the main ingredient that goes into making these humans the way they are....,

newmodel |  Suggestion must be studied separately from hypnotism.

Hypnotism and suggestion are constantly confused; the place therefore which they occupy in life is quite undetermined.

In reality, suggestion is the fundamental fact. Hypnotism might not exist in our life, nothing would be altered by this, but suggestion is one of the chief factors both in individual and in social life. If there were no suggestion, men's lives would have an entirely different form, thousands of the phenomena of the life surrounding us would be quite impossible.

Suggestion can be conscious and unconscious, intentional and unintentional. The sphere of conscious and intentional suggestion is extremely small in comparison with the sphere of unconscious and unintentional suggestion.

Man's suggestibility, i.e. his capacity to submit to surrounding suggestions, can be different. A man can be entirely dependent on suggestions, have nothing in himself but the results of suggestions and submit to all sufficiently strong suggestions, however contradictory they may be; or he can show some resistance to suggestions, at least yield to suggestions only of certain definite kinds and repel others. But resistance to suggestion even of such a kind is a very rare phenomenon. Ordinarily a man is wholly dependent on suggestions; and his whole inner make-up (and also his outer make-up) is entirely created and conditioned by prevailing suggestions.

From earliest childhood, from the moment of first conscious reception of external impressions, a man falls under the action of suggestions, intentional and unintentional. In this case certain feelings, rules, principles and habits are suggested to him intentionally; and the ways of acting, thinking and feeling against these rules, principles and habits are suggested unintentionally.

This latter suggestion acts owing to the tendency to imitation which everyone possesses. People say one thing and do another. A child listens to one thing and imitates another.

The capacity for imitation in children and also in grown-up people greatly increases their suggestibility.

The dual character of suggestions gradually develops duality in man himself. From very early years he learns to remember that he must show the feelings and thoughts demanded of him at the given moment and never show what he really thinks and feels. This habit becomes his second nature. As time passes, he begins, also through imitation, to trust alike the two opposite sides in himself which have developed under the influence of opposite suggestions. But their contradictions do not trouble him, first because he can never see them together, and second because the capacity not to be troubled by these contradictions is suggested to him because nobody ever is troubled.

Home-education, the family, elder brothers and sisters, parents, relatives, servants, friends, school, games, reading, the theatre, newspapers, conversations, further education, work, women (or men), fashion, art, music, the cinema, sport, the jargon accepted in his circle, the accepted wit, obligatory amusements, obligatory tastes and obligatory taboos—all these and many other things are the source of new and ever new suggestions. All these suggestions are invariably dual, i.e. they create simultaneously what must be shown and what must be hidden.

It is impossible even to imagine a man free from suggestions, who really thinks, feels and acts as he himself can think, feel and act. In his beliefs, in his views, in his convictions, in his ideas, in his feelings, in his tastes, in what he likes, in what he dislikes, in every movement and in every thought, a man is bound by a thousand suggestions, to which he submits, even without noticing them, suggesting to himself that it is he himself who thinks in this way and feels in this way.

This submission to external influences so far permeates the whole life of a man, and his suggestibility is so great, that his ordinary, normal state can be called semi-hypnotic.

And we know very well that at certain moments and in certain situations a man's suggestibility can increase still more and he can reach complete loss of any independent decision or choice whatever. This is particularly clearly seen in the psychology of a crowd, in mass movements of various kinds, in religious, revolutionary, patriotic or panic moods, when the seeming independence of the individual man completely disappears.

All this taken together constitutes one side of the " life of suggestion " in a man. The other side lies in himself and consists, first, in the submission of his so-called " conscious ", i.e. intellectual-emotional functions to influences and suggestions coming from the so-called " unconscious " (i.e. unperceived by the mind) voices of the body, the countless obscure consciousnesses of the inner organs and inner lives; and second, in the submission of all these inner lives to the completely unconscious and unintentional suggestions of the reason and the emotions.

The first, i.e. the submission of the intellectual-emotional functions to the instinctive, has been more elaborated in psychological literature, though the greater part of what is written on these subjects must be taken very cautiously. The second, i.e. the submission of the inner functions to the unconscious influences of the nerve/brain apparatus, has been very little studied. Meanwhile, this last side offers enormous interest from the point of view of the understanding of suggestion and suggestibility in general.