A first book in psychology / by Mary Whiton Calkins.

  • Mary Whiton Calkins
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A first book in psychology / by Mary Whiton Calkins. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    hypnotizer affects, positively or negatively, the voluntary muscles of his subject, preventing him, by a command, from opening his eyes or inducing him to hold his arm outward and rigid for minutes at a time. More complicated acts may also be brought about: for instance, the subject may lift books from a table or may whirl several times round. In deeper hypnosis the involuntary muscle contractions, and thus the pulse and the secretions, may be affected. Structural bodily changes sometimes occur. There are, for example, well authenticated though infrequent cases, in which blisters have been produced by a hypnotizer who assured his subject that a burning object would be applied to his skin. We may quote, in illustration, from Krafft Ebing’s account of his well-known patient, lima S-: “ The experimenter draws with the percussion hammer a cross on the skin over the biceps of the left arm, and suggests to the patient that on the following day at twelve o’clock, in the same place, a red cross shall appear. . . . On the next day at eleven o’clock . . . the patient wonders that she has an itching, excoriated spot on her right upper arm. . . . The examination shows that a red cross is to be seen on the right arm exactly at the place corresponding with that marked on the left side yesterday.” Later a ‘ sharply defined scab’ is formed.* Hypnosis is marked, finally, by perceptual illusions and hallu¬ cinations. These may be positive or negative. A positive illusion may, for example, be induced if the hypnotizer, pointing to cracks in the wall, tells the subject that these are interlacing tree tops, thus suggesting the vision of a summer landscape. Or the hypnotizer may hand to his subject a cup of water, or even of ink, telling him that it is coffee. The subject drinks it eagerly, com¬ plains, perhaps, that it is warm, and shows by the expression of his face that he is quite unconscious of its real nature. Indeed, the alleged coffee may produce actual bodily effects, a flushed face, for example. These, of course, are instances of illusion brought about by means of an external object. Genuine hallu- * “An Experimental Study in the Domain of Hypnotism,” by R. von Krafft Ebing, translated by C. G. Chaddock (Putnam, 1889), pp. 57-60. Cf. pp. 78, 96.
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