canonized toy horse already referred to] would like you to do this/ and it was done without a murmur."
We have another analogue to hypnotic suggestion when a mother prepares her child some time beforehand for a difficult duty, telling him that she expects him to perform it. A mother writes that her boy, when about the age of two years and three months more particularly, was inclined to burst into loud but short fits of crying. "I have found [she says] they are often checked by telling him beforehand what would be expected of him, and exacting a promise that he would do the thing cheerfully. I have seen his face flush up ready to cry when he remembered his promise and controlled himself." This reminds one forcibly of the commands suggested by the hypnotizer to be carried into effect when the subject wakes.
Much more, perhaps, might be done in this direction by choosing the right moment for setting up the persistent ideas in the child's consciousness. I know a lady who got into the way of giving moral exhortation to her somewhat headstrong girl at night before the child fell asleep, and found this very effectual. It is possible that we may be able to apply this idea of preparatory and premonitory suggestion in new and surprising ways to difficult and refractory children.[1]
One other way in which the wise mother will win the child over to duty is by developing his consciousness of freedom and power. A mother, who was herself a well-known writer for children, has recorded in some notes on her children that when one of her little girls was disinclined to accede to her wish she used to say to her, "Oh, yes, I think when you have remembered how pleasant it is to oblige others you will do it." "I will think about it, mamma," the child would reply, laughing, and then go and hide her head behind a sofa pillow, which she called her thinking corner." In half a minute she would come out and say, "Oh, yes, mamma, I have thought about it and I will do it." This strikes me as an admirable combination of regulative suggestion with exercise of the young will in moral decision. It gave the child the consciousness of using her own will, and yet maintained the needed measure of guidance and control.
As the moral consciousness develops and new problems arise, new openings for such suggestive guidance occur. How valuable, for example, is the mother's encouragement of the weakly child shrinking from a difficult self-repressive action when she says with inspiring voice, "You can do it if you try." Thus, pilotlike.
- ↑ The bearings of (hypnotic) suggestion on moral education have been discussed by Guyau, Education and Heredity (English translation), chap. i. Compare also Prayer, op. cit., o. 267 f., and Compayré, op. cit., p. 262.
