SUGGESTION. By the older writers on psychology the words "suggest" and "suggestion" were generally used in senses very close to those of common speech. Modern studies in mental pathology and hypnotism (q.v.) have led to the use of these words by psychologists in a special and technical sense. The hypnotists of the Nancy school rediscovered and gave general currency to the doctrine that the most essential feature of the hypnotic state is the unquestioning obedience and docility with which the hypnotized subject accepts, believes and acts in accordance with every command or proposition of the hypno tizer. These commands were called "suggestions"; and the subject that accepted them in this fashion was said to be "sug gestible." It is made clear, chiefly by French physicians, that a high degree of "suggestibility" is a leading feature of hysteria.
It is also becoming widely recognized that the suggestibility of hypnosis and of hysteria is conditioned by a peculiar state of the brain, namely a cerebral or mental dissociation, which in hypnosis is temporarily induced by the operations of the hypno tist, and in hysteria arises from some deficiency of energy in the whole psycho-physical system. But as to the range of sug gestion great differences of opinion still obtain. Firstly, it is maintained (notably by Professor Pierre Janet, whose studies of hysterical patients are celebrated) that suggestibility is a con dition peculiar to hysterical subjects. In view of assertions of physicians that they find more than 90% of all subjects hyp notizable, it would seem that this stigmatization of suggestibility as in every case a morbid symptom, is erroneous. A second group consists of writers who admit that suggestion may operate in normal minds, but that it is a process of very exceptional nature. 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 beneath our more commonplace mental activities. This submerged faculty is
variously called the secondary or submerged stratum of con sciousness, the subconscious or subliminal self (see SUBLIMINAL SELF). These writers insist upon the more startling of the effects producible by suggestion, such as paralysis, contracture, hyper aesthesia, increased power of recollection, hallucinations (q.v.), etc. ; and they regard dissociation as the process by which the supernormal faculty (or faculties) is liberated from the normal waking self.
A third view connects itself with, and bases itself upon, the view of Professor Bernheim and his colleagues of the Nancy school of hypnotism. According to this view all men are normally suggestible under favourable conditions, and the hypnotic subject and the hysteric patient differ from the normal human being chiefly in that their normal suggestibility is more or less (some times very greatly) increased, owing to the prevalence of the state of cerebral dissociation.
According to this third view, suggestion may be defined as the communication of any proposition from one person (or persons) to another in such a way as to secure its acceptance with convic tion, in the absence of adequate logical grounds for its acceptance. 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; whereas in the absence of such dissociation the operation of the suggested idea is always subject to some weakening or inhibition through the influence of many opposed or incompatible tendencies and ideas, even if these do nog rise into explicit consciousness.