ of hypnotism, is one of these. I have already briefly described how Charcot propounded his three stages--lethargy, catalepsy, somnambulism--as though they formed the inevitable development of a physiological law;--and how completely this claim has now had to be withdrawn. Other schemes have been drawn out, by Liebeault, etc., but none of them seems to do more than reflect the experience of some one hypnotist's practice. The simplest arrangement is that of Edmund Gurney, who spoke only of an "alert stage" and a "deep stage" of hypnosis; and even here we cannot say that either stage invariably precedes the other.

The alert stage, which often came first with Gurney's subjects, comes last in Charcot's scheme; and it is hardly safe to say more than that hypnotism is apt to show a series of changes from sleep-waking to lethargy and back again, and that the advanced stages show more of subliminal faculty than the earlier ones. There is much significance in an experiment of Dr. Jules Janet, who, by continued "pa.s.ses," carried on Wittman, Charcot's leading subject, beyond her usual somnambulic state into a new lethargic state, and out again from thence into a new sleep-waking state markedly superior to the old.

Gurney held the view that the main distinction of kind between his "alert" and his "deep" stage of hypnosis was to be found in the domain of memory, while memory also afforded the means for distinguishing the hypnotic state as a whole from the normal one. As a general rule (though with numerous exceptions), the events of ordinary life are remembered in the trance, while the trance events are forgotten on waking, but tend to recur to the memory on rehypnotisation. But the most interesting part of his observations consisted in showing alternations of memory in the alert and deep stages of the trance itself;--the ideas impressed in the one sort of state being almost always forgotten in the other, and as invariably again remembered when the former state recurs. (_Proceedings_ S.P.R. vol. ii., pp. 61 _et seq._ [523 A].) On experimenting further, he met with a stage in which there was a distinct third train of memory, independent of the others;--and this, of course, suggests a further doubt as to there being any fixed number of stages in the trance. The later experiments of Mrs. Sidgwick [523 B] on the same subject, in which eight or nine distinct trains of memory were found--each recurring when the corresponding stage of depth of the trance was reached--seem to show conclusively that the number, may vary almost indefinitely. We have already seen that in cases of alternating personalities the number of personalities similarly varies, and the student who now follows or repeats Gurney's experiments, with the increased knowledge of split personalities which recent years have brought, cannot fail to be struck with the a.n.a.logies between Gurney's artificial light and deep states,--with their separate chains of memory,--and those morbid alternating personalities, with their complex mnemonic cleavages and lacunae, with which we dealt in Chapter II. The hypnotic stages are in fact secondary or alternating personalities of very shallow type, but for that very reason all the better adapted for teaching us from what kinds of subliminal disaggregation the more serious splits in personality take their rise.

And beneath and between these awakenings into limited, partial alertness lies that profound hypnotic trance which one can best describe as a scientific or purposive rearrangement of the elements of sleep;--a rearrangement in which what is helpful is intensified, what is merely hindering or isolating is removed or reduced. A man's ordinary sleep is at once unstable and irresponsive. You can wake him with a pin-p.r.i.c.k, but if you talk to him he will not hear or answer you, until you rouse him with the mere noise. That is sleep as the needs of our timorous ancestors determined that it should be.

Hypnotic sleep, on the contrary, is at once stable and responsive; strong in its resistance to such stimuli as it chooses to ignore; ready in its accessibility to such appeals as it chooses to answer.

p.r.i.c.k or pinch the hypnotised subject, and although some stratum of his personality may be aware, in some fashion, of your act, the sleep will generally remain unbroken. But if you speak to him,--or even speak before him,--then, however profound his apparent lethargy, there is something in him which will hear.[65]

All this is true even of earlier stages of trance. Deeper still lies the stage of highest interest;--that sleep-waking in which the subliminal self is at last set free,--is at last able not only to receive but to respond: when it begins to tell us the secrets of the sleeping phase of personality, beginning with directions as to the conduct of the trance or of the cure, and going on to who knows what insight into who knows what world afar?

Without, then, entering into more detail as to the varying forms which hypnosis at different stages may a.s.sume, I have here traced its central characteristic;--the development, namely, of the sleeping phase of personality in such fashion as to allow of some supraliminal guidance of the subliminal self.

We have here a definition of much wider purview than any which has been habitually applied to the process of hypnotisation or to the state of hypnosis. To test its validity, to explain its scope, we need a survey of hypnotic results much wider in range than any enumeration of the kind at present usual in text-books. Regarding hypnotic achievements mainly in their _mental_ aspects, I must seek for some broad principle of cla.s.sification which on the one hand may not be so exclusively moral as to be physiologically untranslatable,--like the distinction between vice and virtue;--or on the other hand so exclusively physiological as to be morally untranslatable,--like the distinction between cerebral anaemia and hyperaemia.

Perhaps the broadest contrast which is expressible in both moral and physiological terms is the contrast between check and stimulus,--between _inhibition_ and _dynamogeny_. Not, indeed, that such terms as _check_ and _stimulus_ can be pressed in detail. The central power,--the ruling agency within the man which gives the command,--is no doubt the same in both cases. But the common contrast between negative and positive exhortations,--"this you shall _not_ do," "this you _shall_ do,"--will help to give clearness to our review of the influences of hypnotism in its bearings on intelligence and character,--its psychological efficacy.

The most rudimentary form of restraint or inhibition lies in our effort to preserve the infant or young child from acquiring what we call "bad tricks." These morbid affections of motor centres, trifling in their inception, will sometimes grow until they are incurable by any regime or medicament;--nay, till an action so insignificant as sucking the thumb may work the ruin of a life.

In no direction, perhaps, do the results of suggestion appear more inexplicable than here. Nowhere have we a more conspicuous touching of a spring;--a more complete achievement, almost in a single moment, of the deliverance which years of painful effort have failed to effect.[66]

These cases stand midway between ordinary therapeutics and moral suasion. No one can here doubt the importance of finding the shortest and swiftest path to cure. Nor is there any reason to think that cures thus obtained are less complete or permanent than if they had been achieved by gradual moral effort. These facts should be borne in mind throughout the whole series of the higher hypnotic effects, and should serve to dispel any anxiety as to the possible loss of moral training when cure is thus magically swift. Each of these effects consists, as we must suppose, in the modification of some group of nervous centres; and, so far as we can tell, that is just the same result which moral effort made above the conscious threshold more slowly and painfully attains.

This difference, in fact, is like the difference between results achieved by diligence and results achieved by genius. Something valuable in the way of training,--some exercise in patience and resolve,--no doubt may be missed by the man who is "suggested" into sobriety;--in the same way as it was missed by the schoolboy Gauss,--writing down the answers to problems as soon as set, instead of spending on them a diligent hour. But moral progress is in its essence as limitless as mathematical; and the man who is thus carried over rudimentary struggles may still find plenty of moral effort in life to train his character and tax his resolution.

Among these morbid tricks _kleptomania_ has an interest of its own, on account of the frequent doubt whether it is not put forward as a mere excuse for pilfering. It may thus happen that the cure is the best proof of the existence of the disease; and certain cures indicate that the impulse has veritably involved a morbid excitability of motor centres, acted on by special stimuli,--an _idee fixe_ with an immediate outcome in act.[67]

Many words and acts of _violence_ fall under the same category, in cases where the impulse to swear or to strike has acquired the unreasoning automatic promptness of a _tic_, and yet may be at once inhibited by suggestion. Many undesirable impulses in the realm of _s.e.x_ are also capable of being thus corrected or removed.

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 mult.i.tude 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 s.p.a.ce; 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.

"Acc.u.mulated 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 apt.i.tudes 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 pa.s.s 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_.

Any modification of attention is of course likely to be at once a check and a stimulus;--a check to certain thoughts and emotions, a stimulus to others. And in many cases it will be the _dynamogenic_ aspect of the change--the new vigour supplied in needed directions--which will be for us of greatest interest. Yet from the _inhibitive_ side also we have already had important achievements to record. All these arrests and destructions of _idees fixes_, of which so much has been said, were powerful modifications of attention, although the limited field which they covered made it simpler to introduce them under a separate heading.

And even now it may not be without surprise that the reader finds described under the heading of _inhibition of attention_ a phenomenon so considerable and so apparently independent as _hypnotic suppression of pain_. This induced _a.n.a.lgesia_ has from the first been one of the main triumphs of mesmerism or hypnotism. All have heard that mesmerism will stop headaches;--that you can have a tooth out "under mesmerism" without feeling it. The rivalry between mesmerism and ether, as anaesthetic agents in capital operations, was a conspicuous fact in the medical history of early Victorian times. But the ordinary talk, at any rate of that day, seemed to a.s.sume that if mesmerism produced an effect at all it was an effect _resembling_ that produced by narcotics--a modification of the intimate structure of the nerve or of the brain which rendered them for the time incapable of transmitting or of feeling painful sensations. The state of a man's nervous system, in fact, when he is poisoned by chloroform, or stunned by a blow, or almost frozen to death, or nearly drowned, etc., is such that a great part of it is no longer fit for its usual work,--is no longer capable of those prolongations of neurons, or whatever they be, which const.i.tute its specific nervous activity. We thus get rid of pain by getting rid for the time of a great deal of other nervous action as well; and we have to take care lest by pushing the experiment too far we get rid of life into the bargain. But on the other hand, a man's nervous system, when hypnotic suggestion has rendered him incapable of pain, is quite as active and vigorous as ever,--quite as capable of transmitting and feeling pain,--although capable also of inhibiting it altogether. In a word, the hypnotic subject is _above_ instead of _below_ pain.

To understand this apparent paradox we must remind ourselves that pain probably originated as a warning of danger,--a warning which, while useful to active creatures with miscellaneous risks, has become only a mixed advantage to beings of more advanced intelligence and sensitivity. There are many occasions when, knowing it to be useless, we wish to shut off pain, to rise as definitely _above_ it as our earliest ancestors were _below_ it, or as the drunken or narcotised man is below it. This is just what hypnotic suggestion enables us to do.

Hypnotism attacks the real _origo mali_;--not, indeed, the pressure on the tooth-nerve, which can only be removed by extraction, but the representative power of the central sensorium which converts that pressure for us into pain. It _diverts attention_ from the pain, as the excitement of battle might do; but diverts it without any competing excitement whatever. To this topic of _influence on attention_ we shall have to recur again and again. For the present it may suffice if I refer the reader to a few cases--chosen from among some thousands where hypnotic practice has removed or obviated the distress or anguish till now unmistakably a.s.sociated with various bodily incidents--from the extraction of a tooth to the great pain and peril of childbirth.[72]

This suppression of pain has naturally been treated from the therapeutic point of view, as an end in itself; and neither physician nor patient has been inclined to inquire exactly _what_ has occurred;--what physiological or psychological condition has underlain this great subjective relief. Yet in the eye of experimental psychology the matter is far from a simple one. We are bound to ask _what_ has been altered.

Has there been a total _ablation_, or some mere _translation_ of pain?

What objective change on the bodily side has occurred in nerve or tissue? and, on the mental side, how far does the change in consciousness extend? How deep does it go? Does any subliminal knowledge of the pain persist?

The very imperfect answers which can at present be given to these questions may, at any rate, suggest directions for further inquiry.

(1) In the first place, it seems clear that when pain is inhibited in any but the most simple cases, a certain group of changes is produced whose _nexus_ is psychological rather than physiological. That is to say, one suggestion seems to relieve at once all the symptoms which form one idea of pain or distress in the patient's mind; while another suggestion is often needed to remove some remaining symptom, which the patient regards as a different trouble altogether. The suggestion thus differs both from a specific remedy, which might relieve a specific symptom, and from a general narcotisation, which would relieve all symptoms equally. In making suggestions, moreover, the hypnotiser finds that he has to consider and meet the patient's own subjective feelings, describing the intended relief as the patient wishes it to be described, and not attempting technical language which the patient could not follow. In a word, it is plain that in this cla.s.s, as in other cla.s.ses of suggestion, we are addressing ourselves to a _mind_, an _intelligence_, which can of itself select and combine, and not merely to a tissue or a gland responsive in a merely automatic way.

(2) It will not then surprise us if,--pain being thus treated as a psychological ent.i.ty,--there shall prove to be a certain psychological complexity in the response to a.n.a.lgesic suggestion.

By this I mean that there are occasional indications that some memory of the pain, say, of an operation has persisted in some stratum of the personality;--thus apparently indicating that there was somewhere an actual consciousness of the pain when the operation was performed.[73]

We find accounts of the revival of pain in dreams after operations performed under chloroform.[74]

(3) Such experiences, if more frequent, might tempt us to suppose that the pain is not wholly abrogated, but merely translated to some stratum of consciousness whose experiences do not enter into our habitual chain of memories. Yet we possess (strangely enough) what seems direct evidence that the profoundest organic substratum of our being is by suggestion wholly freed from pain. It had long been observed that recoveries from operations performed in hypnotic trance were unusually benign;--there being less tendency to inflammation than when the patient had felt the knife. The same observation--perhaps in a less marked degree--has since been made as to operations under chemical anaesthesia.

The shock to the system, and the irritation to the special parts affected, are greatly diminished by chloroform. And more recently Professor Delbuf, by an experiment of great delicacy on two symmetrical wounds, of which one was rendered painless by suggestion, has distinctly demonstrated that pain tends to induce and keep up inflammation.[75]

Thus it seems that pain is abrogated at once on the highest and on the lowest level of consciousness; yet possibly in some cases (though not usually[76]) persists obscurely in some stratum of our personality into which we gain only occasional and indirect glimpses. And if indeed this be so, it need in no way surprise us. We need to remember at every point that we have no reason whatever to suppose that we are cognisant of all the trains of consciousness, or chains of memory, which are weaving themselves within us. I shall never attain on earth--perhaps I never shall in any world attain--to any complete conspectus of the variously interwoven streams of vitality which are, in fact, obscurely present in my conception of myself.

It is to hypnotism in the first place that we may look for an increased power of a.n.a.lysis of these intercurrent streams, these irregularly super-posed strata of our psychical being. In the meantime, this power of _inhibiting_ almost any fraction of our habitual consciousness at pleasure gives for the first time to the ordinary man--if only he be a suggestible subject--a power of concentration, of _choice_ in the exercise of faculty, such as up till now only the most powerful spirits--a Newton or an Archimedes--have been able to exert.

The man who sits down in his study to write or read,--in perfect safety and intent on his work,--continues nevertheless to be involuntarily and inevitably armed with all that alertness to external sights and sounds, and all that sensibility to pain, which protected his lowly ancestors at different stages of even pre-human development. It is much as though he were forced to carry about with him all the external defences which his forefathers have invented for their defence;--to sit at his writing-table clad in chain-mail and a respirator, and grasping an umbrella and a boomerang. Let him learn, if he can, inwardly as well as outwardly, to get rid of all that, to keep at his command only the half of his faculties which for his purpose is worth more than the whole.

Dissociation and choice;--dissociation between elements which have always. .h.i.therto seemed inextricably knit;--choice between faculties which till now we have had to use all together or not at all;--such is the promise, such is the incipient performance of hypnotic plasticity in its aspect of _inhibitive suggestion_.

I come now to the division of hypnotic achievement with which I next proposed to deal, namely, the _dynamogenic_ results of hypnotic suggestion. These I shall arrange in an order resembling that which we try to follow in education:--proceeding from external senses to internal sensory and other central operations; and thence again to attention and will, and so to character which is a kind of resultant of all these.