pnotic sleep of
yesterday from all that happened, only he was not aware of it because
the channels of the accepting attitude were blocked.

As soon as the over-attention has produced the acceptance of the belief,
all further effects are automatic and necessary. If I tell the
hypnotized person that he cannot speak and he absorbs this proposition,
with that completeness in which he accepts it as a fact, not speaking
itself unavoidably results. The motor ideas with which the speech
movement has to start are cut off and the subject yields passively to
the fate that he cannot intonate his voice. Thus a special influence on
the will is in no way involved. If the idea is accepted, and that means,
if the preparatory setting for the action has been completed, the ideas
of opposite activity must remain ineffective; the suggested idea must
discharge itself in action without resistance. As a matter of course the
new line of action will then surround itself with its own associations
and will thus give to the subject the impression that he is acting from
his own motives. As soon as the psychophysical principles are
understood, there is indeed no difficulty in going from the simplest
experience to those spectacular ones where we may suggest to the
profoundly hypnotized person that he is a little child or that he is
George Washington. In the one case, he will speak and cry and play and
write as in his present imagination a child would behave; in the other
case, he will pose in an attitude which he may have seen in a picture of
Washington. There is nothing mysterious and his utterances are
completely dependent upon his own ideas, which may be very different
from the real wisdom of a Washington and the real unwisdom of a child. I
may suggest to him to be the Czar, by that he will not become able to
speak Russian. In the same way I may suggest changes of the
surroundings; he may take my room for the river upon which he paddles
his canoe, or for the orchard in which he picks apples from my
bookshelves.

Finally there is no new principle involved, if the action which is
prepared by any belief has to set in after the awaking from hypnotic
sleep, the so-called post-hypnotic suggestion. As a matter of course,
just these have an eminent value for psychotherapy. I may suggest to-day
that the subject will overcome to-morrow his desire for the morphine
injection, or that he will feel to-night the restfulness which will
overcome his insomnia. But