Hysteria and Hypnosis Blog

I concur with J. F. Babinski6 in his conviction that hysteria is a state of abnormal suggestibility. It is generally acknowledged, indeed, that people suffering from this disease react vigorously to outside influences. They are easily carried away by ideas uttered in their presence, they let imagination break the boundaries of the common sense, they are led with facility to the extremes of emotionality. If we are to understand the neurosis of hysteria, however, it is necessary to go beyond the simple assertion that hysterics are excessively suggestible. For it is not enough to grant that hysteria is closely associated with suggestibility or merely to define it as a pathological state of suggestibility. After all, what is the bodily mechanism underlying those after-effects of suggestion, which are separated, as in hysterical or hypnotized persons, from conscious regulation?Suggestion, it is true, is sometimes experienced consciously, and one is more or less distinctly aware of its workings. It has to be experienced to start with-seen or heard, sometimes even understood. On the 6 "My Conception of Hysteria and Hypnotism," Neurologist.