The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams, стр. 821

HUMAN BEHAVIOUR AND THE HUMAN MIND

suggestion and control are enormous. He can suggest that the subject’s thumb shall be insensitive to pain, the first finger hypersensitive ; and then the subject will draw away his first finger in agony from the tiniest prick, while he will let his thumb be jabbed with a needle without a sign. Blindness of one or both eyes can be successfully suggested, or paralysis of a limb. The subject can be made to believe that one of the party is not present; if told to sit on the chair which this man is occupying, he will sit on his lap. Most extraordinary of all, in some subjects blisters can be raised by suggestion, or the temperature can be made to go up or down—bodily activities not under the control of our volition at all.

Another remarkable set of facts is provided by what is called post-hypnotic suggestion. The subject, while still in hypnosis, is told that, after he comes out of his hypnotic condition, he is to perform a particular action, but that he is not to remember the command to do so. The action may be some absurd one, such as putting a footstool on the middle of a table; it may be commanded to take place at a given signal, or after a definite lapse of time. In the great majority of cases, it will be performed. Often the subject is uneasy for a little time beforehand ; some sort of a struggle is going on in him between the conscious self which knows that putting a footstool on the table is absurd and the hidden part of his mind which has been in subjection to the operator’s bidding. But eventually he will do as he has been told. When he has been told to execute the action after the lapse of a definite period of time—so many minutes, hours, days, or even weeks—the instruction will often be carried out with extreme punctuality. Posthypnotic commands of this sort have been effective after a whole year.

Not infrequently the subject will throw an ingenuous ray of light on human rationality by making up some reason for what he isimpelledtodo. Ifhe has been told to open a window, he will say, “‘ Very stuffy in here, don’t you think ? ” although it may actually be rather fresh ; or if he is to put a vase ona bookshelf, he may suggest that it really looks much better there. ‘This is what is generally called rationalization, the making up of reasons to justify an act whose motive is not rational. The rationalizer may be consciously or subconsciously ashamed of the motive : he may simply not know what his motive is but merely that the impulse is there. We realize here the gulf between Reason and reasons.

One of the salient facts revealed by such experiments (which have now been carried on by psychologists in all parts of the world for over half-a-century), is that in hypnosis the personality is as it were split or, to use the technical term, dissociated. The part in rapport with the operator is in some peculiar way isolated from the rest. The case of post-hypnotic suggestion we have just cited shows that this cleavage may remain after waking. The two dissociated parts of the mind are dissociated in the sense that they can act separately and even antagonistically, and that there is a barrier between the consciousness of the one and of the other. Yet they act upon one another in spite of this mutual unconsciousness. As we have already said, after waking from hypnosis, the conscious self may grow restless and uneasy when the time comes for carrying out a posthypnotic suggestion, and is almost always aware of some extraneous impulse to action. Usually the subject experiences the same sort of uneasiness that he feels in normal life when he knows he ought to remember to do something but has quite forgotten what the something is. At other times he knows precisely what the impulse is urging him to do, but cannot ascribe a reason or a motive to it. Between these extremes there are all gradations. From the point of view of the normal waking self, the impulse to post-hypnotic action is real enough ; but its origin and often its very nature are hidden. And yet the command is carried out. The command has been given by word of mouth, received by the ordinary channels of sense. Though the subject may have no recollection of it whatever, yet when he is again hypnotized, he will remember all about it and tell you; and if he be told to remember it instead of forgetting it when he wakes up, he will remember.

Here again, in the domain of memory there is a complete splitting.

The Unconscious

In our description of the hypnotized dog we seemed to have a case of restricted activity, due to the inhibition of wide regions of the brain. These regions are held down while others remain in control. In these human cases, and especially in the cases of post-hypnotic suggestion, there is a parallel division into regions that are operative and regions that are restrained. There is a barrier to connection and recollec-

795