Excerpt from Suggestion and Autosuggestion: A Psychological and Pedagogical Study Based Upon the Investigations Made by the New Nancy SchoolYet the idea that unconscious autosuggestion is respon sible for many of our troubles, moral and physical, was slow to mature. Even to-day, people fail to recognise that they are largely wrong when they speak of the ills that esh is heir to, and that they should rather in many cases speak of the ills that fancy breeds. Still more slowly has come the recognition that in reective auto suggestion, scientifically applied, we have in very truth the faith that moves mountains. Healers, official and unofficial, have at all times made use of the power of suggestion, but the use has been for the most part uncon scious. James Goodhart, in his Harveian lectures on Common Neuroses (1894, p. Tells us that there are many conditions in which the cure must come/inainly from within, our function in chief being to call out this dormant power. But for Goodhart the rational treatment of disease was still to be found in skilled advice as to regimen and the like; the dormant power of reective autosuggestion was not yet revealed to his discerning gaze. In the most outstanding British work on psychotherapeutics, J.

Milne Bramwell's Hypnotism (third edition, the word autosuggestion is not to be found in the index. Yet Bramwell inclines to accept the theory that the phenomena of hypnotism are chiey explicable by the conception of the subliminal conscious ness, and he records as the main feature of this theory that the essential characteristic of the hypnotic state is the subject's power over his own organism. Here we obviously verge upon Coue's teaching. But the affiliations of that teaching can be best understood in the light of a brief analysis of the development of the theory of hypnotism subsequent to the days of Bertrand and Braid.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work.

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