FEAR AND THE HYPNOIDAL STATE
In my work on “Sleep” I report a series of interesting experiments
carried out by me on guinea pigs, rabbits, cats, dogs, children,
and adults.[4] I discovered one of the most important states of
animal life, a state which I termed _hypnoidal_.
The study shows that in almost every animal, from the lowest to
the highest, from frog to man, a somewhat sudden change of the
usual environment deprives that animal of its activities and its
functions. If the change is not too intense and prolonged, the
animal merges into the hypnoidal state in which the lost functions
are restored. During this hypnoidal state the functions are
weakened, the animal may be regarded in a state of invalidism, its
reactions being enfeebled, practically speaking, paretic.
Perhaps it is advisable to approach the phenomena from their
more striking aspect. In seizing a triton, salamander, or frog,
and stretching it on the table, one will observe with surprise
that the animal remains in the same position given it. The most
uncomfortable and bizarre position may be given to the limbs, and
still the animal will not move. Testing the extremities one finds
them rigid and resisting. Something similar we find in the hypnotic
condition, when under the suggestion that the extremities are
rigid, and they cannot be moved by the subject. The same can be
done with a lobster and other animals of the same type.
Everyone has heard of the _experimentum mirabile_ made by Kirchner
in the seventeenth century. A rooster or hen is seized, the legs
are tied with a string and the bird is put on the ground. A piece
of chalk is passed over the beak,--the chalk tracing a line
from beak to some distant point on the ground. When the bird is
released, it remains in the same position. Some explain that the
animal is kept prisoner, because it “imagines” that it is bound by
the line of chalk. The chalk, however, is unnecessary. The animal
may be seized, shouted in its ear, or kept down forcibly, and the
same result will happen. This state has been termed by Preyer
“cataplexy.” The phenomenon can also be produced in insects, in
mollusca.
Many investigators have been interested in this phenomenon. I have
devoted a good deal of work to this condition which is also found
in mammals in which it is induced by the fear instinct. In mammals,
however, the state of cataplexy is not necessarily accompanied
by rigidity, although it may be present, but there is a complete
loss of voluntary activity. Horses tremble violently and become
paralyzed at the sight of a beast of prey, such as a tiger or a
lion. At the sight of a serpent, monkeys are known to be in such an
intense state of fear that they are unable to move, and thus fall
easy victims to the reptile.
Under similar conditions birds are so paralyzed by fear that they
are unable to fly away from the source of danger, and fall a prey
to the threatening serpent. The birds resemble very much the
hypnotized subject in a state of catalepsy. Although the gibbons
are the most agile of all the simians, they are easily taken by
surprise, and captured without any resistance,--they are paralyzed
by fear. Seals when pursued on land become so frightened that they
are unable to offer any opposition to their pursuers, and let
themselves easily be captured and killed.
In large cities one can often witness nervous people affected
suddenly by the presence of danger; they remain immobile, in the
middle of the street, becoming exposed to fatal accidents. The fear
instinct paralyzes their activities, they are petrified with terror.
I was told by people who have experienced the effects of
earthquakes, that during the time of the earthquakes they were
unable to move, and the same condition was observed in animals,
especially in young dogs. It is hard to move cattle and horses from
a burning stable, on account of the fear of fire which obsesses
the animals, so that they become paralyzed, suffocated and burnt
to death. So vital is the fear instinct that the least deviation
from the normal state is apt to play havoc with the safety of the
individual.
The fear instinct is the most primitive, the most fundamental,
and the most powerful of all instincts. When the fear instinct is
let loose, the animal succumbs. We should not wonder, therefore,
that with the aberration of the fear instinct, the life guardian
of the individual, all orientation is lost, the animal becomes
demoralized, and the organism goes to destruction. No other
instinct can surpass the fear instinct in its fatal effects.
The more one studies the facts, the more one examines various
psychopathic, functional maladies, without going into any
speculations and without being blinded by foregone conclusions
and pseudo-scientific hypotheses, the more one is driven to the
conclusion that the fear instinct is at the bottom of all those
nervous and mental aberrations, conscious and subconscious.
The infinite varieties of functional psychopathic diseases are the
consequences of some abnormal association with the fear instinct
which alone gives rise to the infirmities characteristic of
functional mental maladies.
President Stanley Hall accepts my view of the subject. In a recent
paper he writes: “If there be a vital principle, fear must be one
of its close allies as one of the chief springs of the mind”....
In spite of his former psychoanalytic inclinations President Hall
asserts now that “Freud is wrong in interpreting this most generic
form of fear as rooted in sex. _Sex anxieties themselves are
rooted in the larger fundamental impulse of self-preservation with
its concomitant instinct of fear._” This is precisely the factor
and the teaching which I have been expounding in all my works on
Psychopathology.
So deeply convinced is Professor Stanley Hall of the primitive
and fundamental character of the fear instinct, that he refers to
the facts that “if the cerebrum is removed, animals, as Goltz and
Bechterev have proved, manifest very intense symptoms of fear, and
so do human monsters born without brains, of hemicephalic children,
as Sternberg and Lotzko have demonstrated.”
The fear instinct is of such vital importance that it is found
in animals after decerebration, and persists in animals after
spino-vago-sympathetic section. Sherrington found the fear instinct
present in dogs after section of the spinal cord and also after
complete section of the vago-sympathetic nerves, thus removing
all sensations coming from the viscera, muscles, and skin, below
the shoulder, leaving only the sensations from the front paws,
head and cerebral activity. The dog was a sort of cerebral animal.
The whole body below the shoulder, skin, muscle, viscera, were all
anaesthetic, and yet the fear instinct remained intact.
On the other hand, after complete ablation of the cerebral
hemispheres of the dog, so that the animal became spinal, all
cerebral functions being totally wiped out, Goltz invariably found
that the fear instinct remained unimpaired. _The fear instinct is
inherent in animal life--existence. As long as there is life, there
is fear._
So potent, all embracing, and all pervading is the fear instinct,
that the physician must reckon with it in his private office, in
the hospital, and in the surgical operating room. In a number of
my cases psychognosis, the study and examination of mental states,
clearly reveals the fact that even where the neurosis has not
originated in a surgical trauma, surgical operations reinforced,
developed, and fixed psychopathic conditions.
The fear instinct is one of the most primitive and most fundamental
of all instincts. Neither hunger, nor sex, nor maternal instinct,
nor social instinct can compare with the potency of the fear
instinct, rooted as it is in the conditions of life primordial.
When the instinct of fear is at its height it sweeps before it
all other instincts. Nothing can withstand a panic. Functional
psychosis in its full development is essentially a panic. A
psychogenetic examination of every case of functional psychosis
brings one invariably to the basic instinct of life, self
preservation and the fear instinct.
As Whittier puts it:
Still behind the tread I hear
Of my life companion, Fear,
Still a shadow, deep and vast
From my westering feet is cast;
Wavering, doubtful, undefined,
Never shapen, nor outlined.
From myself the Fear has grown,
And the shadow is my own.
FOOTNOTE:
[4] The experimental work was carried on by me at the physiological
laboratory, Harvard Medical School, and in my private laboratory,
and published in my work on “Sleep.”