Suggestion and Autosuggestion

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1922 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER FOUR AFFECTIVE SUGGESTIONS (Sensations, Emotions, the Peripheral Theory of Emotion) As we pass from the representative sphere to the affective sphere, sensations provide us with a natural stepping-stone. As a general rule, sensations are simultaneously affective and representative. Certain sensations of heat and cold, and to a still greater degree certain visceral sensations, are often attended with pain which may preponderate very markedly over the representative element. The idea of a sensation of pleasure or pain, the idea of. a feeling, tends to become this pleasure, this pain, or this feeling. Here, again, we have to point out that such an idea is rather a schema than an image properly so called. When we think of a pain, we feel (unless our representation be purely verbal) a sort of reduced copy of the pain, as if we had only just experienced it, and as if a faint trace of it, a vague emotional echo of it, still remained. The vividness of this echo varies in different persons. There are some who, directly they hear any physical suffering spoken of, promptly display upon their faces the customary signs of pain. The forehead becomes furrowed, the corners of the mouth are spasmodically raised. This implies that one who thinks of a pain, begins to feel it, has already a rough sketch of it in his sensorium. If, now, the attention becomes unduly concentrated upon this sketch, this schema, or if the attention returns to it too often, suggestion is unleashed. The same considerations apply to every kind of affective state. As far as visceral sensations are concerned, Herbert Parkyn, in his excellent manual of autosuggestion,1 records the following incident. It has its amusing side, so that it sticks in the memory. "A New York visitor...