204 



DISCOVIiHY 



with age and sex ; children arc more suggestible than 

 growTi persons, and women arc more suggestible than 

 men. Suggestibility is also heightened by anything 

 which increases the prestige of the person from whom 

 the suggestion is received, and by practice. A person 

 who has been put frequently into a state of hypnosis 

 becomes increasingly suggestible. 



The state of half-waking which immediately precedes 

 and follows sleep is a condition in which suggestibility 

 is verj' high. A similar state can be induced artificially 

 and is called light hypnosis or the hypnoidal state. 

 What is called deep hypnosis is a state resembling 

 sleep. Both of these are states of high suggestibility. 

 Hypnosis can be induced by fixing the eyes on a 

 bright point, such as the flame of a candle or the 

 bright reflections in a crystal, by listening to a con- 

 tinuous or rhj'thmicalh- varying sound, such as the 

 ticking of a clock or the sound of waves breaking on 

 the seashore, or by rhythmical passes performed before 

 the subject's face and body. It can also be produced 

 simply by suggestion in a sufficiently suggestible 

 subject. The operator has only to order such a subject 

 to sleep, and he immediately falls into the hypnotic 

 sleep. 



Suggestion has been used as a method in the cure of 

 diseases, and it is in this connection that we shall be 

 principally concerned with it in this article. When 

 a doctor wished to treat a patient by suggestion, it 

 was at one time usual to put him into the hypnotic 

 trance ; more usually at the present time he is put 

 only into the state of light hypnosis. In either case, 

 the object is to increase the patient's suggestibility so 

 that the curative suggestions of the doctor may more 

 readil}' take effect. One objection to the use of sug- 

 gestion in the cure of disease, and particularly of 

 suggestion under deep hypnosis, is its tendency to 

 increase the patient's suggestibility, with consequent 

 weakening of his independence of character. 



This objection is overcome if the suggestion is per- 

 formed by the patient himself instead of another 

 person. Wlien this is done the process is called 

 autosuggestion. There are serious difficulties in the 

 way of successful autosuggestion, but these can be 

 overcome, and we are then provided with a valuable 

 weapon for the cure of some kinds of disease. In the 

 present article, I am going to describe the methods of 

 autosuggestion employed in the New Nancy psychiatric 

 clinic. These are explained in a recent book called 

 Suggestion et Autosuggestion, by Charles Baudouin, 

 which has been translated into English by Eden and 

 Cedar Paul. The page references in the present article 

 are to the English translation. 



The principal novelties in the New Nancj' treatment 

 of suggestion are : their increased emphasis botli in 

 theory and practice on autosuggestion, and their 



enunciation of certain laws of suggestion which will 

 be described later. 



In what is ordinarily called suggestion Baudouin 

 distinguishes two steps. First, an idea imposed by the 

 operator is accepted by the subject. This he calls 

 acceptation. Secondly, the object of the idea is 

 realised. This he calls the ideorefiex process or simply 

 suggestion. He considers that the second of these steps 

 is the more important one, and that earlier accounts of 

 suggestion have gone astray by fixing their attention 

 too exclusively on the earlier step of acceptation, and 

 regarding that as the important thing in suggestion. 

 The second step is of course a subconscious one. If 

 we accept this distinction and follow Baudouin's use 

 of words, it will be necessary to modify the terminology 

 used earlier in this article. Then we called a person 

 suggestible if he realised readily a suggested idea. But 

 Baudouin uses the word acceptivity for the property 

 of accepting a suggestion readily, and reserves suggesti- 

 bility for readiness in carrying out what he calls the 

 ideoreflex process. A person may be highly suggestible 

 in this sense, and yet not be easily influenced by other 

 persons, because his acceptivity is low. It is accep- 

 tivity, and not suggestibUity, that is an undesirable 

 quality if too highly developed. 



If the subject himself puts into operation the 

 ideoreflex process, we have autosuggestion. Auto- 

 suggestions may either be spontaneous or the result 

 of our own deliberate effort. These are distinguished 

 as spontaneous and reflective autosuggestion respectively. 

 The case of spontaneous autosuggestion is the simpler 

 one, so we wOl consider it first. 



Spontaneous autosuggestion is a process occurring 

 in the lives of all of us fairh' continually, when any 

 idea which has happened to catch our attention 

 realises itself. An opinion, for example, which we 

 have heard often repeated tends to become a belief. 

 When we see a fire freshly lighted, we begin to feel 

 warmer even though it has not really begun to throw 

 out any heat. An illness that we are always talking j 

 and thinking about tends to develop. I 



There are four laws of suggestion developed by ' 

 Coue (the founder of the New Nancy school) which 

 are so important that I will give them in full : 



(i) The Law of Concentrated Attention. " The idea 

 which tends to realise itself in this way is always an 

 idea on which spontaneous attention is concen- 

 trated " (p. 114). 



(2) The Law of Auxiliary Emotion. " Wlien, for 

 one reason or another, an idea is enveloped in a 

 powerful EMOTION, there is more likelihood that this 

 idea will be suggestively realised " (p. 114). 



(3) The Law of Reversed Effort. " \\licn an idea 

 imposes itself on the mind to such an extent as to 

 give rise to a suggestion, all the conscious efforts 



