Psychotherapy by Hugo Münsterberg (world of reading .TXT) 📕

What has happened? Are the manipulations which I applied sufficient to produce the changes by their physical influence? Certainly not; they are of the most different kinds and yet all may have the same effect. Perhaps I may have used the easy method of making the subject stare at a shining button held in front of his forehead. Or I may have used slight tactual impressions, while he was lying with closed eyes, or I may have produced the abnormal state by monotonous noises of falling waterdrops, or I may have simply spoken to him and asked him to think of sleep and to relax and to feel tired, while I held my hand on his forehead or while I held his hand in mine. Or I may have relied upon mild talking without touching him at all; and yet every time the result was reached in the same degree. There is thus certainly no special physical energy which like a magnetic force flows over. It cannot even be said that my will is engaged. I have often hypnotized without even thinking of the subject before me, going through adjusted manipulations while my thoughts were engaged in something else. I have even hypnotized over the telephone; and a written note may be substituted with the same result. I write to the patient that two minutes after receiving this letter by mail, he will fall into hypnotic sleep. The effect sets in; and yet at that time, I may not remember sending the note at all.

It is thus entirely evident that the hypnotic effect results only from the mental conditions of the subject. Whatever may stimulate his mind to the right kind of reaction will produce the desired result. The increased suggestibility thus sets in by his own imagination which may be stirred up by slight visual or tactual or acoustic stimuli or by monotonous words or by feelings of relaxation and especially by words which encourage sleep. But just because it is the play of his own imagination, the most essential factor certainly is the will and expectation of the subject. No one can really be hypnotized against his own will. And to expect strong hypnotic effect from a certain hypnotist is often in itself sufficient to produce hypnotic sleep. Thus there is no special personal power necessary to produce hypnotism. Everybody can hypnotize. And almost with the same sweeping statement it may be said everybody can be hypnotized, provided that he is willing to enter into this play of imagination. The young child or the insane person is therefore unfit.

Of course, not everybody can be hypnotized to the same degree. Just as the normal suggestibility showed itself very different with different persons, the degree of artificial reënforcement varies still more. Practically everybody can be brought to that breakdown of the resistance in which he can no longer open the eyes against the order of the hypnotist, but rather few can be brought to the point of seeing extended hallucinations, or accepting the disappearance of persons who are speaking, or of yielding to the impulse to a dangerous action. The highest reported degree, in which even criminal actions are performed by honest men, exists in my opinion only in the imagination of amateurs; it is certainly not difficult to produce sham crimes for performance sake, with paper daggers and toy pistols, but that is no proof at all that the hypnotized person would commit a crime under conditions under which he has the conviction that he faces a real criminal situation. But if we abstract from real crime, we certainly have to acknowledge that actions can be performed which appear in striking contrast with the habits and character of the normal personality, upset his knowledge, and are based on beliefs which would be immediately rejected under ordinary conditions. These higher degrees of hypnotic state are easily followed by complete loss of memory for all that happened during the abnormal state.

How have we to interpret such a surprising alteration of mind? It lies near to compare it with sleep. The brain seems powerless to produce its normal ideas, the associations do not arise, the normal impulses have disappeared and a general ineffectiveness has set in; in short, the brain cells seem unable to function. Of course, the explanation of sleep itself may offer difficulties. Is it a chemical substance which poisons the brain during the sleep, or are the brain cells contracted so that the excitement cannot run over from the branches of one nerve cell into those of another? Or are the blood-vessels contracted so that an anæmic state makes their normal function impossible? But whatever the physical condition of sleep may be, have we really a right to emphasize the similarity between sleep and hypnosis? After all that we have discussed, we ought rather to recognize that the hypnotic state too comes much nearer to the process of attention than to the process of sleep. We saw that in every act of attention the process of inhibition is essential. All that is not in harmony with the attended idea is suppressed. Yet we should hesitate to say that in attention parts of our brain are asleep.

We should feel reluctance to group such inhibition together with sleep because it would be a sleep which at any moment can pass from one part of the brain to others and which certainly leaves at every moment most of the cell groups unaffected. We saw that attention does not at all focus on one narrow point, but that an abundance of impressions, of ideas and associations, of thoughts and emotions can enter the field of attention, if they all lead to one and the same motor attitude, and that only the one part is inhibited which involves the opposite action. Such a jumping sleep which at every moment selects a special part would be, of course, just the contrary of that which characterizes the sleep state of the fatigued brain. But exactly these characteristics of attention belong to hypnotism too. It is not true that the mind of the hypnotized is asleep and that perhaps only one or the other idea can be pushed into his mind. On the contrary, his mind is open to an abundance of ideas, just as in the normal state. If I tell him that this is a landscape in Switzerland, he sees at once the mountains and the lakes, and his mind provides all the details of his reminiscences, and his imagination furnishes plenty of additions. His whole mind is awake; the feelings and emotions and volitions, the memories and judgments and thoughts are rushing on, and only that is excluded which demands a contrary attitude. This selective process stands decidedly in the center of the hypnotic experience and makes it very doubtful whether we are psychophysically on the right track, if we make much of the slight similarity between hypnosis and sleep.

This has nothing to do with the fact that hypnosis is best brought about by suggesting the idea of sleep, that is, the belief that sleep will set in. This belief is indeed effective in removing all the ideas which are awake in the mind which would interfere with the willingness to submit to the suggestions of the hypnotizer. But the fact that belief in sleep and expectation of sleep bring with them the hypnotic state is not a proof that the hypnotic state itself is sleep. Even the mental experiences which can remain in sleep, the dreams, are characteristically different from the hypnotic experience. Thus the dreams show that unselective awakening of ideas which is to be expected from a general decrease of functioning. The hypnotic variation is characterized just by its selective narrowing of consciousness. For the same reason, hypnotism is strikingly different from such diseases of the mind as dementia. Certainly in dementia too, many associations are cut off, but it is not a selective inhibition, it is a haphazard destruction resulting from the degeneration in the brain.

The fundamental principle of the hypnotic state lies in its selective character. Inhibited and cut off are those states which are antagonistic to the beliefs in the suggested ideas, and as their antagonism consists in their connection with opposite actions, the whole is again a question of motor setting. No doubt, such new motor setting can precede the normal sleep too; thus the sleeper may be insensitive to any surrounding noises, but perhaps awake at the slightest call from a patient who is intrusted to his care. In that case, one special feature of hypnotism is superadded to sleep but the sleep itself is not hypnotic. Again sleep may go over into a state which shares many characteristic features with hypnotism, that is, somnambulism, and it may be said with a certain truth that hypnotism is artificial somnambulism. But somnambulism, while arising in sleep, is not at all a feature of sleep.

While sleep is characterized by a decrease of sensitiveness and of selective powers, the selective process of hypnotism rather reënforces sensitiveness and memory in every field which is covered by the suggestive influence. Stimuli may become noticeable which the normal man is unable to perceive, and long-forgotten experiences which seem inaccessible to the search of the waking mind may reproduce themselves and may vividly enter consciousness. Again we have there symptoms which rather characterize the state of over-attention than the state of sleep. We might add further that we know states with all the characteristics of hypnotism in which even the subjective idea of sleep is entirely absent, for instance, all those which are usually called states of fascination. A certain shining light or a glimpse of an uncanny eye may startle and upset the imagination of the subject and throw him into a state of abnormally increased suggestibility. It is well known that whole epidemics of such captivation have occurred and have resulted in hysterias of the masses in which the subjects become the slaves of their impulse, perhaps to imitate what they see or hear, or to realize ideas in which they believe without logical warrant. They surely are not asleep, are not even partially asleep. Every center of their brains would be ready to work, if the captivated attention were not forcing the mind in one direction and selectively suppressing every impulse to opposite actions. The developed hypnotism finally shades off into innumerable states of hypnoid character in which the sleeplike symptoms are entirely in the background.

Thus the increased suggestibility of the hypnotic state will result not from a partial sleeplike decrease of functioning but the decrease of function is a motor inhibition which results from over-attention. In the ordinary attention, our motor setting secures only an increase in clearness and vividness of the attended ideas, but in an abnormal over-attention the new motor setting produces a complete acceptance with all its consequences. Abnormal or heightened attention thus goes directly over into the belief and into the impulse without resistance. There is no hypnotism which does not contain from the first stage this definite relation to certain objects of attention, usually to