Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/497

THE PROBLEMS OF HYPNOTISM:. 485 Hall's phrase) may be a very satisfactory description of the one-sided absorption in a particular direction which characterises many isolated stages of the hypnotic trance. But what tendency should the cramp of an attention which is directed to a button held in the hand have to produce, or to facilitate, a fresh cramp or series of cramps when the attention is diverted to quite fresh objects ? The cramp of a limb which has been kept too long in one position does not issue in a tendency to move it rapidly into new posi- tions : yet it is just such an anomaly as this that the hypnotic process and its sequel perpetually present. Prof. Stanley Hall's excellent remarks a propos of the idea of attention on the danger of using terms in a manner which necessitates 'radically reconstructing the notion of them familiar to common consciousness,' would surely be equally in place here a propos of cramp. Even the case which he himself describes where powerful excitement, both physical and psychical, was produced by the effort to change the current of the ' subject's ' ideas, and where it was necessary to wake and re-hypnotise him before impressions of a new genus could be given presented a feature which seems an odd result of previous rigid attention to a button, namely, ' great mobility of attention ' within the single genus of ideas suggested. But this necessity for waking and re- hypnotising is so far from being constant that in my experi- ence it is unexampled. I have again and again found the complete change to a new genus of ideas to be absolutely effortless and instantaneous found, that is, that the atten- tion, which had been as usual fixed during the process of hypnotisation, became quite abnormally mobile afterwards. Thus to give one example out of many a youth well- known to me, with whom I have made many experiments, was told by the operator, before the proceedings began, that when hypnotised he was to recognise and converse with me. He was then hypnotised by fixation in the usual way ; after which he talked to me for a minute quite naturally. Then, with a single sentence, he was taken from my room to a church-yard, and was set to work at trimming a grave, where the grass had grown too long. He put great energy and humour into his task, and he now regarded me as a stranger who wanted to interfere with and rob him of his job. Another word from the operator, and he was in a boat in a storm, running up an anti-macassar for a sail, and lash- ing his companion to the mast for safety, his comments throughout being extremely vivid and amusing. Another word, and he was engrossed in watching a conjuror spinning