I should raise no objection to our calling hypnosis a mental disorder if we also regarded sleep and dreams as such. And we find that when alienists wish to discover analogies to mental disorder they always have recourse to dreams; but no investigator has maintained that in order to lose one's sanity it is only necessary to go to sleep. To illustrate the resemblance which dreams bear to mental disorders, Freud, following Radestock, points to statements made by various philosophers. Kant called the insane dreamers who were awake; and Schopenhauer declared that a dream was a short mania, and mania a long dream. Wundt, in his Physiological Psychology, expresses the view that when we dream we experience all those phenomena met with in a madhouse. For this reason even Radestock concludes that mania, an abnormal morbid phenomenon, should be considered an exacerbation of the periodically recurrent dream-state. Trenaunay points out in a work I have already mentioned that a number of alienists have expressed similar views.

Moreau de Tours has written on the identity of the dream-state and mental disorder, and Delasiauve has observed dreams which approached confusion mentale, Schiile considers mania the analogue of the physiological dream-state. Delirium of toxic origin - e.g., alcohol, has recently been classified among dreams by various writers - Lasegue, Klippel, Re'gis. The two latter lay special stress on the toxic origin of many forms of delirium. Regis, for example, considers the delirium of infectious diseases the delirium of a dream caused by toxic action: for him it is a kind of etat second, analogous to the hypnotic state. Like somnambulists, these sleepers, as our authors call them, on waking often retain but a confused recollection of what has happened: sometimes the whole dream is forgotten. Regis finds even greater justification for comparing toxic delirium with the state of consciousness in hypnosis in the fact that although the memory of the events of such delirium is lost on the patient's waking, it can nevertheless be restored in hypnosis.

It follows from the foregoing considerations that dreaming and mental disorder are analogous in many respects, and from this point of view there can be no objection to our comparing hypnosis to mental disorder. But the most dissimilar mental disorders have been compared to hypnosis, which shows what confusion there is about it. For example, Rieger and Konrad say that hypnosis is nothing but an artificial madness. Mey-nert maintains that it is an experimentally-produced imbecility. Luys compares it to general paralysis of the insane, Bevan Lewis to stupor. These different comparisons show the want of unanimity among the authors, for the forms of mental disorder we call imbecility and mania are as unlike as a pea and a rose, which are both plants, but of utterly different kinds.

When hypnosis is thus compared to mental disorder it is generally forgotten that susceptibility to suggestion is the chief phenomenon of hypnosis. But it is a mistake to think that susceptibility to suggestion is an essential phenomenon of mental disorder; if it were, mental disorders could be cured by suggestion, but this is hardly ever possible. By means of suggestion in hypnosis, forms of hypnosis may be induced which resemble mental derangement - e.g., spontaneous mania, or melancholia attonita, besides forms of imbecility, etc. But we can also induce paralysis and stammering by suggestion, and yet hypnosis is not a state of paralysis or of stammering. We can suggest pain in hypnosis, yet hypnosis is not a state of pain. And how the light stages of hypnosis in which only motor effects are caused by suggestion can be called states of mental disorder is not clear to me, unless a person is to be called mentally unsound simply because he cannot open his eyes. But even the susceptibility to suggestion which exists in such mental disorders as delirium tremens (Moeli, Pierre Janet), or the katatonia of Kahlbaum (Jensen), must not be without further ceremony identified with the susceptibility we find in hypnosis; and we have just as little right to reckon mental disorders in which there is a fixed idea as hypnosis merely because of the fact, to which Kornfeld and Bikeles have called attention, that such fixed ideas in cases of megalomania are very easily influenced in hypnosis.

We often see that a fixed idea can be guided as we please. But none of these states has anything to do with the susceptibility to suggestion met with in hypnosis. I need only say "Wake!" to -the hypnotized subject, and at once the state ends; but there is no mental disease which can be ended at a moment's notice like hypnosis.

It is no new thing to see hypnosis brought into connection without obeying them, and even imitated the threats which he uttered against them.

I lately had an opportunity, at the large Arab hospital at Cairo, of seeing a case which doubtless should be mentioned in this connection. The subject was a negress, some thirty years of age, then in the hospital. Besides her own negro tongue she understood some French. The chief symptom of her disorder was that while she sat passively in the same place all day long she repeated whatever was said to her, whether in her own language, in French, or in any other language of which she knew nothing whatever. I made trials with German and other languages; even difficult sentences she repeated mechanically, the first time usually with omissions, but when she had again gone over one, every syllable was clearly uttered. She also imitated movements to a certain extent. If I put out my tongue she did the same, if I showed my teeth she also showed hers, if I clapped my hands she clapped hers, though after a longer interval. It was, however, generally first necessary to attract her eye before performing any action.

Once more, the chief feature of hypnosis is increased susceptibility to suggestion. By means of this we can induce counterfeits of all sorts of diseases, which appear identical with the real thing. But none the less, hypnosis should not be identified with these diseases. The two characteristics of hypnosis are suggestibility and the power of ending the state at pleasure. We do not find them united in psychoses, nor in neuroses; but we find them in sleep, in which many dreams are induced by suggestion, and from which the subject can be awakened at any moment by an external stimulus. Although no identification of hypnosis and sleep would be justifiable on the above grounds, I must again point out that they are closely related, at least so far as hypnoses of the second group are concerned.