528. Among these morbid tricks kleptomania has an interest of its own, on account of the frequent doubt whether it is not put forward as a mere excuse for pilfering. It may thus happen that the cure is the best proof of the existence of the disease; and certain cures (quoted in 528 A and B) indicate that the impulse has veritably involved a morbid excitability of motor centres, acted on by special stimuli, - an idée fixe with an immediate outcome in act.

Many words and acts of violence fall under the same category, in cases where the impulse to swear or to strike has acquired the unreasoning automatic promptness of a tic, and yet may be at once inhibited by suggestion. Many undesirable impulses in the realm of sex are also capable of being thus corrected or removed.

529. The stimulants and narcotics, to which our review next leads us, forms a standing menace to human virtue. By some strange accident of our development, the impulse of our organisms towards certain drugs - alcohol, opium, and the like - is strong enough to overpower, in a large proportion of mankind, not only the late-acquired altruistic impulses, but even the primary impulses of self-regard and self-preservation. We are brought back, one may almost say, to the "chimiotaxy" of the lowest organisms, which arrange themselves inevitably in specific relation to oxygen, malic acid, or whatever the stimulus may be. We thus experience in ourselves a strange conflict between moral responsibility and molecular affinities; - the central will overborne by dumb unnumbered elements of our being. With this condition of things hypnotic suggestion deals often in a curious way. The suggestion is not generally felt as a strengthening of the central will. It resembles rather a molecular redis-position; it leaves the patient indifferent to the stimulus, or even disgusted with it.

The man for whom alcohol has combined the extremes of delight and terror now lives as though in a world in which alcohol did not exist at all. (See 529 A and B; also a case of the cure of excessive smoking in 529 C).

530. Even for the slave of morphia the same sudden freedom is sometimes achieved. It has been said of victims to morphia-injection that a cure means death; - so often has suicide followed on the distress caused by giving up the drug. But in certain cases cured by suggestion it seems that no craving whatsoever has persisted after the sudden disuse of the drug. There is something here which is in one sense profounder than moral reform. There is something which suggests a spirit within us less injured than we might have feared by the body's degradation. The morphinomaniac character - the lowest type of subjection to a ruling vice - disappears from the personality in proportion as the drug is eliminated from the system. The shrinking outcast turns at once into the respectable man. (See 530 A).

531. The theme which comes next in order, while of first-rate importance, cannot be freely treated except in a purely medical work. I have spoken of the standing danger which the stimulus of alcohol constitutes to human health and happiness. There exists, I need not say, a stimulus still more powerful, and still more inextricably interwoven with the tissue of life itself. In my chapter on Genius I have endeavoured (as the disciple of Plato) to show how that instinct for union with beauty which manifests itself most obviously in sexual passion may be exalted into a symbolical introduction into a sacred and spiritual world. In my discussion of hysteria I showed how suggestion may be used to relieve certain of the more delicate sorrows into which that passion may betray the yearning and unconscious heart. But there are baser yearnings, sorrows of fouler stain; there are madnesses and melancholies whose cause even the physician or the confessor must often guess rather than hear. It must be enough to say that in many such cases the hypnotising physician has proved the most helpful of confessors; that in this direction also impulses have been arrested, appetites transformed; that here, too, as with the victims of alcohol or morphia, the world holds many men and women sane and sound whom but for hypnotic suggestion we might now have sought in vain; - save in the prison, the madhouse, or the grave.1

532. Some of these profound and pervasive disorders of the sexual passion, if fully analysed, might supply us with types of almost every variety of perversity and folly. But even apart from these, and apart from troubles consequent on any intelligible instinct, any discoverable stimulus of pleasure, there are a multitude of impulses, fears, imaginations, one or more of which may take possession of persons not otherwise apparently unhealthy or hysterical, sometimes to an extent so distressing as to impel to suicide. I believe that these irrational fears or "phobies" are often due to heredity; - not always to a reversion to primitive terrors, - but (as in the case of horror at injury to finger-nails quoted from Mr. Francis Galton in 526 B) to an accidental and, so to say, traumatic inheritance of some prenatal suggestion. However originated, these morbid aversions (like other idées fixes which I reserve for later mention) may often lie very deep, and in their sudden removal by hypnotic suggestion they remind one of the deep-seated tumours which Esdaile used to astonish the Calcutta coolies by extirpating while they slept.

A frequent form of idee fixe consists of some restricting or disabling preoccupation or fear. Some of these "phobies" have been often described of late years, - as, for instance, agoraphobia, which makes a man dread to cross an open space; and its converse, claustrophobia, which makes him shrink from sitting in a room with closed doors; or the still more distressing mysophobia, which makes him constantly uneasy lest he should have become dirty or defiled (see Appendices to this section).

All these disorders involve a kind of displacement or cramp of the attention; and for all of them, one may broadly say, hypnotic suggestion is the best and often the only cure. Suggestion seems to stimulate antagonistic centres; to open clogged channels; to produce, in short, however we imagine the process, a rapid disappearance of the insistent notion.

1 See, for example, Von Schrenck-Notzing's work, Die Suggestions- Therapie bei krankhaften Erscheinungen des Geschlechts-Lebens.

I have spoken of this effect as though it were mainly to be valued intellectually, as a readjustment of the dislocated attention. But I must note also that the moral results may be as important here as in the cases of inhibition of dipsomania and the like, already mentioned. These morbid fears which suggestion relieves may be ruinously degrading to a man's character. The ingredients of antipathy, of jealousy, which they sometimes contain, may make him dangerous to his fellows as well as loathsome to himself. One or two cases of the cure of morbid jealousy are to my mind among the best records which hypnotism has to show (see 557 A).