Psychological Automatism

a great number of psychological facts and even an entire psychological existence that becomes subconscious, just like the fixed ideas themselves. In a word, somnambulisms In 19th-century psychology, "somnambulism" referred not just to sleepwalking, but to various trance-like or dissociated states. are very varied, and the amnesia that characterizes them does not seem to us to always be so profound, nor can it be explained by the same reasons.

In our study on suggestion, we sought to describe the phenomenon and its innumerable varieties, then we tried to show how psychological phenomena combined and modified themselves to produce them. Today, we would like to insist on an essential character which seems to us to be insufficiently indicated. In our opinion, the word suggestion should not be applied to just any psychological phenomena, to thoughts, or to associations of ideas that exist in all men in a normal way. To avoid confusion of language, it must be reserved to designate a very real and very important, but abnormal fact, which only clearly occurs in morbid states. In a more recent work, we endeavored to highlight the pathological character of true suggestion.

Suggestion properly so-called seems to depend on an alteration of the mind that can be observed clinically. Moreau (of Tours) Jacques-Joseph Moreau (1804–1884), a French psychiatrist who studied the effects of drugs and mental alienation. had already expressed the necessity of this primordial state of psychic weakness original: "faiblesse psychique"—at least momentary—to explain the invasion of madness. We have tried in various works to analyze this mental weakness, to show what this reduction of the phenomena of will and attention consists of at the moment when suggestion develops; we had in particular compared this weakness to a state of exaggerated distraction. No doubt, as several authors observe, this is not an ordinary distraction; the latter only occurs when the mind is strongly attentive to some object. But we had precisely tried to show that this state has all the characters of distraction except one: it is not produced or maintained by an attention strongly directed in another direction; it is a perpetual distraction without motive, without excuse, and it is precisely because of this that it is pathological.

In a state of this kind, the mind can only synthesize a small number of phenomena at a time; it is forced to leave aside sensations, memories, and motor images that it is incapable of perceiving. We have attempted to express the totality of these phenomena by a term that has had some success: the narrowing of the field of consciousness original: "rétrécissement du champ de la conscience". We are happy to see that this character, in our opinion important, has since been noted by many authors in sick and suggestible individuals. Among the fairly numerous studies on this narrowing of consciousness, we will point out the work of Mr. Pick 1. This author studies above all the influence of this narrowing on the movements of hysterics, and he verifies what we had put forward: these patients can voluntarily perform only very few simultaneous movements, just as they can consciously perceive only a very—

1 A. Pick. On the so-called "muscular consciousness" (Duchenne) original: "Ueber die sogenannte «conscience musculaire»" Journal of Psychology and Physiology of the Sense Organs, vol. IV, 1892.