Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/500

 488 EDMUND GUENEY : a main reason (though a very illogical one) for the tendency to regard previous fixity of attention as in itself a sufficient ground for the unhinged automatic mental condition of hyp- notised ' subjects '. It is that certain physical phenomena, which may at first sight seem more startling (but are in reality far less unique) than the mental condition in question, have undoubtedly been known to follow or to accompany the state of fixed or expectant attention that attention, however, being then always directed to the part of the body in which the phenomena were actually to appear ; as in the familiar case where the steady contemplation of a particular finger leads to a sense of tingling in it. But even in this direction, where the mere attitude of attention and expectancy does actually seem of distinct efficiency, cases occur where the physical change cannot possibly be ascribed to that attitude, inasmuch as not even the vaguest realisa- tion of the bodily part to be affected was in the patient's mind. Such a case is that of a woman who had been hypnotised by Braid for relief of violent pain in the arm and shoulder, and who found, much to his and her own surprise, that an opacity which had been left by rheumatic fever over more than half the cornea of her left eye was gradually clearing. This case has been most unaccountably quoted by Dr. Carpenter as an instance of the curative effects of mere attention. The result seems clearly attri- butable to that re-balancing or re-direction of nervous energy which Braid regards as characteristic of the hypnotic state to those nervous events which are no mere correlate of an act of attention, but the result (as he explains) of a quite special physical cause. But the objections to the attention-theory are not by any means exhausted by the difficulty of connecting the process with the results of hypnotisation : on the contrary, they become even more substantial if we confine ourselves to the latter. And they deserve note the more just because the theory here will actually cover so much ground because so many of the hypnotic phenomena may be truly described as belonging to the ' pathology of the attention,' and admit of interesting treatment (e.g., in G. H. Schneider's treatise, Die psychologische Ursache der liypnoiisclun Erscheinungcri) in connexion with other branches of that wider subject. But in the first place, even in the alert stage of hypno- tism, where mono-ideism with its accompanying loss of balance and control is often most conspicuous, it must always be borne in mind that this is not the essential pe- culiarity of the state. The fundamental fact according to