James Braid, the British doctor who popularized hypnotism, was the first to use the term "suggestion" to describe experiments in which the hypnotist, using a gesture or word, triggers the subject's automatic obedience. Around 1860 Ambroise Liebeault decided to make use of suggestion for therapeutic purposes: orders, formulated in an authoritarian or well-meaning manner, would help trigger hypnosis and the therapeutic process. Hippolyte Bernheim extended this by claiming that suggestion had explanatory powers. In 1891 he defined suggestion as "the act through which an idea is introduced into the brain and accepted by it." According to Bernheim, an idea suggested verbally by the operator triggered a representation-adherence on the part of a subject endowed with "crédivité." Unless inhibited, this idea tended to be translated into actions ("ideo-dynamism").
Bernheim noted that some subjects were more susceptible than others and used the term "suggestibility" to describe the ability to respond to suggestion. Contrary to Jean Martin Charcot, he did not see this as pathological, but as a very general psychological phenomenon, present to a varying degree in everyone. Thus, suggestion helps to explain hypnosis as well as the mechanism or process of education, the adherence to a belief, and so on.
Gabriel de Tarde in Les Lois de l'imitation (1890), and Gustav Le Bon, in La Psychologie des foules (1895), used suggestion to describe the connection between two or more people that serves as the basis for a society or a crowd. For Bernheim, however, hypnosis only facilitated therapeutic suggestibility, and suggestive psychotherapies could be practiced in a waking state. This identification of hypnosis with suggestion resulted in criticism from Liebeault, and especially from Charcot and his followers.
Originating in the School of Nancy, for which Bernheim was the spokesman, all of Europe took an interest in experiments, therapies, and models of suggestion. Experiments were conducted on "suggested" crimes, which triggered theoretical, ethical, and juridical polemics. Although experiments with suggestion were met with trepidation, its therapeutic use generated tremendous hope. It was believed it would be able to eliminate certain symptoms, like pain, associated with organic illnesses and heal "nervous disorders" such as hysteria, as well as sexual inversion and alcoholism.
Suggestion, as a therapy and as a concept, raised questions and criticisms from many of its practitioners. Bernheim remarked that some subjects can present resistance to "direct suggestion." In such cases it is better not to give a direct order, but rather to tell the patient nothing can be done, and the problem will heal itself. In this context Bernheim also spoke of "indirect suggestion," an expression used in a similar sense by Charcot and his school. The Belgian Joseph Delboeuf emphasized self-suggestion, the ability to resist, and the will of the patient. The Dutch practitioner Frederik Van Eeden, who was, like Delboeuf, part of the Nancy School, pointed out that suggestive psychotherapy must involve collaboration between the doctor and his patient, respecting the patient's autonomy to as great an extent as possible. Pierre Janet criticized the overly broad extension given to the concept of suggestion and proposed, in 1889, in L'Automatisme psychologique, a more limited definition: "The influence of one person on another, who carries it out without the intermediary of voluntary consent." At the same time he reactivated the older notion, associated with animal magnetism, of "rapport." Auguste Forel, a Swiss practitioner, noted the ambiguity of the word suggestion, which designates both a therapeutic procedure associated with an order from the practitioner and a psychic process that leads the subject to respond to someone else's influence.
The articles Freud wrote in 1895 on hypnosis and suggestion situate him within the critical movement outlined above. He subsequently abandoned suggestion both as a therapeutic practice and as a psychological explanation. Nonetheless, he claimed in the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1916-17a) that "in our technique we have abandoned hypnosis only to rediscover suggestion in the shape of transference" (p. 446). Although we can do away with suggestion, the problems associated with the process remain and have been shifted toward the transference. In 1921 Freud returned to the question of hypnosis and suggestion, and of suggestion as a model of the social bond.
Looking at contemporary techniques of hypnosis, we find that the therapies inspired by Milton Erickson have reactivated the identification of hypnosis with suggestion. The procedures used (the proposal of metaphors, paradoxical orders, or prohibitions) seem less authoritarian than those employed at the end of the nineteenth century, but may still be compared to the "indirect suggestion" used in the past.
Bibliography
Carroy, Jacqueline. (1991). Hypnose, suggestion et psychologie: l'invention de sujets. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Chertok, Léon, and Stengers, Isabelle. (1992). A critique of psychoanalytic reason. Hypnosis as a scientific problem from Lavoisier to Lacan (Martha Noel Evans, Trans.) Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. (Original work published 1989)
Ellenberger, Henri. F. (1970). The discovery of the unconscious: The history and evolution of dynamic psychiatry. New York: Basic Books.
Freud, Sigmund. (1921c). Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. SE, 18: 65-143.
Gauld, Alan. (1992). A history of hypnotism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
—JACQUELINE CARROY