December 4, 1885.] 



SCIENCE. 



505 



in a tliicket in whose darkness only technically 

 trained eyes will feel at home. 



Hypnotism now stands where gravitation, gal- 

 vanism, and the 'metamorphosis of plants' once 

 stood. In France, especially, a real fureur of 

 investigation is going on, and all sorts of people 

 are trying then- hand as magnetizers or as sub- 

 jects. Eepeatedly assaihng the academies for 

 recognition, as repeatedly rejected by reportmg 

 committees, whose criticism occupied itself too 

 much with a few exceptional claims, and too 

 httle with the fundamental conditions of the 

 hypnotic state, this latter at last wears official 

 robes ; and it is as ' bad form ' now to be ignorant 

 of its phenomena as a while ago it was to know 

 any thing about them. To those who would no 

 longer remain ig-norant, Dr. CuUerre's little com- 

 pilation^ may cordially be recommended as the 

 work of one who has tried to survey the whole 

 ground, and w^ho has certainly brought a great 

 deal of scattered material together, and put it into 

 readable shape. There is no other account of the 

 subject at once so short and so complete. More 

 than this we need not say of the book, for it 

 makes no pretensions to originality, and the au- 

 thor's own critical comments are so rare, that a 

 certain intellectual commonness about them may 

 well be overlooked. 



As matters now stand, the fundamental phenom- 

 ena, sleep, narrowing of the field of consciousness, 

 blotting out of memory, insensibihty or hyper- 

 aesthesia, modifications of neuro-muscular irrita- 

 bUity, hallucination in obedience to suggestion, 

 etc., etc., are too banals to excite any longer much 

 interest ; and the attention of investigators is 

 directed more and more to the curiosities of the 

 hypnotic state, to those exceptional phenomena be- 

 longing to the mdividual subjects from which (by 

 virtue of the law that nature shows us her secrets 

 most readily in her monstrosities) most may be 

 hoped for in the way of light thrown upon what 

 is, after aU, a great mystery. 



Foremost among these novelties are the ' post- 

 hypnotic impulsions,' which may take place weeks, 

 or even months, after the patient has been hypno- 

 tized, in obedience to suggestions made during the 

 trance; of which suggestions themselves nothing 

 is remembered, the patient usually assigning for 

 the act he finds himself irresistibly driven to per- 

 form, some pretext trumped up at the moment. 

 It is obvious what power this gives to any un- 

 scrupulous operator who might wish to use his 

 subjects as cat's-paws to crime. The remedy on 

 the subject's part, if once he mistrusts the opera- 



1 MagnetisvLe et hypnotisme. Expose des phenomenes 

 observes pendant le sommeil nerveux provoque. Par le 

 Dr. A. CuLLERRE. Paris, BaillUre, 1886 [1885J. 16°. 



tor, would seem to be to get himself hypnotized by 

 some other person, who, by suggesting that the for- 

 mer operator's proceedings should thenceforward 

 be ineffectual, would ia many cases actually render 

 them so. 



These inhibitions of certain processes by negative 

 suggestion are among the greatest curiosities of 

 hypnotism, and bid fair to put us on the track of 

 important psychological secrets by isolating phe- 

 nomena which usually are found combined. We 

 may make a patient blind or deaf to special ob- 

 jects, and to nothing else, just as we may make 

 him blind of one eye, deaf of one ear, or insensible 

 to pain in one part of the body, — aU by verljal 

 suggestion that he shall become so. And the 

 distinction that psychology makes between the 

 mere sensation we receive from a thiag, and 

 the mental apperception or assimilation of 

 the latter, so as to form a percept, is beauti- 

 fully brought out in these experiments. For 

 it seems that in them the bliudness or other 

 peculiarity is not the lack of sensation. A pa- 

 tient, for example, made to look at a red wafer on 

 a sheet of paper, but told that there is nothing 

 there, will not see the wafer — wiQ say that the 

 entire field of view is white. As soon, however, 

 as the wafer is blown away, he will say he sees a 

 green spot, its negative after-image. So a pa- 

 tient made blind to a particular by-stander can- 

 not be made to see him. But how can the pa- 

 tient know which one to be blind to, without in 

 some way discerning him ? Some sort of a sensa- 

 tion of him must be there, or he would not be so 

 singled out for invisibility. 



The ' hemi-hypnotic ' phenomena again afford a 

 sort of moral vivisection of the patient into two 

 halves. One side of the body may be cataleptic 

 or lethargic, the other awake. One side of the 

 face may be made to laugh, the other to weep. 

 ' ' If, in the hands of an open-eyed cataleptic sub- 

 ject, her knitting-work is placed, she takes it, and 

 works away with remarkable skiQ. If the operator 

 then close one of her eyes, the hand on the cor- 

 responding side falls inert, and the other hand 

 continues all alone to perform the knitting move- 

 ments, which, of course, then produce no effect." 

 M. Eicher describes a similar transformation of 

 the act of washing the hands, into a unilateral 

 operation. MM. Binet and Fere in some papers 

 in the Revue philosophique, too late apparently to 

 be noticed in Dr. CuUerre's book, have described 

 most wonderful transferrences of the unilateral 

 phenomena from one side to the other of the 

 patient, whenever a magnet was brought near her, 

 even without her knowledge. Many parts of then- 

 account are so starthng tliat more verification is 

 highly to be desu'ed. 



