Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/782

762 They are not passive. Persons who are very much preoccupied with a certain idea are difficult to influence; hence hypochondriacal and hysterical patients make poor subjects, largely on account of their introspection and egoism. Many people think that it is a sign of weak will to yield readily to hypnotism, and that it is a sign of strong character to resist. Both views are equally erroneous. I have frequently seen persons of strong, determined character fall asleep at the first trial. On the other hand, hysterical patients with very little will-power are generally highly refractory. Men are as readily hypnotized as women. Imaginative persons, and those who sleep very soundly, are generally easily hypnotized.

It has been repeatedly stated that frequent hypnotization is dangerous. It is questionable whether hypnotism has ever proved really dangerous, even when it is induced as it is at the Salpêtrière. With Braid's method, it often happens that a severe headache or general nervous irritability is produced, and hysterical or epileptic paroxysms are occasionally brought on in persons subject to them. It is important to understand that these evil results are not due to the hypnosis; they are the result of the long fixation, Liébault, Bernheim, and Forel have hypnotized many thousand persons in the manner I have described—that is, by suggestion—and have never witnessed an unpleasant or harmful after-effect.

It is impossible to give an exhaustive description of the hypnotic manifestations here. The most that can be done is to mention briefly the principal classes of phenomena with which one meets; and, having done this, some of the more remarkable ones can be studied by themselves.

Liébault divides hypnotic sleep into six grades. The division is arbitrary and theoretical, and the grades can not be sharply separated from one another, for there are all imaginable transitions. Nevertheless the classification is useful, and I shall give it here as the best means with which I am acquainted of introducing the characteristics of hypnotism.

Under the first degree Liébault includes those cases in which the somnolence is so slight that it is questionable whether it can really be called sleep. There is a sense of drowsiness, often very pronounced, and the eyelids feel heavy, but this influence may only continue while the operator is speaking. As soon as his influence is withdrawn the subject wakens.

In the second degree the subject's eyes are closed. He hears everything that is said to him or that occurs about him, but does not awake spontaneously for some time. As the magnetizers say, he is in the "hypotaxic" or charmed condition.

This degree of hypnotism is characterized by the existence of what is called suggestive catalepsy. If, as soon as the subject is