Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/133

 THE STAGES OF HYPNOTISM. 121 point in connexion with this obedience is that it seems apt to fail in cases where a vivid and interesting idea is suggested at the same time as the command. Thus several ' subjects ' who were told in the deep state that a fire had broken out at home, and that they must go and help to put it out, on being recalled to the alert state sat without moving, and denied any impulse to do anything. The idea probably produced a strong mental picture, which, in disappearing with the change of state according to the rule above given, involved the further disappearance of the sense of obliga- tion. (8) Obedience also fails in the following case. If a command has been imposed in the deep state, and the ' subject ' is woke into the alert, but then, before he has tune to perform it, is put under a delusion this will *>i.*i>?inl. the performance of the act. Thus, a youth who had been told that he was to put on his hat and begin reading the newspaper, and had then been roused, was on the point of carrying out the command, when he was suddenly told he was a chicken. He instantly went down on the floor and began to cluck. He was then allowed to lapse into the deep state, and again brought out of it : he now at once performed the order. In this particular instance the order was not remembered in the second deep state, though carried out on emergence from it ; the delusion had altogether obliterated it, as far as psychic memory- was concerned. But this feature seems unsymnietrical, and was found not to be constant the delusion as a rule having no effect beyond the particular sort of state in which it is in- duced. Such in briefest outline is a sketch of the conditions of memory connected with hypnotism, so far as my own observation has gone. Brief as it is, it may perhaps suggest matter of re- flection as to theories which assume hypnotism to be a state of mere unconscious automatism, on the ground that no true memory ever exists of what happens in it.