Suggestion is the process by which an idea, statement, image, expectation, or impression is introduced into the mind in a manner capable of influencing thought, feeling, perception, behavior, or bodily response.
Suggestion became an important subject in nineteenth-century psychology and medicine through the study of hypnotism and suggestive therapeutics, but researchers increasingly recognized that suggestion was not confined to hypnosis. Suggestions could operate while a person was awake, could arise from environmental and social influences, and could be deliberately directed toward oneself through auto-suggestion.
For Herbert A. Parkyn, this distinction became fundamental. His clinical work during the 1890s led him to conclude that the therapeutic effects commonly attributed to hypnotism were actually produced by suggestion and that hypnotic sleep itself was unnecessary. Parkyn developed this conclusion into a system of suggestion, waking suggestion, and auto-suggestion that he began teaching in 1896 through the Chicago School of Psychology. His 1898 Special Mail Course in Hypnotism and Suggestive Therapeutics then became the blueprint for the network of writers and publishers that became known as the “Suggestion Family.”
Suggestion is important to the history of the Yogi Publication Society because Parkyn’s system and teachings on the Law of Suggestion can be found in numerous books published by the YPS.
What Is Suggestion?
Suggestion occurs when an idea is presented to the mind and influences a subsequent mental or physical response. A suggestion may be communicated verbally, conveyed through gesture or behavior, implied by circumstances, produced by expectation, or generated internally by the individual. It does not necessarily require a formal hypnotic procedure, and the person receiving the suggestion does not necessarily experience it as an external command.
A simple suggestion might direct attention toward a sensation, idea, action, or expectation. Telling someone that a sensation will diminish can direct attention and expectation toward that result. Repeatedly imagining oneself performing an action can strengthen the mental association connected with that action. An atmosphere of confidence or fear can likewise influence expectation without an explicit instruction ever being given. Suggestion can therefore range from deliberate therapeutic instruction to ordinary influences encountered in everyday life.
The important feature is the introduction or activation of an idea that acquires enough influence to affect what follows. Nineteenth-century investigators disagreed considerably about why this happened, how suggestion related to hypnosis, and whether unusual hypnotic states were required to produce strong suggestive effects. Those disagreements helped transform suggestion from something treated mainly as a feature of hypnotism into a subject worthy of investigation in its own right.
How Does Suggestion Work?
Suggestion works through the relationship between ideas and the responses associated with them. An idea can direct attention, create expectation, activate memory, influence interpretation, and encourage a corresponding action or experience. A suggestion that something will happen can make the suggested result more mentally prominent, while competing ideas receive less attention.
This helps explain why expectation became so important to the study of suggestion. If a person expects a particular sensation or response, ambiguous experiences may be interpreted in accordance with that expectation. Attention can intensify the effect by repeatedly returning consciousness to the suggested idea. Repetition can make the idea increasingly familiar and strengthen its association with a desired response. Emotional intensity can also increase the importance attached to an idea.
Suggestion does not mean that every statement automatically produces the result it describes. People differ in their responses, suggestions can be rejected, incompatible ideas can interfere with one another, and the circumstances in which a suggestion is given can affect its influence. The study of suggestion is concerned with these conditions and with the processes through which an idea can become sufficiently influential to alter thought, perception, behavior, or experience.
What Is the Difference Between Suggestion and Hypnosis?
Suggestion and hypnosis were historically intertwined because much of the nineteenth-century investigation of suggestion occurred through hypnotic experiments. A hypnotist would induce an altered condition and then give instructions concerning movement, sensation, memory, perception, or later behavior. If the subject responded as instructed, the response was described as a hypnotic phenomenon.
An important question gradually arose from these experiments. Was hypnosis itself producing the phenomenon, or was the decisive factor the suggestion given to the subject? If a person could respond to suggestion without entering hypnotic sleep, then hypnosis could no longer be regarded as the necessary cause of the response.
This distinction became central to Parkyn’s work. He concluded from his clinical experience that suggestion was the active therapeutic agent and that hypnotic sleep was unnecessary. That conclusion allowed suggestion to be separated from the dramatic procedures historically associated with mesmerism and hypnotism. Suggestion could be studied and applied while the individual remained awake and aware of what was occurring.
What Is Waking Suggestion?
Waking suggestion is suggestion given without placing the subject into hypnotic sleep. The individual remains conscious and can hear, understand, and respond to what is being said. This form of suggestion was important because it demonstrated that suggestive effects did not depend upon unconsciousness or a mysterious hypnotic state.
Waking suggestion could be used to influence habits, expectations, emotional responses, bodily sensations, confidence, attention, and behavior. The operator could explain the expected change and repeatedly direct the subject’s attention toward it. The procedure placed greater emphasis upon the idea being communicated and less upon the production of hypnosis.
For Parkyn, waking suggestion was a major step away from conventional hypnotic therapeutics. Once hypnotic sleep was removed as a requirement, the central question became how ideas could be introduced, accepted, strengthened, and converted into responses. This opened the way toward his increasingly systematic treatment of suggestion itself.
What Is Auto-Suggestion?
Auto-suggestion is suggestion directed by a person toward his or her own mind. Instead of another person supplying the suggestion, the individual deliberately introduces and repeats ideas intended to influence thought, feeling, habit, behavior, or physical condition. It transforms suggestion from a relationship between operator and subject into a method of self-direction.
Auto-suggestion can involve repeated statements, deliberate mental imagery, concentrated attention, expectation, or the rehearsal of a desired response. The individual attempts to make the desired idea sufficiently prominent and persistent that it begins to influence habitual thought and action. A person attempting to overcome hesitation, for example, might repeatedly cultivate an idea of confidence and immediate action until the new response becomes increasingly familiar.
Parkyn made auto-suggestion a central part of his system well before the subject became widely associated with Émile Coué. His 1905 Auto-Suggestion presented a developed method of self-directed suggestion based upon work he had been conducting and teaching for years. In Parkyn’s system, auto-suggestion was closely connected with habit formation, mental control, health, confidence, action, and the deliberate replacement of undesirable mental tendencies with desirable ones.
What Is Post-Hypnotic Suggestion?
Post-hypnotic suggestion is an instruction given during hypnosis that is intended to be carried out after the person has returned to the ordinary waking state. A subject might be told that after awakening a particular cue will cause a certain action, sensation, thought, or memory to occur. When the cue appears later, the subject may respond according to the earlier instruction.
Such experiments became important to the study of suggestion because they demonstrated that a suggested idea could continue to influence behavior after the immediate circumstances in which it had been given had ended. They also raised questions concerning memory, unconscious mental activity, volition, and the persistence of ideas outside ordinary awareness.
The importance of post-hypnotic suggestion extends beyond the particular hypnotic experiment. It helped investigators recognize that ideas could remain active and influence later responses even when they were not continuously present in conscious attention. This became part of the larger investigation into the relationship between conscious thought and mental processes operating outside immediate awareness.
What Is Direct Suggestion?
Direct suggestion explicitly states the idea or response being proposed. It may take the form of an instruction, assertion, or prediction. Statements such as “you will remain calm,” “the discomfort will decrease,” or “you will remember this” are direct because the intended response is plainly expressed.
Direct suggestion was especially common in hypnotic and therapeutic work because it allowed the operator to concentrate attention upon a specific result. Repetition could strengthen the suggested idea, while confidence in its delivery could increase the subject’s expectation that the predicted response would occur.
The effectiveness of a direct suggestion depends upon more than its wording. The relationship between the individuals, the expectations of the subject, the circumstances in which the suggestion is made, previous experience, competing ideas, emotional state, and the perceived authority of the person giving it can all influence the response.
What Is Indirect Suggestion?
Indirect suggestion communicates an idea without presenting it as an explicit command. An expectation can be created through implication, description, assumption, example, environment, or the behavior of other people. A person may begin expecting a particular result because everything surrounding the situation appears to indicate that the result should occur.
This form of suggestion demonstrates how widely suggestive influence can operate outside formal hypnotism. A physician’s manner can influence a patient’s expectations. The behavior of a crowd can affect an individual’s emotional response. Repeated exposure to an idea can make it familiar enough to influence judgment. Tone of voice, confidence, reputation, surroundings, and social expectation can all contribute to a suggestion without the presence of a direct instruction.
The distinction between direct and indirect suggestion also helps explain why suggestion became relevant far beyond clinical hypnotism. Once suggestion was understood as the influence of ideas and expectations, investigators could examine its operation in education, advertising, religion, public speaking, social behavior, habit, medicine, and everyday interpersonal relationships.
What Is Suggestibility?
Suggestibility refers to responsiveness to suggestion. The term has historically been used in different ways, and it should not simply be understood as gullibility or weakness. A person may respond strongly to certain kinds of suggestion and weakly to others, while circumstances can alter the degree and character of the response.
Attention, expectation, trust, emotional state, previous experience, repetition, and the manner in which an idea is presented can all affect suggestibility. Hypnotic researchers also observed substantial differences among subjects. Some individuals responded readily to suggested movements or sensations, while others were much less responsive.
Suggestibility is thus better understood as a variable aspect of responsiveness than as a fixed measure of intelligence or character. The same individual may resist one suggestion, accept another, and respond differently under changed circumstances.
What Roles Do Attention and Expectation Play in Suggestion?
Attention determines which ideas receive mental prominence. When attention is repeatedly directed toward an idea, sensation, or expected response, competing impressions can become less prominent. This is one reason concentration became so important in both hetero-suggestion and auto-suggestion.
Expectation adds another element. A suggestion frequently tells the subject, directly or indirectly, what to expect. Once that expectation is established, subsequent sensations and events may be interpreted in relation to it. Expectation can also prepare a person to respond in a particular manner when the anticipated circumstance occurs.
Attention and expectation frequently operate together. The suggestion establishes an expected result, attention remains fixed upon it, and repetition keeps the idea active. Many systems of suggestion developed techniques intended to strengthen precisely this combination.
Why Is Repetition Used in Suggestion?
Repetition keeps an idea before the mind and gives it repeated opportunities to become associated with a desired response. A single suggestion may be displaced quickly by competing thoughts. Repetition makes the selected idea familiar and can help establish it as a habitual mental pattern.
This was especially important in auto-suggestion. A person attempting to change an established habit was working against an existing pattern that had itself been strengthened through repetition. Repeating the opposing idea provided a means of cultivating a new association until the desired response became easier and more automatic.
Repetition alone does not guarantee acceptance. A statement that continuously provokes contradiction or disbelief can strengthen resistance. Effective systems of suggestion therefore paid attention to the form of the suggestion, the state in which it was given, the expectation attached to it, and its relationship to existing habits and ideas.
How Was Suggestion Used Therapeutically?
Suggestive therapeutics applied suggestion to the treatment of physical and psychological complaints. During the nineteenth century it became closely associated with hypnotism, with practitioners using hypnotic suggestion for pain, functional disorders, habits, sleep difficulties, emotional disturbances, and other conditions. The field became an important meeting point between medicine, psychology, hypnosis, and the developing study of mind.
Therapeutic suggestion was based upon the observation that mental states could affect bodily sensations and responses. Pain, muscular movement, appetite, sleep, fear, expectation, and other experiences could sometimes be altered through suggestion. This did not mean that every disease was caused by thought or could be cured by suggestion. Serious practitioners distinguished between conditions in which suggestion might influence symptoms or behavior and diseases requiring other forms of medical treatment.
The major theoretical dispute concerned the role of hypnosis. If therapeutic changes could be produced through suggestion while the patient remained awake, hypnotic sleep was no longer necessary for many of the effects attributed to hypnotic treatment. That question became central to Parkyn’s clinical work.
How Did Herbert A. Parkyn Understand Suggestion?
Herbert A. Parkyn developed his understanding of suggestion through clinical work rather than beginning with a purely philosophical theory. Between 1892 and 1894 in Toronto, he treated approximately 243 cases involving suggestion. During 1894 and 1895 he worked in Minneapolis with Dr. W. X. Sudduth, where more than one thousand demonstrations provided a much larger field for observing hypnotic and suggestive phenomena.
From this work Parkyn reached the conclusion that became fundamental to his later system. The therapeutic agent was suggestion, not hypnotic sleep. If the suggestion produced the change, inducing hypnosis added an unnecessary procedure. Parkyn increasingly separated suggestion from hypnosis and developed methods that could be applied while the subject remained awake.
He began teaching in 1895 and founded the Chicago School of Psychology in June 1896. Suggestion became the central subject around which a much larger curriculum was constructed. By 1898, his Special Mail Course in Hypnotism and Suggestive Therapeutics presented the subject systematically through forty-one lessons, allowing students throughout the country to study his methods by correspondence.
What Were Parkyn’s Three Laws of Suggestion?
Parkyn organized suggestion around three laws that attempted to explain the conditions under which suggestions become effective. These laws were important because they moved the subject away from the idea that successful suggestion depended upon mysterious hypnotic power possessed by an operator. Parkyn treated suggestion as a process governed by identifiable mental conditions that could be studied, taught, and deliberately applied.
The laws addressed the acceptance and operation of ideas within the mind and formed part of the theoretical foundation for Parkyn’s methods of suggestive therapeutics and auto-suggestion. They also helped explain why conflicting ideas could interfere with a suggestion and why the construction and repetition of an opposing idea could be used to weaken an undesirable mental tendency.
For Parkyn, the significance of such laws was that suggestion could be approached systematically. The operator did not need to overpower another person’s mind. The important problem was understanding how an idea entered into mental activity, what prevented or assisted its acceptance, and how an accepted idea could influence subsequent thought and action.
Why Did Parkyn Separate Suggestion from Hypnosis?
Separating suggestion from hypnosis changed both the theory and application of the subject. If hypnosis was necessary, suggestive treatment depended upon producing a special condition in another person. If suggestion itself produced the relevant effect, the hypnotic procedure could be discarded whenever it served no necessary purpose.
Parkyn’s conclusion also changed the relationship between practitioner and subject. Suggestion no longer had to be presented as control exercised by a hypnotist over a passive individual. The subject could remain awake, understand the procedure, cooperate with it, and eventually learn to apply suggestion independently.
This leads directly to auto-suggestion. Once the power attributed to the hypnotist was relocated in the operation of the suggested idea, there was no theoretical reason that all useful suggestions had to originate with another person. The individual could learn how suggestion operated and deliberately use the same principles for self-direction.
How Did Parkyn Use Auto-Suggestion?
Parkyn developed auto-suggestion as a systematic method for deliberately changing established patterns of thought and behavior. An undesirable tendency could be identified and met with an opposing constructive suggestion. The desired idea was then cultivated until it became increasingly established as the habitual response.
This is the setting in which Parkyn’s characteristic formulations become important. “Health, Happiness, and Success,” “Do it Now,” “I Can and I Will,” and his statement that “Thought takes form in action” were connected with a system in which thought was expected to lead toward conduct. The purpose of auto-suggestion was not simply to repeat pleasing words. The suggestion was intended to establish a mental tendency that would express itself through action.
Parkyn’s Auto-Suggestion, published in 1905, brought these teachings together in book form after years of teaching the subject. His treatment predates the later international popularity of auto-suggestion associated with Émile Coué and belongs to the earlier American development of suggestion as a method of deliberate self-direction.
Why Did Parkyn Record Suggestions on the Phonograph?
Parkyn’s use of the phonograph followed directly from his understanding of auto-suggestion and repetition. If repeated verbal suggestions could influence mental habits, recorded speech provided a way for suggestions to be repeated without requiring another person to deliver them each time. Parkyn became the first to record suggestions on the phonograph for this purpose, applying a new recording technology to the systematic repetition of therapeutic and self-directed suggestions.
The importance of the experiment lies in what it reveals about his conception of suggestion. The effective element did not depend upon the physical presence or supposed magnetic power of a hypnotist. A recorded voice could deliver the words because the suggestion itself was the operative element. The phonograph separated the message from the person giving it and provided a mechanical means of repetition.
This also fits the direction in which Parkyn’s system had been developing. He had moved from hypnotic experimentation toward waking suggestion and from waking suggestion toward auto-suggestion. Recorded suggestion carried the same movement further by making repeated suggestion available independently of a live operator.
How Does Suggestion Relate to Habit?
Habit is one of the most important reasons suggestion could be developed into a method of self-training. Repeated thoughts and actions become easier to reproduce, while familiar responses can occur with decreasing conscious effort. Suggestion attempts to intervene in this process by deliberately establishing an alternative idea and repeatedly associating it with the desired response.
From this perspective, an undesirable habit is not overcome merely by recognizing that it is undesirable. The established response must be challenged by another response capable of becoming habitual in its place. Auto-suggestion provides the repeated mental preparation for that replacement.
This helps explain Parkyn’s emphasis upon action. A suggested idea was valuable when it became expressed through conduct. “Do it Now” compressed this relationship into a short command aimed at overcoming hesitation and establishing immediate action as a habit. “I Can and I Will” similarly combined expectation with volition. The formulas were components of a system designed to carry an idea from deliberate suggestion into habitual response.
Why Is Suggestion Important to the Yogi Publication Society?
Suggestion has a direct place in the history of the Yogi Publication Society because the Society developed from the publishing and educational network in which Parkyn had already been teaching the subject for years. Parkyn began teaching in 1895, founded the Chicago School of Psychology in 1896, issued his forty-one-lesson mail course in 1898, and developed an extensive correspondence-school system around suggestion, psychology, personal development, and related subjects before YPS began operating from his offices at 4000 Cottage Grove Avenue in 1903.
The importance of that chronology becomes clearer when the later YPS and associated mental-training books are compared with Parkyn’s earlier material. Ideas involving the deliberate direction of thought, the replacement of undesirable mental tendencies, the formation of habits, concentration, confidence, will, mental influence, and the translation of thought into action were already being taught within Parkyn’s system. The relationship can be investigated through the actual language, exercises, definitions, and teaching structures preserved in his courses and books.
This makes suggestion different from subjects that can be connected to YPS only through the general history of Western esotericism. Here there is an earlier teaching system, a documented school and publishing operation, identifiable personnel, surviving instructional material, and a later publishing enterprise that developed from the same network. Suggestion is one of the subjects through which that continuity can be examined directly.
