Suggestion (suggestion) is defined as the transmission and induction of thoughts, moods, feelings, autonomic and motor reactions, behavior from one person to another. The less the one who is being inspired thinks about what is being suggested to him, the more successfully the suggestion passes.
There are two parties involved in the suggestion process. The inspiring one usually has such mental and physical qualities with the help of which he can influence the state of the psyche of another person. Suggestion occurs through words, as well as facial expressions and gestures.
The setting is of particular importance. If we are talking about therapeutic suggestion, then the fame of the psychotherapist plays an important role in this process. Knowledge of him as a high-class specialist in a certain way prepares the patient for the session.
Suggestibility is also of great importance for the process of suggestion, that is, susceptibility to suggestion from the side of the one who will serve as its object. This is a kind of readiness for suggestion. Usually, increased suggestibility is observed in people with a weak type of nervous system and increased sensitivity. Alcoholics and drug addicts have a particularly weak nervous system.
Along with suggestion, self-suggestion often acts, when a person himself believes in the miraculous power of a remedy.
It is said that one musician who was fired from a brass band decided to take revenge on his comrades and chose this method for this. He waited until the orchestra was supposed to play a solemn march at some kind of festival, went up to the musicians and began to eat … lemon. The sight of the lemon and the way the man eats the lemon caused the orchestra members to salivate so much that they couldn't play!
This example may seem curious. It is possible that the story somewhat exaggerates the action of the spectacle. But it is needed in order to say: not only the taste and appearance of lemon can cause salivation, but also the mention of it. What's the matter here?
Let's get acquainted with the so-called conditioned and unconditioned reflexes. You burn your finger with a match and pull your hand away immediately, without hesitation. Nerve fibers transmitted painful irritation of the skin to a group of cells of the central nervous system responsible for the motor functions of the muscles of the hands. The excitement that arose in them was immediately transmitted along other nerve fibers of the muscles. They shrank sharply - the hand twitched, the fire no longer burns the finger.
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This is an unconditioned reflex. We have a lot of them. They are congenital.
And conditioned reflexes need to be created, developed. Research in this area is associated with the name of our famous physiologist I. P. Pavlov. He showed that if some unconditioned reflex is repeatedly accompanied by a certain stimulus, then after a while the stimulus will begin to cause this reflex.
Here's an example. You will be injected with a needle and at the same time ringing a bell. After a certain number of repetitions, the sound of the bell becomes a signal to withdraw the hand. The needle did not prick, and the hand twitched involuntarily. The conditioned reflex has been created.
Conditioned reflexes play an important role in the life of animals and humans. The child, having been burned by the fire, further withdraws his hand even before the fire again scorches his skin. The forest animal, having become closely acquainted with some danger, behaves more cautiously another time. I. P. Pavlov called this perception of the surrounding reality by the brain of humans and animals the first signal system.
In addition, humans have a second signaling system. In this case, words-images and concepts are a conditioned stimulus. If, say, a person has experienced the strongest fear associated with a fire, then it is enough to shout “Fire” in front of him to cause the same fear.
Both signaling systems in our body are closely interconnected. They represent the work of our central nervous system. And the latter regulates all the activities of the body. It is known that various emotional experiences (fear, grief, joy, etc.) can cause changes in the work of the heart (faster and slower heart rate, narrowing or widening of blood vessels, redness or pale skin), can lead to graying of hair, etc. This means that in one way or another we can influence the work of many internal organs. And including can be influenced by the word. It is able to noticeably affect the psyche, which means the work of the whole organism.
And so it turns out: you hear the word "lemon", and it immediately makes you salivate.
In past centuries, the power of the word scared superstitious people. Those who could do this were called sorcerers, capable of overtaking damage to a person. Half a century ago, in a village near Moscow, cows began to die. The peasants decided that this was the work of a sorcerer (one old man believed that). We decided to deal with him.
But when they gathered near his hut, the old man left the house and shouted imperiously: “I can do anything with you! You’ll have diarrhea now! - and he pointed with his hand at one peasant. - And you will start to stutter! - he pointed to another peasant. And indeed: one immediately felt an upset stomach, and the other began to stutter.
The thing is that the peasants were convinced of the old man's omnipotence, believed that he was a sorcerer and was able to "send" illness. It was this faith that did its job. The old man's words, his suggestion had such a strong effect on the psyche of people, on their consciousness that they really began to have various disorders of the body.
An even more extraordinary story is told about a Napoleonic soldier who became famous for instantly healing from diseases. When a man with a paralyzed leg came to him, he looked at him menacingly, and then loudly commanded: "Get up!" For some, this worked miraculously: the patient dropped his crutches and began to walk!
The soldier became so famous for his amazing healings that hundreds of people suffering from serious illnesses turned to him. He did not heal everyone, but some left him recovered. These were people with various nervous diseases: paralysis of the arms and legs, etc.
And self-hypnosis? The famous actor I. N. Pevtsov stuttered, but on stage overcame this lack of speech. How? The actor suggested to himself that it was not himself who was acting and speaking on the stage, but another person - a character in the play who did not stutter. And it always worked.
The Parisian physician Mathieu did such an interesting experiment. He announced to his patients that he would soon receive a new drug from Germany that would quickly and reliably cure tuberculosis. At that time, there was no medicine for this disease.
These words had a powerful effect on the sick. No one, of course, thought that this was just the doctor's invention. The doctor's suggestion turned out to be so effective that when he announced that he had received the medicine and began to treat it, many began to feel much better, and some even recovered.
And how did he treat the sick? Simple water!
Suggestion and self-hypnosis can cure a person of a bad habit, make him not be afraid of what scares, etc.
Probably, you can also remember a case from your life when you convinced yourself of something and it helped. Let's say this example. The person is afraid of the dark and at the same time knows that it is stupid. He goes into a dark room and says to himself: “There is nothing to be afraid of! There is nobody there! Self-hypnosis works, and the unaccountable fear disappears.
Under the influence of self-hypnosis, a person may lose his legs and arms or suddenly become deaf and blind. Such diseases are called psychogenic. They occur easily in people with hysteria.
And here's what is important: in a person, for example, who has lost his sight, not the optic nerves are damaged, but only the activity of that part of the brain that is in charge of visual perception is disturbed. In it, under the influence of auto-suggestion, a persistent focus of painful inhibition develops, that is, nerve cells stop working for a long time. They stop receiving incoming signals and responding to them.
On such psychogenic diseases, suggestion and self-hypnosis have a huge impact. In hysteria, seizures, convulsions, vomiting, dumbness, deafness, paralysis of the limbs may occur. All of these disorders are often associated with self-hypnosis.
There are many reliable stories about fakirs, religious fanatics, medieval witches and sorcerers, testifying that in a state of ecstasy they lost sensitivity to pain and endured the most incredible self-torture and torture with amazing endurance.
One can recall even more incredible, at first glance, stories. In the spring of 1956, several thousand people gathered in front of a peasant woman's house in the German town of Konnersreith. Some have traveled tens, hundreds of kilometers. Everyone expected only one thing: to see Teresa Neumann.
Teresa Neumann is a stigmatic woman. This means that stigma wounds appear on her body, similar in disposition and character to the wounds of the crucified Christ.
Teresa Neumann
This strange story began in 1926, when Teresa was 28 years old. On her left side, directly opposite her heart, she suddenly had a wound that was oozing profusely. Wounds appeared around the head, on the hands and feet. Dr. Otto Seidl was summoned from the nearest town. The doctor examined Teresa in detail. His report says that the wound against the heart is about 4 centimeters long. Having smeared the bleeding places with ointment, the puzzled doctor left.
Teresa felt excruciating pain until April 17, when the pain began to subside and soon disappeared. The wounds healed without leaving scars. However, they could hardly be called healed: they were covered with a transparent film through which the muscle tissue was visible. Dr. Seidl was called again and he wrote: “This is the most unusual case. The wounds do not fester, they do not become inflamed. There is not the slightest possibility of forgery that some have been talking about."
After that, Teresa Neumann was repeatedly examined by doctors. It was found that she had open wounds on her hands, feet, forehead, and sides. Each year, shortly before Easter, these wounds begin to bleed, and the bleeding continues throughout the week following Easter, sometimes several days longer. The examination proves that this is indeed blood and that it begins to flow spontaneously.
For a person who first heard this, all this seems like some kind of clever deception. Meanwhile, there is no fiction in the story. The history of stigmatists has more than 300 such cases. So, around the same years, in the western regions of Ukraine, the stigmatic laborer from the village of Mlyny, Lviv region, Nastya Voloshan, was known. She suffered from severe hysteria and, like Teresa Neumann, had "the wounds of Jesus Christ" on her arms and legs.
Already in 1914, 49 cases of stigmatization were described: 41 in women and 8 in men. In most cases, stigma arose on religious grounds. But such a case is also known: the sister was present at the cruel whipping of her beloved brother - and her back was covered with the same bleeding scars as his.
Despite all the seeming improbability of such phenomena, they have their own explanation. We have before us the same result of self-hypnosis. Of course, it is possible only in persons with an extremely excitable, severely upset, painful psyche. On such people, not only real, but also imaginary suffering affects so strongly that it is reflected in the work of internal organs.
In morbidly suspicious people, thoughts about the disease cause the disease itself, which in appearance strongly resembles one or another disease. There are known cases when bleeding from the throat began, as in tuberculosis, ulcers appeared on the body, resembling various skin diseases, etc.
Ulcers in stigmata have the same mechanism. All such patients are fanatical believers. In the last week before Easter, in churches they read about how Christ was crucified, and this can have such a strong effect on a sick person that his psyche cannot stand: there is an obsessive thought about the torments that Christ experienced when he was nailed to the cross. Hallucinations begin. Before the eyes of this man, as if alive, there is a picture of the crucifixion. The entire nervous system is shaken. And here is the result: in those places where Christ had wounds, open, bleeding wounds appear in those who are tormented by mental illness.
Faith and words can also play a decisive role in treating these patients. Faith in the person who heals, faith in what he says.
V. M. Bekhterev wrote about this:
“The secret of healing suggestion was known to many people from the common people, among whom it was passed from mouth to mouth for centuries under the guise of witchcraft, witchcraft, conspiracies, etc. Self-hypnosis explains, for example, the action of many so-called sympathetic means, which often this or that healing action.
Ferraus cured fever with a piece of paper on which were inscribed two words: "Against the fever." The patient had to tear off one letter every day. There are known cases of the healing effect of "bread pills", "Neva water", "laying on of hands", etc."
Even today we often hear: the old woman "spoke" the wart, and it disappeared. It happens, and there is nothing wonderful about it. The doctor here is suggestion and self-hypnosis. Or, more precisely, the belief that a healer can heal a person. When she comes to the patient, he has already heard about her, knows that she has healed someone, and longs for a cure.
And it doesn't matter at all whether the healer ties the wart with a thread or hair, it doesn't matter what she whispers over this wart. Everything is decided by the belief that the wart will disappear after such a "conspiracy".
A person destroys his wart by self-hypnosis! The suggestion of the healer works here, when she confidently says: the wart will come down.
Psychiatrists have repeatedly repeated this method of treatment. One doctor, for example, moistened a wart with plain water, and told a person that this was a new strong-acting medicine, from which the wart should disappear. And it worked for many. People believed in the medicine, that it would help them, and the warts disappeared.
This explains the “miraculous” healings known in history at various “holy places”. This was the case, in particular, in France at the grave of the Catholic deacon François de Paris, who died in 1728.
Engraving depicting the deceased François de Paris
The first to come to the grave was the silk winder Madeleine Beny, who lost her hand. She was led here by the conviction that the body of a deacon who had lived a "righteous" life had received the ability to heal diseases.
Leaning against the grave, she felt some relief, and when she returned home, she was already so free in her hand that she immediately began to work with both hands. After that, those suffering from various ailments began to flock to the grave, and some of them were really healed.
For over a hundred years, a small town in the south of France, Lourdes has been famous among Catholics for "miraculous" healings. A water source allegedly possesses miraculous power here. Having bathed in it, you can be healed. In fact, a well-thought-out system of influencing the consciousness of pilgrims is the basis of the Lourdes "miracles".
Who is going to Lourdes? As a rule, these are people who really hope for a miraculous healing. After all, Lourdes "miracles" are spoken of from cathedral pulpits, they write in newspapers, eyewitnesses tell about them.
And now the patients are getting ready to go. From that time on, all attention, all conversations are about miraculous healings. And here the “holy fathers” take on the pilgrim. Each carriage on trains going to Lourdes is accompanied by monks, special "sisters" and "brothers" of mercy. They get to know each patient, his relatives, tell them all kinds of stories about the wonders of Lourdes, distribute special books, photographs of those who recovered after the pilgrimage.
When the pilgrims arrive in Lourdes, they are greeted by new clergymen and taken to the “holy grotto”. They are silent, their every movement seems significant.
During the prayer at the grotto, all the patients repeat the same words in chorus: “Lord Jesus! Heal our sick! Omnipotent Virgo, save us! These words sound with more faith and hope, nervous excitement grows, and now loud sighs and hysterical cries are heard in the crowd of worshipers.
It is not difficult to see how important suggestion and autosuggestion are here. An environment is created that promotes the onset of a hypnotic state. In Lourdes, Émile Zola superbly described one such healing in such a famous place.
“… The patient's eyes, still devoid of any expression, widened, and his pale face was distorted, as if from unbearable pain. She said nothing and seemed to be desperate. But at that moment, when the holy gifts were brought and she saw the monstrance flashing in the sun, she seemed to be blinded by lightning.
The eyes flashed, life appeared in them, and they lit up like stars. The face brightened up, covered with a blush, lit up with a joyful, healthy smile. Pierre saw her immediately get up, straighten herself in her cart …
Unrestrained delight took possession of thousands of excited pilgrims who pressed each other to see healed, who filled the air with shouts, words of gratitude and praise. There was a storm of applause, and their thunder rolled through the entire valley.
Father Furkin shook his hands, Father Massias shouted something from the pulpit; finally heard him:
- God has visited us, dear brothers and sisters …"
Propagating the Lourdes "miracles", the churchmen claimed that there are several miraculous healings. For a hundred years, thousands of names of allegedly healed people were recorded in a special book. However, a review of this book (checked by a special commission consisting of doctors) showed that in a hundred years only 14 healings took place in Lourdes. They are all explained by science.
We must remember that … fear can lead to miraculous healing. There is a known case when a woman who jumped out of a window fell at the feet of an old man with a paralyzed half of her body and loss of speech. It affected him so hard that he started talking again!
Healers also resort to fear treatment. Let's say they suddenly throw a cat on a sick cat. The medicine of the Napoleonic soldier mentioned above worked in the same way. When he loudly and imperiously commanded "Stand up!" - this word had such a strong effect on others (remember his fame as a doctor) that the hysterical paralysis of the legs suddenly disappeared. The focus of inhibition that struck the motor centers of the nervous system was removed, and the muscles began to work.
If you remember the history of nations, then it is easy to see that such methods of treatment were already known in the ancient world. Doctor of Medical Sciences, Professor V. E. Rozhnov writes:
“The ancient Greeks appealed with a prayer for the bestowal of health and strength to the god-healer Asclepius. The most famous of the temples dedicated to him was located eight kilometers from the city of Epidaurus. The temple had a special sleeping room for pilgrims who flocked from all over the country. It was called "abaton". It was possible to enter here only after going through preliminary complex rituals of "cleansing" the soul and body.
The priests of the temple talked for a long time with everyone, asking what brought him here, strengthening the hope for recovery, faith in the power and kindness of God - the giver of health. The location and the entire furnishings of the temple contributed a lot to this. It was located in a dense green grove, among which dozens of crystal clear streams gurgled. The wind carried the fresh scent of the sea here.
The fabulous beauty of nature merged into an indestructible harmony with the majestic and austere beauty of the snow-white building of the temple itself. In its center stood a huge marble statue of Asclepius. The outer walls of the temple were made of huge stone slabs, carved with inscriptions telling about the most outstanding healings that took place here.
These slabs were found by archaeologists during excavations, and from the preserved inscriptions it is possible to establish what diseases and why were cured here. For example, one of them: “The girl is dumb. Running around the temple, she saw a snake crawling up a tree in a grove; in horror she began to call her father and mother and left here healthy."
Another: “Nikanor is paralyzed. While he was sitting and resting, one boy stole a crutch from him and ran away. He jumped up and ran after him."
Asclepius
Psychiatrists have long known how healing is sometimes the effect of sudden emotional stimuli (in the first case - sudden fright, in the second - anger), and they successfully use them to treat various manifestations of hysteria, including to eliminate some paralysis, blindness, deafness, etc. dumbness. So there is, of course, nothing supernatural about these facts of healing the dumb and paralytic.
To all that has been said, we add that, of course, such healings are not at all frequent, and, moreover, they do not always lead to a complete restoration of the patient's health.
Leningrad scientist L. L. Vasiliev told about an incident that happened before his eyes. A young man, coming out of a hotly heated village bath, noticed an insect that had never before encountered a disgusting species - an earwig. With a feeling of disgust, he took the insect with the fingers of his right hand in order to get a closer look.
The earwig bent and tried to pinch the finger that held it with its "forceps"; but she did not succeed, since the man, crying out in surprise, with a sharp movement shook the insect to the ground. And after a while, distinctly visible purple spots appeared on the skin areas of the fingers with which the insect was taken - one on the index finger and two on the thumb. There was no burning sensation or pain in the reddened areas of the skin. The stains were not washed off.
What happened?
Here, strong fright and self-hypnosis played a role that the earwig bit her finger, although in reality this was not. Fright and self-hypnosis caused local expansion of cutaneous blood vessels.
So it turns out that in 90 cases out of 100 we are sick with diseases that we ourselves have suggested. This is the conclusion reached by British doctors.
British doctors offer several ways to deal with dangerous self-hypnosis, which we do not even suspect. The simplest thing, in their opinion, is to repeat to yourself that you are healthy. And one has only to think about the disease, as it is immediately revealed.
English doctors consider naps to be another effective means of fighting for their health. At the same time, before falling asleep, it is strongly recommended to suggest to yourself that you are lying on the beach on the warm sand or fishing. These "pictures" should promote sound sleep and release the brain from stress.
And Vernon Coleman, who deals with the issues of suggestions in the fight against "unthinkable" diseases, recommends during the period of illness to try to visually imagine the infection in the form of an intrusive guest, but at the same time extremely skinny and frail, homeless and frightened. This will help you chase away the bum easily.
By the way, in this way, until the end of the 17th century, surgeons coped with diseases, both physical and spiritual. A simple psychological trick was often used to cure the "obsession". The doctor made a slight incision on the patient's abdomen and made a sign to the assistant, who released a live bat from the bag, after which everyone watched with relief as the "demon" flew away.
