FURTHER PROBLEMS OP HYPNOTISM. (II.) 403

as applied to it ; but I believe the true application to be quite remote from any theory of occult or ' mesmeric ' influence. For why need we assume the parties to be connected by any more mysterious bond than the one before denned (MiND No. 46, p. 228) in connexion with hypnotisation at a distance the permanent impression of their past relations to one another? On the view of psy- chical transference (as opposed to physical effluence) which I have founded on the distant cases, it is hard to see that any further condition is either possible or required. That this permanent impression in the hypnotic cases is peculiar, I should fully admit ; but only, I conceive, in so far as the relations themselves are peculiar. Now, their peculiarity is sufficiently patent : the ' subject's ' mental abandonment to the idea of his hypnotiser, with all the oddities of conduct to which this one-sided engrossment leads, are phenomena quite special to the hypnotic state. 1 And inasmuch as rare 1 This engrossment is implied, of course, in that abnormal responsive- ness to the hypnotiser's suggestions which I regard as the most distinctive mark of the hypnotic state. But it is shown also in other ways. The ' subject ' will often seem blind and deaf to the presence and voice of every- one else, and can only be made to see and hear some other person by the hypnotiser's pointedly bringing such person to his notice, so that the two become associated in his mind. A sensitive 'subject 3 will frequently follow the hypnotiser about the room or the house, will show uneasiness when he disappears, and will even feel a strong impulse to rejoin him after an interval of a day or of several days. The same peculiarity seems to be shown in a fact which has not, I think, been enough noticed, but as to the reality of which I would appeal with confidence to anyone who has assisted at hypnotic experiments conducted by a good many different operators at a good many different places. I mean the readiness with which what may be called hypnotic fashions are established. A group of

• subjects ' in one place, who have been a good deal under the influence of

the same operator, will develop a quite different set of habits from another group in another place. A rough instance of this is where one group prove more or less unamenable to methods of entrancement or of awakening which are specially successful with the other ; as, e.g., I have found the 'subjects' of one operator wake with certainty at a smart blow or sudden command, while those of another seemed recalcitrant to everything except the flicks of a towel or large handkerchief to which they were accustomed. But their behaviour during the trance often shows a far more subtle confor- mity to what the operator expects ; so that there come to be veritable schools of hypnotism the phenomena taking the course marked out for them by the operator's general view of the ' subject ' a view which may really have originated to a considerable extent in accidental peculiarities of individual subjects. I should be inclined, for example, to account in this way for much of the difference between the observations of Nancy and of the Salpgtriere, and, in consequence, for much of the difference in the theories associated respectively with the two localities. But I cannot pursue this subject in a footnote. What I wish to point out is simply that these facts seem to imply a far more continuous and minute attention, on