In claiming that hypnotism depends upon the over-attention to the hypnotizing person, we admit that the increased suggestibility belongs entirely to suggestions which come from without. Only that which at least takes its starting point from the words or the movements of the hypnotizer finds over-sensitive suggestibility. Ideas which arise merely from the associations of the subject himself have no especially favorable chance for acceptance. But surely we also know states in which the suggestibility for certain of one's own ideas is abnormally increased. Great individual differences exist in that respect in normal life. There are normal hypochondriacs who believe that they feel the symptoms of widely different diseases under the influence of their own ideas, and others who are torturing themselves with fears on account of unjustified beliefs. But the abnormal increase of suggestibility parallel to that of hypnotism for suggestions from without exists for suggestions from within, mainly in nervous diseases, especially in neurasthenic, hysteric, and psychasthenic states. Within certain limits, we might almost say that this increase of suggestibility for autosuggestion is the fundamental characteristic of these diseases, just as increase of suggestibility for heterosuggestions characterizes hypnotism.
Especially in earlier times, the theory was often proposed that hypnosis is an artificial hysteria. Such a view is untenable to-day; but that hysteria too shows abundant effects of increased suggestibility is correctly indicated by such a theory. The hysteric patient may by any chance pick up the idea that her right arm is paralyzed or is anaesthetic and the idea at once transforms itself into a belief and the belief clings to her like an obsession and produces the effect that she is unable to move the arm or that she does not feel a pinprick on the skin. These autosuggestions may take a firmer hold of the mind than any suggestions from without, but surely such openness to selfimplanted beliefs must be acknowledged as symptomatic of disease, while hypnosis with its impositions can be broken off at any moment and thus should no more be classed among the diseases than are sleep and dreams. The hysteric or psychasthenic autosuggestion resists the mere will of breaking it off. Here, therefore, is the classical ground for strong mental counterinfluences, that is, for psychotherapeutic treatment. Experience shows that the strongest chance for the development of such autosuggestive beliefs exists wherever an emotional disposition is favorable to the arriving belief. But emotion too is after all fundamentally a motor reaction. The whole meaning of emotion in the biological sense is that it focuses the actions of man into one channel, cutting off completely all the other impulses and incipient actions. Emotion is therefore for the expressions of man what attention is for the impressions. An emotional disposition means thus in every case a certain motor setting by which transition to certain actions is facilitated. It is thus only natural that a belief can settle the more easily, the more it is favored by an emotional disposition, as the motor setting for the one must prepare the other. Hypnosis and hysteria thus represent the highest degrees of suggestibility, the one artificial, the other pathological; the one for suggestions from without, the other for suggestions from within. But between these two and the normal state there lie numberless steps of transition. The normal variations themselves may go to a limit where they overlap the abnormal artificial product, that is, the suggestibility of many normal persons may reach a degree in which they accept beliefs hardly acceptable to other persons in mild hypnotic condition. Thus there is no sharp demarcation between suggestions in a waking state and suggestions in a hypnoid state. And the expectation of coming under powerful influence may produce a sufficient change in the motor setting to realize any wonders. Moreover probably every physician who has a long experience in hypnotizing has found that his confidence in the effectiveness of the deep hypnotic states has been slowly diminished, while his belief in the surprising results of slight hypnotization and of hypnoid states has steadily grown and has encouraged him in his psychotherapeutic efforts.