ise to introduce them into many
practical fields. Everybody knows for instance how much may depend upon
the suggestibility of the witness in court. The suggestible witness
believes himself to have seen and heard what the lawyer suggests. The
memory picture which such a witness has in mind offers, of course, much
less resistance to the opposite action and attitude and belief than the
immediate impression. If I show the witness a colored picture of a room
and close the book and ask him whether there were three or four chairs
in the picture and whether the curtain was green or red, the suggestible
man will decide for one or the other proposition, even if there were
only two chairs and a blue curtain. The perception would have resisted
the suggestion, the fading memory image cannot resist it. Thus
suggestibility is really a practical factor in every walk of life. And
it is in the highest interests of psychotherapy that this intimate
connection between suggestion and ordinary talk and intercourse, between
suggestion and ordinary choice of motives, between suggestion and
attention be steadily kept in view and that suggestion is not
transformed into a kind of mysterious agency.

To be sure, the importance of suggestion for psychotherapy is not
confined to these suggestive processes of daily life. They play a role
there, as we shall see, and we shall claim that even the mere presence
of the physician may have its suggestive power and so may every remedy
which he applies. But no doubt many of his suggestive effects depend on
a power which far transcends the suggestions of our daily life. Yet the
psychologist must insist again that no new principle is involved, that
even in the strongest forms of suggestion, in hypnotism, nothing depends
upon any special influence emanating from the mind of the hypnotizer or
upon any special power flowing over from brain to brain; but that
everything results from the change of equilibrium in the psychomotor
processes of the hypnotized, and thus upon the interplay of his own
mental functions. All that is needed is a higher degree of
suggestibility than is found in the normal life. In a more suggestible
mind even the direct sense impressions may be overwhelmed by the
proposition for an untrue belief and the strongest desires may yield to
the new propositions of action. This library may then become a garden
where the hypnotized person picks flowers from the floor, and the wise
man stands on one leg