makes us
gullible, and at other times the cause of our suggestibility is
failure to use the knowledge that we have. Sometimes our ideas are
locked away in air-tight compartments with no interaction between
them. The psychologists tell us that suggestion is greatly favored by
a narrowing of the attention, a "contraction of the field of
consciousness," a dissociation of other ideas through concentration.
This all simply means that we forget to let our common sense bring to
bear counter ideas that might challenge a false one; or that worry--a
veritable "spasm of the attention"--has fixed upon an idea to the
exclusion of all others; or that through fatigue or the dissociation
of sleep or hypnosis or hysteria, our reasoning powers have been
locked out and for the time being are unable to act.

It was through experiments on hypnotized subjects that scientists
first learned of the suggestibility of the subconscious mind. In
hypnosis a person can be made to believe almost anything and to do
almost anything compatible with the safety and the moral sense of the
individual. The instinct of self-preservation will not allow the most
deeply hypnotized person to do anything dangerous to himself; and the
moral complexes, laid in the subconscious, never permit a person to
perform in earnest an act of which the waking moral sense would
disapprove. Within these limits, a person in the dissociated hypnotic
state can be made to accept almost any suggestion. We found in the
last chapter how open to suggestion is a person in normal sleep. Of
the dissociation of hysteria we shall have occasion to speak in later
chapters. Although all these special states heighten suggestibility,
we must not forget how susceptible each of us is in his normal waking
state.

=Living Its Faith.= All this gathers meaning only when we realize that
ideas are dynamic. They always tend to work themselves out to
fulfilment. The subconscious no sooner gets a conviction than it tries
to act it out. Of course it can succeed only up to a certain limit.
If it believes the stomach to have cancer, it cannot make cancer, but
it can make the stomach misbehave. One of my patients, on hearing of a
case of brain-tumor immediately imagined this to be her trouble, and
developed a pain in her head. She could not manufacture a tumor, but
she could manufacture what she believed to be the symptoms.

There was another patient who was supposed to have brain-tumor. This
young woman see