Two Cases of Induced Insanity

Suggestion plays an important part in the psychology of nations just as it does in the life of the individual, and it can sometimes be of supreme importance. In times of major social trends, of historical events in which the individual's normal critical sense and inhibitory ideas lose their restraining power under the influence of universal excitement, the mental influencing of the mass of the people assumes extraordinary proportions. In the first phase of this war we ourselves witnessed a special efflorescence of suggestive processes; the surprise of the experience increased the receptivity of the popular mind to suggestive influences, made it less discerning and more credulous, and its sensitivity, strained by eager expectancy and fear, reacted uninhibitedly to every external influence. How swift was the spread of fantastic spy stories and the wildest rumours of victories or defeats, and what forms did not food hoarding take.

In individual life suggestion plays an even bigger part. All education, for instance, depends, strictly speaking, on suggestion, for the transfer of ideas and intellectual content owes its strength solely to the suggestive resources at the disposal of the person in authority.

Such suggestive influences can sometimes be pathological in nature: in the form of mass suggestion they can take the form of psychical epidemics such as were especially frequent in the Middle Ages and occurred sporadically in later times (religious mania in Hesse, Sweden, etc.); and in the individual they can take the form of the illness known to us under the clinical picture of induced insanity.

In the strict sense of the term this means the transfer of the delusional ideas of a mentally ill person to another who has hitherto been mentally well but takes over the former's delusional ideas and works them up into a content of his own consciousness. The transferability of the delusional ideas depends among other things on their credibility, their plausibility. Thus it