The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams, стр. 823

HUMAN BEHAVIOUR AND THE HUMAN MIND

cause blisters and changes in the blood-supply. This power can be used for therapeutic purposes. Control of the bladder and the bowels may be much disturbed in neurotic people, and here suggestion under hypnosis may often achieve a regulation impossible to the patient’s conscious will. Professor Delboeuf carried out a remarkable experiment in which he made equal and symmetrical burns on the arms of two subjects. The burn on one arm of each patient he left to nature; but he suggested during hypnosis that the other should heal better. And he found that this burn healed quicker and with less inflammation than the other.

Now these bodily processes upon which hypnosis opens a door are under control from the autonomic nervous system, that subordinate organization of nerves to which, as we hinted in Chapter 3 of Book 1, the control of the viscera is largely delegated. It controls most glands, and many of the “involuntary ” that are not attached to the skeleton and concerned with locomotion—all the muscles that squeeze food along our intestine, that expand or contract our bloodvessels and the pupils of our eyes, that make our hearts beat. In normal life, these activities are regulated automatically, or with only a moderate degree of control from our will ; they are things that ought to happen of themselves, leaving the conscious mind free to deal with the unexpected changes of the outer world. But in hypnosis it appears that a more effective connection is established (or released) between the still active part of the surface mind that is in rapport with the operator, and the deep-buried processes of bodily life.

Hypnosis may enable us to go deep in another direction—in memory. The hypnotized subject has access to all sorts of recollections (which can then often be verified as recollections of actual facts), which to the waking self are lost and unavailable. And the deeper the hypnosis into which he is plunged, the greater may be the number of these lost and buried recollections that are exhumed, and the further back into past life may they penetrate. In many subjects, if the hypnotizing process be often repeated and carried on for a

longer and longer time on each successive.

occasion, memories of very early childhood can be brought out. It is as if there were a sort of stratification. Some experimenters state that certain subjects can even be transported back to infancy and that there in the lowest layers of the Unconscious still linger lost memories of sucking and crying.

To the Unconscious, too, belong all those impressions which enter the mind without being attended to—the ticking of the clock on the shelf, the beat of the heart in your own body. There is here a complete gradation between an intense focus of consciousness, on which attention is concentrated, a zone of less acute consciousness, where attention and interest are not aroused, a fringe of events of which we are barely conscious, and an outermost zone of events that do not enter consciousness at all and yet may be recorded in the Unconscious.

Superficial mental matter from which we are temporarily shut off, visceral nervous activities, unobserved stuff, and the lumberroom of memories—these are four leading realities in our unconscious worlds. But there is another of much greater practical significance. There is an accumulation of ideas and feelings that we have deliberately thrust out of our consciousness because we found it undesirable to be aware of them. Forgetting is not always, perhaps not often, a mere passive fading out. It can be a very active process. There are things we cannot bear to think of, do not dare to think of, will not think of. Out they go. This wilful banishment of thoughts and impulses is called repression. We have seen how in hypnosis the suggestion of the operator can bar one part of the mind from access to the rest. Here something wilful within plays the part of the operator. Many lost memories are really of this type—they have been forcibly forgotten. Many of our more primitive impulses have been normally repressed in this way. Lusts, appetites, hatreds that we “control” are thus driven under. But the thing is done against resistance ; impulse is in conflict with impulse, our selfcontrol against a rebel. Very frequently when the impulse itself is repressed in its naked reality it will push back towards consciousness in a disguised form. Our repressive powers are limited. Our most nude and cloven-footed impulses, which we should be horrified to admit into the polite society of our conscious ideas, still manage to exert an influence over us. The same may be true, however, for other more angelic impulses. It is not only evil which is repressed by self-control. Most of us are uncomfortably conscious that the angelic does not go very well with our business and the practical life of every day. Hence such impulses, too, are often partially or wholly repressed ; and we do good by stealth or entertain angels unawares, the good impulses exerting their influence from the

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