The key ideas

Hypnosis. Suggestion. Telepathy

Vladimir Bekhterev, 1898

A whole crew sees a raft with drowning people, while the lifeboats run into floating trees. A lecture hall of students runs from a collapse that never happens. A dog carries out a task the professor thought of in silence. A classic of Russian psychiatry explains how suggestion works in a crowd and in everyday life, and becomes an example himself of how a strong expectation can affect a researcher.

Who it is for

For those who want to understand how thoughts and moods pass from one person to another and to a crowd, and learn to notice it in themselves: in advertising, in the news, among friends.

They enter our mental sphere not by the front door, but, if one may so put it, by the back porch that leads straight into the inner chambers of our soul.

About this book

St Petersburg, a professor's flat. The fox terrier Pikki sits on a chair. The animal trainer Vladimir Durov holds the dog's muzzle in his hands and silently looks into its eyes for half a minute. Then he lets go. Pikki dashes to the piano, jumps onto a round stool and strikes the right-hand side of the keyboard with a paw. That is exactly the task the flat's owner had suggested beforehand.

The flat's owner is Vladimir Bekhterev, neurologist and psychiatrist. Yet a few years before these experiments he himself had written that there was not a single strictly verified fact in favour of transmitting thoughts at a distance.

The collection Hypnosis. Suggestion. Telepathy includes his works on hypnosis, on suggestion and on “mental suggestion.” The central one is Suggestion and Its Role in Social Life. These are the observations and interpretations of a doctor from the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, not modern science. Where his conclusions were later not confirmed, we will say so plainly.

Idea 1. The front door and the back porch

Why can a clever person believe an absurdity and fail to shake it off, even when he understands that it is absurd?

Bekhterev answers this way. Conviction enters the mind through the front door: through attention, arguments and checking. Suggestion goes another way. It penetrates, in his words, “by the back porch,” bypassing the criticism of our “I.” That is why a suggested thought can hold on even when a person can see its absurdity.

According to the author's observation, suggestion gets through best when attention is occupied or weakened: in distraction, in tiredness, in a strong feeling. And it works not only through words but also through tone, gesture and example.

You scroll through a feed while thinking about something else, and a day later you notice that you are humming an advertising jingle you never play on purpose.

In Bekhterev's view, a suggested thought can persist against logic. One consequence that can be drawn from this: it is useful not only to argue with a thought but also to notice where it came from, and to let it pass through the front door.

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About the author

Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev (1857–1927) was a Russian neurologist, psychiatrist and psychologist, professor at the Military Medical Academy in St Petersburg, and founder of the Psychoneurological Institute.

All books by this author: Vladimir Bekhterev

Terms from the book

  • Suggestion
  • hypnosis
  • Mutual suggestion: Bekhterev's term for the mutual, involuntary influence of people on one another, when a mood or thought passes from one to another and back.
  • Self-suggestion: In Bekhterev's view, suggestion whose source lies in the person himself: he can tune himself to a sad or cheerful mood, or instil a conviction in himself.
  • Mental epidemic: Bekhterev's term for the mass spread of identical states and behaviour, from panics to religious convulsive outbreaks. A historical concept, not a modern diagnosis.
  • Mental suggestion: The supposed transfer of thoughts without words or visible signs. Bekhterev tried to study it in experiments with dogs; modern science does not consider its existence proven.

All terms

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