The psychology of reasoning : based on experimental researches in hypnotism / Translated from the 2d French ed. by Adam Gowans Whyte.

  • Alfred Binet
Date:
1907
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The psychology of reasoning : based on experimental researches in hypnotism / Translated from the 2d French ed. by Adam Gowans Whyte. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    Let us take the case of agraphia. An educated man, knowing how to write, loses all at once, suddenly, as a result of cerebral accidents, the faculty of writ- ing; his arm and his hand are in no way paralyzed, and yet he is unable to write. Upon what does this powerlessness depend? He himself says: upon his no longer knowing. He has forgotten how he must proceed in order to trace the letters, he has lost the memory of the movements to be executed, he no longer possesses the motor images which when formerly he set himself to write directed his hand. It is possible, thanks to hynotism, to vary the examples of these systematized paralyses, which affect only a particular system of movements, leav- ing the others intact and the arm completely free. It is in this way that we may make a hypnotized subject lose, by suggestion, the faculty of accomp- lishing a definite act, such as smoking, sewing, embroidering, laughing, etc. We have often in- sisted on the advantage which hypnotism offers in this respect, in the study of the majority of motor and sensitive troubles.* Other patients, struck by verbal blindness, make accurate use of these motor images in order to make up for what they lack in another way. We collect all these examples because the subject is not popular- ly known ; it will be useful if we combine several facts scattered here and there, and endeavour to make a synthesis of them. An individual afflicted by ver- bal blindness is no longer able to succeed in reading the characters placed before his eyes, although his *Binet,and Fere, Les paralysies fay suggestion (Revue scietitifique,]u.\y, 1884).