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

the hypnotist's intent. Often this is coupled with telepathic fancies. The hypnotist is believed to have mystic power to bring any person in a distant region under his mental control and thus to be able to carry out any sinister plans by the help of his innocent victim. All hypnotizing therefore ought to be interdicted by the state. The presuppositions of such a view are, as we know now, entirely absurd. We know that hypnotism is not based on any special power of the hypnotizer; there is no magnetic fluid in the sense of the old mesmerism. The imagination of the hypnotized person is the only hypnotizing agency. Thus no one can be hypnotized without his knowledge or against his will. The story of telepathic mysteries which is often brought before the public is probably always the outcome of a diseased brain. It is indeed a frequent symptom in paranoia and other insanities that the patient who feels abnormal organic sensations and abnormal unaccountable impulses interprets them as influences of a distant enemy. Whole pamphlets have been written with elaboration of such insane misinterpretations and requests to legislatures have been made in that spirit, but the physician recognizes easily throughout the whole argumentation the well-known phenomena of the mental disease.

To be sure, while no one can be hypnotized against his will, many a person is liable to accept suggestions from others and thus to carry out the wishes of others almost without knowing and certainly without willing that the other mind interfere with the interplay of the own motives. But if we were to strike out all suggestive influences from social life, we should give up social life itself. Suggestion is given wherever men come in contact; in itself it is neither good nor bad. The good resolution and the bad one can be suggested, the good example and the bad can be effective; both encouragement of the noble and imitation of the evil may work with the same mental technique. Certainly there are some persons who have a stronger influence than others on the imagination of those with whom they come in contact; their expression awakens confidence, their voice and their words reach deeper layers of the mind, their calmness and firmness overwhelm more easily the antagonistic ideas. But the chief difference lies after all in the different degrees of suggestibility among those who receive such impressions. The easily suggestible person cannot be protected by any interdict; he may catch suggestions everywhere, any advertisement in the newspaper and any display in the shop-window may overrun his own intentions. What he needs is training in firmness. The application of reënforced suggestion or even of hypnotism in the doctor's office is even for him no possible source of danger.

On a higher level are objections which come from serious quarters and which are not without sympathy with true science. In recent times this opposition has repeatedly found eloquent expression. It is an objection from the standpoint of morality, belonging therefore entirely to the purposive view of the mind, but we have now reached a point where it is our duty to do justice to this purposive view too. As long as we discussed the problem entirely from the standpoint of the physician, no other view of mental life except the causal one could be in question. As soon as we look at it from the standpoint of the community, it becomes our duty to bring the causal and the purposive view into harmony, and it would be narrow and short-sighted simply to draw the practical consequences of a naturalistic view of the mind without inquiring whether or not serious interests in the purposive sphere are injured. If there is moral criticism against suggestive therapy, it is the duty of the community to consider it. This opposition argues as follows: Hypnotic influence brings the patient under the will control of the hypnotizer and thus destroys his own freedom. Whatever the patient may reach in the altered states is reached without his own effort, while he is the passive receiver of the other man's will. His achievement has therefore no moral value, and if he is really cured of his drunkenness or of his perverse habits, of his misuse of cocaine or of his criminal tendencies, he has lost the right to be counted a moral agent. It would be better if there were more suffering in the world than that the existence of the moral will should be undermined.

No one ought to take such arguments lightly. The spirit which directs them is needed more than anything else in our time of reaching out for superficial goods. No one can insist too earnestly that life is worth living only if it serves moral duties and moral freedom and is not determined by pleasures and absence of pain only. Those who set forth this argument are entirely willing to acknowledge the profound effect which suggestive therapeutics may create. More than this, they have to acknowledge it to gain a basis for their attack. Just because the hypnotizer can entirely change the desires and passions, the habits and perversities of the suffering victim, he seems to them a moral wrongdoer who negates the principle of human freedom. A forcible book of recent days calls the suggestive power of the psychotherapist "The Great Psychological Crime." It says to the hypnotist: "By your own testimony, you stand convicted of applying a process which deprives your subjects of the inalienable right and power of individual self-control. In proportion as you deprive him of the power of self-control, you deprive him of that upon which his individual responsibility and moral status depend. In proportion as you deprive him of the free control and exercise of those powers of the soul upon which his individual responsibility and moral status depend, you thereby rob him of those powers upon which he must depend for the achievement of individual immortality."

But this censure too is entirely mistaken, not because it urges the purposive views against the causal but because it is in error as to the facts. Such critics are fully under the influence of the startling results which are reached; they do not take the trouble to examine the long and difficult way which has had to be traversed with patience and energy. It is quite true that if I hypnotize a man and suggest to him to take up after awaking the book which lies on my table, he follows my suggestion without conflict and in a certain sense without freedom. He feels a simple impulse to go to the table and lift the book and, as no stronger natural desire and no moral objection stand in the way, he carries out that meaningless impulse and perhaps even invents a foolish motive to explain to himself why he wanted to look at that book. But after a long experience, I have my doubts as to whether a man was ever cured in such a way by hypnotism of serious disturbances and of those anomalous actions which the critics want to see overcome by the patient's own moral efforts. On the contrary, every suggestion has to rely on the efforts and struggles of the patient himself and all that the psychotherapists can give him is help in his own moral fight. His own will is presupposition for being hypnotized and for realizing the suggestion. If again and again I hesitate to undertake new cases, it is just because I have to see during the treatment too much of this daily and hourly striving against overpowering impulses. The joy of removing some obstacles from the way of the patients is too much overshadowed by the deep pity and sympathy with their suffering and craving during the whole period of successive treatments. To make a man fight where despair is inevitable, and where the enemy is necessarily stronger than his own powers, can certainly not be the moral demand. Morality postulates that everyone find conditions in which he can be victorious if he puts his strongest efforts to the task.

In our discussion of the mental symptoms I reported as an illustration of the suggestive treatment of the drug passion the case of a morphinist. To make clear this purposive side of the case as against the causal one which alone interested the physician, I may add a few features to the short report as a typical example. When that man left my laboratory for the last time to go out to work and happiness, you might well have believed from his joyful face that it had been an easy and pleasant time in which hypnotic influence smoothly removed from him the dangerous desire for morphine. In truth it was the result of four months of the most noble and courageous suffering and struggling. He had been for years a slave to his passion. To quote from his little autobiography: "When I realized that I was addicted to morphine, I was at first not at all worried as I did not then understand the real horror of the thing, and did not then realize all the future suffering and misery that is coming to anyone who is the user of opium or any of its alkaloids. For the first few months, I found great relief after every injection of morphine, but soon I could not get the same easy feeling and could eat but very little and what sleep I got was in the daytime. I finally went to the sanitarium of a doctor but it was simply a money-making business for him; if he ever cured anyone, I never heard of it. I then tried another one; it was the same kind of a place as the former. When I first went to see the professor in the Harvard Psychological Laboratory, I was using between thirty-two and thirty-eight grains of morphine daily. He put me under his treatment October 6th and that day cut me down by hypnotic treatment to nine grains a day or three doses of three grains a day. I took my hypodermic as directed, but on the following day I lay on the bed too exhausted to get up even to get around the room, and I could not eat and only drank a very little water. The desire for the drug was something terrible. But in about four days I got used to the loss of so much morphine and stayed on this amount for a week, seeing the professor every other day for hypnotic treatment and then returning to my room where I spent twenty-two hours of the twenty-four on the bed, but did not sleep more than two or three hours a day. At the end of the week I was cut off by hypnotic suggestion half a grain and this put me to fighting the desire again. This lasted two or three days and then I began to feel better and began to sleep a little more. But at the end of the week I was cut off another half grain, and the whole fight would have to be begun over. These reductions of the dose were made a week apart and sometimes only two days. The worst time of all was a cut from four injections of a fourth of a grain each to four of one eighth of a grain each, which was about January 10th. At this time I had the worst two days of my life. I tried whiskey, but it gave relief only for about half an hour and then the desire was worse than ever."

In this way every few days I gave the poor fellow under hypnotic influence the suggestion to reduce the dose of morphine in a prescribed way, and with enormous effort he withstood his craving for