Adventurings in the PsychicalBruce, H. Addington (Henry Addington)
Science
Adventurings in the Psychical
Bruce, H. Addington (Henry Addington)
Parapsychology
To bring about a cure, to free her from the obsessing dread of cholera,
it was necessary to remove the gruesome subconscious memory image, and
Doctor Janet essayed to do this through suggestions given to her when
she was again hypnotized.
"You will no longer think of this," he kept assuring her. "You will
forget it, absolutely, permanently."
Day after day, for weeks, he hypnotized her, and reiterated similar
commands. But she continued to be afflicted with her irrational fear,
and it finally became certain that her subconscious recollection of the
phobia-causing scene of twenty-five years before was too deeply rooted
to be destroyed by direct attack. Instead, however, of abandoning
the task as hopeless, Doctor Janet, with a shrewdness born of long
experience, made a clever change in tactics.
"You insist," he said to the hypnotized Justine, "that you cannot help
seeing in your mind's eye the corpse of the man who died. Very well,
I have no objection to that. But hereafter you must see it decently
clothed. So when it next appears to you, you will see it wearing a
bright blue-and-green uniform, the uniform of a foreign military
officer."
Happily, this suggestion "took," and Doctor Janet followed up his
advantage by suggesting that the subconscious memory image which she
regarded as that of a corpse was, in reality, the image of a living man.
This suggestion likewise being successful, he set about getting rid of
the idea "cholera," and its dire implications. Hypnotizing the patient
as usual, he demanded:
"What is this 'cholera' that troubles you so much? Do you not understand
that it is only the name of the fine gentleman in blue and green, whom
you see marching up and down? He is a Chinese general, and his name is
Cho Le Ra. Bear that well in mind."
Quite evidently there was nothing to inspire dread in the image of a
picturesque Chinese officer, General Cho Le Ra. Little by little,
as this artificial conception obtained firmer lodgment in Justine's
subconsciousness, the baneful idea which it was intended to supplant
faded away, and with its fading the abnormal fear diminished, until
at length it entirely disappeared, greatly to her joy and the warm
gratitude of her devoted husband.[39]
[39] This case and a number of other instances of forgotten
terrors giving rise to disease-symptoms are discussed in
detail in Doctor Janet's "Névroses et Idées Fixes."
Other psychopathologists, following Doctor Janet's lead, have similarly
used this method of substituting one subconscious idea for another.
Doctor John E. Donley, a well-known neurologist of Providence, Rhode
Island, and one of the few psychopathologists whom the United States has
yet produced, was once consulted by a young man of thirty-two, who said
to him:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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