CURE BY SUGGESTION.
THERE is a very interesting article by an American gentleman, Mr. C. M. Barrows, read at the meeting of the Society for Psychical Research at Westminster Town Hall last January, called "Suggestion without Hypnotism : an Account of Experiments in Preventing or Suppressing Pain," in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research for June. Mr. Barrows tells us that he has pursued his method for about seven years, and has treated several hundred cases of various kinds of malady with success, and he gives us an account of a considerable number of those cases in which his chief object was to prevent or relieve pain. In all these cases he used no hypnotism so far as he knows. That is, he is not aware that he put his patients into any trance or other abnormal condition of mind or body, but only suggested to them,—and not always even to their consciousness,—if any.. thing can be said to be suggested to a person who has never heard the suggestion with his ears, nor received it into his mind, —that they were about to be relieved of their pain. There is a certain difficulty in grasping what Mr. Barrows actually did, when we are told that he did it without hypnotism, unless we are told clearly what hypnotism really is ; and it is not easy c in to make out what is meant by saying that he did it by "lino gestion" when he claims to have done !tin f__zeatigir" ases which what we ordinarily call "slarreetion " was certainly absent, seeing that the subject,' of the operation never knew that any attempt to relieve him of his pain was going on. For instance :— " By a single suggestion I relieved a child from severe pain. who was not aware-of-"my presence in the room. She was lying on a bed_besi dig which sat her nurse ; I enttrel. the roam noise- lesslyirsatiOwn where she could not see me, and, after doing my wevhc, wen. out without having attracted her notice, so that there wias no chance for expectancy or attention on her part.'' (p. 30.)
In what sense is that suggestion at all P Mr. Barrows himself does not know, and, of course, cannot tell us. Again, take Mr. Barrows's own account of his proceedings, and it will be found that he himself does not even profess to know what " suggestion " means, and often succeeds best when, in his own opinion, neither he nor the patient to whom he made the suggestion was conscious of what he was doing :—
" Mine is a silent suggestion. I use neither voice nor other means to convey its import to the patient through sensory edits. I find it possible to affect with these unvoiced suggestions one who does not know my language, infants who have learned no language, and brute creatures. This would not be the case if communication depended on speech. More than this : I am not conscious of forming any statement of the message, even in thought, when I make the suggestion. I certainly am not then thinking shoat my patient, or at him. Using the term `mind' in the popular sense, it does not seem that the suggestions which I make are addressed to it at all." (p. 23.) Suggestions made to infants or brutes by a man who was not thinking about them at all, were surely suggestions of a very novel kind. Would it not be more enlightening to tell us exactly what suggestion meant when neither the euggestor knew what he was suggesting, nor the creature to whom the suggestion was made received any indication of what had been suggested to it P Mr. Barrows, however, is not quite con- sistent with himself, for a few lines farther on he says :— "My experience in sending telepathic messages to distant per- cipients casts soma light upon this point. Whenever, acting as agent, I concentrated my thought on a formal statement of the message, the percipient failed to receive it; but when I made no thought effort,—no conscious effort of any kind,—the message reached its destination. Mark, this is not saying that the agent does not need to think of his message beforehand and decide upon its content ; in all except purely spontaneous communications this preliminary step must be necessary." (p. 23.)
If Mr. Barrows needed " to think of his suggestion beforehand and to decide upon its contents," surely he himself cannot have been absolutely unconscious of its nature, and he might just as well have given us specimens of these preliminary re- flections and "the decision as to the contents of the message" on which he had fixed. So far as we understand him, the suggestion was really made in this preliminary act of reflec- tion, however much his mind may subsequently have wandered from his purpose. It is, indeed, perfectly clear that in many cases Mr. Barrows found that unless the suggestion he made was in the highest degree specific as to time as well as to its general drift, it was an utter failure. For instance, he had told a lady who had no confidence at all in his power that she was not to suffer anything while the dentist "stuffed" her teeth, an op ration which usually gave her acute pain. The success was marvellous, until one day, being in a hurry, he omitted the "formal suggestion" as to time, and then she suffered all her old agonies :—
"The lady left me, feeling, as - judged, very little confidence in what I had done,—indeed, she remarked that she could not see that I had done anything,—and at eleven o'clock the operator began work on her most sensitive tooth. Finding, to his surprise as well as her own, that she did not wince under the rough touch of his instruments, he worked steadily and fast for two hours, before she was released from the chair. The next day, instead of being miserable in bed, this lady called to report to me what seemed to her a wonderful deliverance from pain. Referring to the molar on which the dentist had spent so much time, she said, Dr. — wanted to fill it a year ago but it hurt so I could not bear to let him touch it; but yesterday he did not hurt me a particle, although he worked fast and did not favour me. I felt every movement and realised all he was doing, but there was no pain at all, and I have no prostration.' This patient had four subsequent appointments to keep with her dentist ; and as the days arrived for the second, third, and fourth, I repeated the suggestion made in the first instance, and she passed the ordeal with a like immunity from suffering and exhaustion. Perhaps the continued successes made me overconfident; for when she called to take the fifth and last treatment, she was late, I was pressed for time, and so omitted the formal suggestion, trusting that I should be able to control her sensations when there should be need of it. But in this I reckoned without my host, --awl a wretched failure was the consequence. The poor victim endured ..v.r.‘tere torture, and was kept in bed for two days by the prostration. 1.11-.i'..mistake is not to be accounted an un- mixed evil, however, since one would deny that it lent an added value to the experiment' .4p. 22.) After such an experience as that, lit is surely a most rash and misleading statement to declare, as N.-ve have shown that Mr. Barrows does declare, that he "is not cAiscions of forming any statement of the message even in thought," .1hen he makes the suggestion by which he relieves one of his 17.e• iete.fs of pain. If his statements are accurate at all.—and he is very
candid as to his failures,—he certainly is often conscious of the precise drift of his message, and is now aware that unless it is perfectly precise it may run a great risk of failure. It is this vagueness and inconsistency in many of these accounts of psychical experiments, which render the student of them so dubious as to their scientific character. When suggestion
fails because in the suggester's belief it was not specific enough, he is certainly not warranted in declaring that he is "not conscious of forming any statement of the message even in thought," for he not only was conscious of so doing, but was
conscious that, without so doing, he was liable to complete failure.
Indeed, when Mr. Barrows and a good many others of those who prosecute "psychical research" speak of the existence of a "subliminal self" as scientifically established, they seem to us to use the word " scientific " in a sense almost oppo- site to its real and most useful meaning. That we have good reason to believe that many of our most effective forms of life and activity are not under the observation of our own consciousness at all, and proceed out of us as virtue proceeds out of the character of the virtuous, or improvised eloquence out of the nature of the improvisatore, is, we think, certain, but that we can make a science of the methods in which this procedure is effected, seems to us exactly like saying that we can observe that which is admitted to be hidden from observa- tion. We can analyse the mental procedures of which we are fully conscious, but not those of which we are, by our own express admission, absolutely unconscious. Anything like a science or philosophy of the unconscious self must, so long as it remains the unconscious self, be essentially con- jectural, a guess at what has been going on in the darkness, not a study of what has gone on under close observation in the light. The very word "subliminal" excludes anything
like a real knowledge of the laws of that which is properly so termed. We may be Bare that there is much within us of the laws of which we neither have, nor can have, any accurate
knowledge. We may safely declare on scientific grounds that such a region exists; but it is by the very nature of the case a region of which we can only doubtfully guess the laws, from very uncertain inductive reasonings as to the results which appear to issue out of the darkness in which they originate. Yet many of these students of psychical research seem to speak of the "subliminal self" as if we knew as much about it as we do of the conscious self that we can examine and describe. Mr. Barrows puts the reasoning on such matters truly enough when he likens it to the
hypothesis of a luminiferons ether, of the existence of whioh we have no direct evidence, though we have plenty of indirect indications:— " Science has assumed a luminiferous ether through which 'star to star vibrates light,' and many persons seem content to believe that communications pass from brain to brain by means of the same material vehicle. But another theory is possible. What if it should appear that this subliminal agent is simply one intelligent actor filling the universe with its presence, as the ether fills space, the common inspirer of all mankind ? By what authority is it assumed that this wizard self resident in one man is related to the selves of other men merely as, in the language of theology, one personal soul is related to the rest P Are we sure that this transcendent energy is parted into numberless distinct entities, one for each human being ? "
(p. 36).
That is putting the case in the legitimate manner, as a mere provisional hypothesis of which at present we have no sort of verification, the hypothesis itself being a very dubious one on a subject of which by far the most important data are hidden from our eyes. But the chatter about the " science " of the subliminal consciousness is quite pre- mature when the subject is not only so purely hypo- thetical, but relatively at least so new, that we can hardly form anything more than hesitating guesses as to its laws. In the case of the ether, we do at least know that there must be some substance in which waves of different length are formed by impulses of different origin.
But in the case of the subliminal self, we are met with all sorts of paradoxes, of which at present there is no possible solution. That a personality, for instance, can be split up into two or three different personalities of the most in- consistent characteristics, as some of the students of psychical research assume, is, we venture to say, one of the most audacious and as yet wholly unsupported assumptions which ever took the name of " science " in vain.
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