CAN HYPNOTISM CURE LOVESICKNESS?

Ohinemuri Gazette, Volume XXXII, Issue 4228, 14 February 1921, Page 4

CAN HYPNOTISM CURE LOVESICKNESS?

WHAT LOVE IS: BY TIT-BITS MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT. It appears to be much easier for people to be hypnotized into love than to be hypnotized out of it again. Love is in itself a condition of hypnosis induced by the ardent lover himself. Its onset may be sudden or insidious. The prospective lover probably "stops, and looks, and listens" to the voice of some charmer, who at once makes an impression, either faint or vivid, on his senses of sight and hearing. The magic of love is really not so "magic after all. At the first sight of the one who has impressed him the lover suggests to himself that she is a graceful, charming, attractive, or bewitching personality. Now, mental suggestion, self-sug-gestion, or auto-suggestion is one of the most potent forces for either good or evil that plays upon the susceptible mind of humanity's millions. The lover and his lass fall peculiarly easy victims to this form of suggestion. If the first impressions made on either of them are reciprocal, each begins the easy task of self-persuasion to the effect that the other is the bravest, or the most beautiful, or in some other way superlatively the best of all created beings, and the only one in the world for him or her. Each persists in repeati»e this belief at frequent intervals during the day, and probably the last thing at night, just before dropping off to sleep—that is, at the precise moment when self-suggestion operates most powerfully. This persistently repeated belief becomes in time a fixed | idea. And so the idea remains, until it comes unstuck by the solvent action, of a totally different set of suggestions. People cannot be hypnotized against their will. Why? Because all who pass into the state of hypnotic "sleep" have to co-operate in inducing it by their own self-sugges-tion, aided and abetted perhaps by the additional suggestion of the hypnotist. In the case of lovers each one acts as hypnotic to the other, while they both indulge in self-Bug-gestion for all they are worth. People really never fall in love; they throw themselves into it- —into that hypnotic, dreamy, trance-like state of mind which transforms for the time being the real man or woman of everyday life "into an impossible and idealized figure of romance, ence it is obvious that people voluntarily induce the love with their eyes open; but once in that dreamy state, they firmly close their eyes to all the .many imperfections of their felowhypnotists. If a man is deeply in love with a girl, or a girl with a man, is it possible, it may be <asked, to influence them against love? In other words, can a hypnotist arrest love, or awaken a lover from his or her love trance? The answer is in the negative. If the love were only a passing fancy, hypnotic suggestion by a second party might change it; but true love comes under the influence of selfsugges'ion alone. It is of the instinct. DETERMINE TO—AND YOU WILL It is not only, however, in the limited • domain of love that • suggestion from within, or from outside, plays a part. Suggestion in one or other of its forms is acting on our minds at every hour of the day. To suggest to yourself success in any undertaking on which you are about to embark is far more likely to bring about the desired result than would be the case if you were to suggest the possibility of failure. Think success, and in all human probability you must succeed; think failure, and you must fail. The reason for this is that every thought, especially every thought- j producing emotion, tends to become ! ,an action. What we think persist- , ently, we do or become.