Suggestion

History

According to the philologists Bloch Oscar and Walther von Wartburg, the term of " suggestion" present a pejorative connotation as of its appearance in 1174. One associates it with the ideas diabolic Sorcellerie and practices. It will be the same for the verb " suggérer" appeared at the end of the XVe century. In its Meditations on the Gospel , Bossuet denounces the " suggestions" demon. It is necessary to await the medium of the XIXe century so that Emile Littré announces that suggestion " says itself sometimes into good part".

Suggestion and Hypnosis

Mentioned by James Braid in connection with the Hypnosis, then by Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault, it definite and was especially put at the center of the psychotherapeutic process by Hippolyte Bernheim. In 1884, Bernheim defined it as " act by which an idea is introduced into the brain and is accepted by lui". According to Bernheim, Joseph Delboeuf, and the other members of the School of Nancy (also called " School of the suggestion"), it is the suggestion which explains the physiological Hypnose rather than any phenomenon.

They are opposed in that to Jean-Martin Charcot and Pierre Janet of the École of Salpêtrière. Within the framework of the polemic which opposes the two schools, Janet declares in 1889, " I am not been willing to believe that the suggestion can explain all and in particular which it can be explained it-même".

But Janet and Bernheim meet on the idea according to which suggestibility is not necessarily related to hypnosis. Janet written in the psychological automatism that " suggestibility can be very complête apart from the sleepwalking; it can miss completely in a state of sleepwalking complêt". Bernheim deduced from it into 1891 that the " psychotherapy suggestive" operated as well, if not better, without hypnosis. One finds a similar idea at Milton Erickson, for which it can have " very well there; Hypnosis " without hypnotic ritual.

The pharmacist Emile Coué, author of the célèbe " méthode" who bears his name, will learn the techniques from suggestion of Liébeault and Bernheim in 1885.

Suggestion and Psychoanalysis

In the polemic which opposes its two professors, Bernheim and Charcot, Sigmund Freud takes a position close to the École of Salpêtrière. In 1921, reconsidering this period, he declares that its resistance to the tyranny of the suggestion is " directed later on towards the revolt against the fact that the suggestion, which would explain all, should itself be exempted of explication".

Just like Charcot, and contrary to Janet, Bernheim or Erickson, Freud makes suggestibility a feature characteristic of the Hypnose, itself comparable in a state " pathologique" objectivable. Thus, by rejecting hypnosis, he thinks of getting rid of the suggestion.

For Freud, the suggestion finds - as the Hypnose - a limit in its application because of variability of the suggestibility of the patients. Following Charcot, he considers that the model of the patients likely to be influenced should be the hystericals but that, even for these people, the technique of suggestion and/or hypnosis does not function sufficiently to found a treatment. After the construction of the model of the psychoanalytical cure, the suggestion becomes a kind of failure to the position of neutrality of the analyst who does not have to intervene in the associative process of his patient.

Many contemporaries of Sigmund Freud, the such psychiatrists Eugen Bleuler or Leopold Löwenfeld consider that the suggestion continues to play a very important part in the analysis. Thus, Löwenfeld written in an article of 1899 " the patients were subjected to a suggestive influence on behalf of the person who them analysait" and Bleuler in 1896 " it is completely possible that therapeutic successes of the " method cathartique" are quite simply based on suggestion". Freud, when with him, always maintained that the suggestion did not intervene in the analytical interpretations and construction industries.

More recently, of the analysts like Michel Neyraut or Rene Roussillon inter alia, consider that the psychoanalysis in did not finish with the question of the impact of the suggestion. Of dimensioned sound, François Roustang, in his article Suggestion with the long course , published in 1978 in the New Review of Psychoanalysis, underlines the role of the suggestion in the psychoanalytical cure. This article will be shown in 1980 in its book It does not release it more… . Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen underlines into 2002 that " the refusal of Freud to recognize the role of the suggestion corresponds théoretiquement to a very deep objectivation of the therapeutic relation, as if the word of the patients did nothing but reproduce one pure " mechanism psychique" observable of the exterieur".

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