One has heard a great deal of the training of the hypnotized. That one increases the suggestibility of a person by repeated hypnotizing is an assured fact. One can, above all, cause him to do everything which one has made him do in the first hypnosis, without verbal order, again, in an apparently instinctive way. The somnambulist concentrates (as Bernheim very truly puts it) in his narrowed brain activity his whole attention to guess the wishes of the hypnotist. However, one has largely overrated the part played by training, especially in Germany, and has overlooked the high degree of the individual suggestibility of the majority of normal people. Where does the training come in, for example, in this case? I hypnotized a perfectly normal, capable nurse for the first time. I looked at her for a few seconds, suggesting sleep, then required her to look at two fingers of my left hand (Bernheim's method); after thirty seconds her lids closed. I suggested amnesia to her, then catalepsy of the arms, caused the arms to be twisted and suggested anaesthesia. All this succeeded at once. I pricked her deeply with a needle. She did not feel anything. I gave her water from the fountain, saying that it was a bitter mixture, and it tasted bitter to her. I suggested to her that her appetite was good (with satisfactory result), and told her that when she awoke she would of her own accord place the paper-basket, standing under the table, on a certain person's lap, and, lastly, that she would come to me at six o'clock in the evening, without receiving any further message. I awakened her by making her count up to four. She did not know anything of what had taken place, and looked constantly at the paper-basket, which she placed on the lap of the person, blushing and feeling awkward the while. She was very angry about this behavior, which she felt herself driven to carry out, although she did not know why. At six o'clock she was alone in the ward, and could not leave on this account; but, having a strong impulse that she should come to me, got very excited and anxious, as she dared not follow this impulse. Who could speak of training in this case? The young peasant girl had only recently come here as a nurse, and was hypnotized for the first time, and she, nevertheless, behaved just like a repeatedly hypnotized somnambulist, only much more directly, and therefore more convincingly.

The fact that the kind of hypnotic reaction of a person is chiefly guided by the kind of suggestion to which he was first subjected to appears to me to be of paramount importance. If one chooses sleep principally, the person will become a sleeper. If one chooses to produce posthypnotic phenomena, he will show such phenomena chiefly, and will react during the waking condition easily to hallucinations, etc. In the same way, anaesthesia, amnesia, etc., can take the most prominent place, according to the efforts of the hypnotist. If a certain person is accustomed to react in a definite way, it is much more difficult to suggest other symptoms later on with a good result.

Naturally, when anyone is repeatedly hypnotized for a long time, and especially when the same experiment is always carried out again and again with him, the phenomena of accustoming appear, as they would with any other nerve activity. The most idiotic suggestions appeal to him to be plausible. It all becomes more mechanical and automatic, as accustomed achievements, impressions, etc., do with us. That is a general law of psychology - i.e., of the wort of the brain.

After ripe experience, I maintain that the direct influence of the hypnotist eventually diminishes after long continued, increasing training. The hypnotized gets to know his hypnotist and his weaknesses well, the fascination of the beginning is gradually lost, and autosuggestion and the contrary suggestion increase. While the suggested portion of the brain activity becomes more automatic and more mechanically adapted, the remaining parts collect themselves together to form an increasingly conscious reaction, to form a not suggested second " ego." In this way the belief in general in suggestion and its influences will rather tend to become less. For this reason one retains more power if one hypnotizes less frequently, and if the suggestion is not given mechanically, and not always in the same way. The experiments on persons hypnotized for the first time are therefore the clearest and prove to be the best.