AU'TOSUGGES'TION. Self - suggestion; a man's acceptance. for himself, without eommand or direction from any other person, of an idea that shall presently issue in action. Autosug gestion may be induced voluntarily or involun tarily—voluntarily, if we fix our attention upon the idea in question and impress it on our minds by attentive consideration; involuntarily, if we are unconsciously influenced by our surround ings. Many persons, e.g. can awake at a certain hour in the morning by suggesting to themselves, the night before, that they will do so; and it is probable that every one can, with practice, attain to smile degree of accuracy in such a 'setting' of the mental machinery. The mechanism of arous al in these cases is not wholly clear. The cue for Waking is however, in all probability, given either by a definite amount of illumination of the sleeping-room by the growing daylight, by certain constant noises of the environment, or by the pressure of water in the bladder of the sleeper. For tire possibility of inducing hypnosis by auto suggestion• see I h7PNOTT SAL Involuntary autosuggestion often plays an im portant part in psychological experimentation. It is sometimes desirable to make tests or experi ments while the observer is, so far as possible, kept in complete ignorance of the object and ar rangement of the investigation. (See Psycno ruysics.) The whole purpose of the 'procedure without knowledge' may, in certain eases, be de feated by autosuggestion. As the work pro gresses, the observer involuntarily formulates an opinion as to its design—suggests to himself that he is expected to see this, and not that ; to judge thus, and not otherwise: so that he is pres ently observing under a strong self-created bias.
The tendency is perfectly well known, and can be guarded against. Experimental psychologists have, indeed, classified laboratory observers as `objective' and 'subjective' in type, upon the basis of the amount of self-suggestion to which they are liable.
Good instances of autosuggestion are to be found in the literature of suggestive therapeu tics. One person is cured by a so-called 'electric belt,' another is invigorated by a band of un known material fastened to the ankle, a third reads a faith-cure pamphlet and his rheumatism ceases. It is, however, in the hypnotic and other abnormal phases of mind—the hysterical con sciousness, the religious ecstasy. the mind of the individual in the mob—that the phenomena of autosuggestion are most striking. 'Many phe nomena which, at their first appearance, were regarded as evidence of supernormal powers and manifestations are reducible (fraud and trickery being eliminated) to autosuggestion. To quote from Jastrow: "The transportation of the senses discovered by P•tC-tin (1787), the hypnotized subjects who, in Braid's day (1850), proved the location of the phrenological organs by the ap propriateness of their actions when certain por tions of the head were pressed; the sensitiveness to magnets and hermetically sealed drugs asserted by Ileichenbach (1845), and later by Bourru and Rurot (1885), and Dr. Luys's (1890) absurd trifling with puppets, and probably. too, Char cot's sharp differentiation of distinct hypnotic conditions (1882).—one and all furnish illustra tions of the subtle possibilities of unconscious suggestion."