William McDougall

“ In auto-suggestion a proposition is formulated in the mind of the subject rather than communicated from another mind, and is accepted with conviction in the absence of adequate logical grounds. Generally the belief is initiated by some external event or some bodily change, or through some interpretation of the behaviour of other persons; e.g. a man falls on the road and a wagon very nearly passes over his legs, perhaps grazing them merely; when he is picked up, his legs are found to be paralysed. ”

“ From time to time fantastic beliefs, giving rise to most extravagant behaviour, swept over large areas of Europe like virulent epidemics—epidemics of dancing, of flagellation, of hallucination, of belief in the miraculous powers of relics or of individuals, and so forth. In these epidemics all the conditions favourable to normal suggestion were generally present in the highest degree, with the result that in great numbers of persons there were produced the more extreme effects of suggestion, such as are usually associated with the hysterical or hypnotic state. ”

“ The idea or belief so introduced to the mind of the recipient is held to operate powerfully upon his bodily and mental processes in proportion to the degree of its dominance over all other ideas or mental processes; and the extraordinary character of the effects, both bodily and mental, of suggestion in hypnotic and hysterical subjects is held to be due to the fact that, in these conditions of mental dissociation, the dominance of the suggested idea is complete and absolute ”

“ If, then, we recognize, as we must, that the alogical production of conviction is the essence of suggestion, and that this frequently occurs in normal minds as well as in those suffering from various degrees of dissociation, it becomes necessary to define the conditions that favour the operation of suggestion in normal minds. ”

“ The well-trained mind is relatively insuggestible, firstly because it possesses large stores of knowledge and belief; secondly, because this mass of knowledge and belief is systematically organized in such a way that all its parts hang together and mutually support one another. On the other hand, the young child, the uncultured adult, and especially the savage, are apt to be suggestible in regard to very many topics, first, because they have relatively little knowledge ”

“ Persons of equal degrees of knowledge or ignorance will be found, even at their times of greatest mental efficiency, to be unequally suggestible owing to differences of native disposition; one person is by nature more open than another to personal influence, more easily swayed by others, more ready to accept their dicta and adopt their opinions for his own. ”

“ A second group consists of writers who admit that suggestion may operate in normal minds, but who, while recognizing that it is not an essentially pathological process, maintain that it is a process of very peculiar and exceptional nature that has little or no affinity with normal mental operations. ”

“ They hold that suggestion, whether it occurs in morbid or in healthy subjects, always implies the coming into operation of some obscurely conceived faculty or region of the mind which is present in all men, but which usually lies hidden or submerged beneath the flow of our more commonplace mental activities. ”

“ Suggestion in such cases may be said to be conditioned by primitive credulity or the suggestibility of ignorance. (b) But the same person will not be found to be equally suggestible at all times under similar external conditions. There are changes of mental state which, without overstepping the limits of the normal, condition varying degrees of increased suggestibility. A man is least suggestible when his mind works most efficiently, when he is most vigorous and most wide awake ”

“ It is in the main through the suggestive power of moral maxims, endowed with all the prestige of great moral teachers and of the collective voice of society, that the child is led to accept with but little questioning the code of morals of his age and country ”

“ Differences of this kind are probably the expression of differences in the native strength of one of the fundamental instinctive dispositions of the human mind, an instinct which is called into play by the presence of persons of superior powers and the excitement of which throws the subject into an attitude of submission or subjection towards the impressive personality. ”

“ Or a savage, suffering some slight indisposition, interprets the behaviour of some person in a way which leads him to the conviction that this person is compassing his death by means of magical practices ”

“ A third view has been rapidly gaining ground and is now predominant. It connects itself with, and bases itself upon, the view of Professor Bernheim and his colleagues of the Nancy school of hypnotism. ”