blush really dilates the
blood-vessels of his cheek is much less open to our causal
understanding; still less that in very exceptional cases perhaps a part
of the skin becomes inflamed, if we make believe that we touch it with a
glowing iron. And yet here too we see that we move in the same direction
and that we have to explain these exceptional and bewildering results by
comparing them with the simpler and simpler forms, that the process of
attention contains all the germs for the whole development.

In claiming that hypnotism depends upon the over-attention to the
hypnotizing person, we admit that the increased suggestibility belongs
entirely to suggestions which come from without. Only that which at
least takes its starting point from the words or the movements of the
hypnotizer finds over-sensitive suggestibility. Ideas which arise merely
from the associations of the subject himself have no especially
favorable chance for acceptance. But surely we also know states in which
the suggestibility for certain of one's own ideas is abnormally
increased. Great individual differences exist in that respect in normal
life. There are normal hypochondriacs who believe that they feel the
symptoms of widely different diseases under the influence of their own
ideas, and others who are torturing themselves with fears on account of
unjustified beliefs. But the abnormal increase of suggestibility
parallel to that of hypnotism for suggestions from without exists for
suggestions from within, mainly in nervous diseases, especially in
neurasthenic, hysteric, and psychasthenic states. Within certain limits,
we might almost say that this increase of suggestibility for
autosuggestion is the fundamental characteristic of these diseases, just
as increase of suggestibility for heterosuggestions characterizes
hypnotism.

Especially in earlier times, the theory was often proposed that hypnosis
is an artificial hysteria. Such a view is untenable to-day; but that
hysteria too shows abundant effects of increased suggestibility is
correctly indicated by such a theory. The hysteric patient may by any
chance pick up the idea that her right arm is paralyzed or is
anaesthetic and the idea at once transforms itself into a belief and the
belief clings to her like an obsession and produces the effect that she
is unable to move the arm or that she does not feel a pinprick on the
skin. These autosuggestions may take a firmer hold of the mind than any
sugges