Hypnosis Daily News

Psychological side the phenomenon is controlled largely by the central nervous system. But then the suggestion is passed on. It becomes a physiological phenomenon, or a way to reach the autonomic nervous system, with resulting actions taking place apparently with no control of conscious will. The hysterics are suggestible in the latter sense. Suggestion works physiologically rather than psychologically in them. Their "pretense" is not willed at all. Hysteria manifests itself either as the result of a powerful emotion (fear, rage, love, religious ecstasy, etc.) or as a consequence of the relationship of suggestion. It is cured, too, through emotion or suggestion. What is even more interesting, the symptoms of hysteria can be removed by hypnosis-which fact induced Charcot to believe that only neurotics, and particularly hysterics, can be hypnotized. Science owes a great debt to Charcot for his observation that paralyses and contractures, undistinguishable from those occurring in hysteria, can also be produced by hypnotic suggestion. As S. Freud, erstwhile Charcot's pupil, said "such artificial products showed, down to their smallest details, the same features as spontaneous attacks." H. Bernheim subsequently demonstrated that Charcot was wrong and that all people, not only hysterics, can be hypnotized. Charcot himself was hard to persuade, and before he was defeated, he made the controversy one of the most colorful in the history of European medicine.