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Show GOOD HEALTH [with illustration]. <br><br> PSYCHOLOGICAL PHENOMENA. br><br> Power of a Strong Mind Over a Weaker One - Reaction of the Mind on Itself. br><br> In a paper read at a psychological conference at Copenhagen Dr. Delboeuf spoke of the manner in which the will of the patient rightly directed can control his nervousness and the mind can react on itself and the healthy part of the brain on the diseased part. He stated a singular case of a woman possessed with the idea of killing her husband and children asking herself every day if it was not the time to accomplish her murderous attack. He said that he defied her to call up the morbid thought while he looked at her. Having succeeded without difficulty, he announced to her that on the following day she would not be able to think of this idea at a certain hour, and so on by degrees he charmed away this morbid idea. This is, in ordinary language, the influence of a strong mind over a weak one, but the laws under which it can be exercised are not yet definitely ascertained. br><br> Dr. Thanet thought it impossible to explain all the complex phenomena that were produced in the hypnotic state by any single word or doctrine. In some cases there were suggestions; in others associations of ideas, modifications of the state of consciousness, etc. As to the patients whom he had chiefly observed, he had always been struck by the fact that they were weakminded persons, who were incapable of fixing their attention long on the same object, and when they were forced to do so they experienced every kind of psychological modification. They lost the control of their movements and of their ideas. br><br> He had seen a child who could not pay attention at school without having a kind of convulsion. With his patients the dreams and hallucinations they had been made known to undergo manifested themselves when their waking thoughts were oppressed with fatigue. In a word, be characterized hypnotism as an ingenious process of bringing to light dreams without the knowledge of the dreamer. Those who have attended the demonstrations of these phenomena by public performers must have been struck with the fact that their most effective patients were half witted imbeciles whom they carried about with them. |