Source: Bekhterev V. M. «Suggestion and education.» Report read at the 1st International Pedological Congress in Brussels, August 13-18, 1911.
Many examples can be cited where an extraordinary childish impressionability and suggestibility is manifested. It is sometimes enough to carelessly utter a word in front of a child about a murder or some other serious incident, and the child will already sleep anxiously at night or even undergo a night fright or a nightmare. That is why the environment and especially the environment always has a huge influence on the upbringing of the child.
The special impressionability of children is closely connected with their extraordinary suggestibility, thanks to which everything good and bad is easily instilled in the child.
How great is the importance of suggestion in a child’s life is shown, among other things, by the fact that small children easily calm down after a bruise, as soon as they blow on the bruised place.
It is further known that small children calm down in the presence of persons close to them and immediately quickly fall asleep.
It is also amazing how easily children are subjected to sensual suggestion. It suffices that the people around show a cheerful mood, and this mood immediately infects the children as well; on the other hand, the fear and confusion of the elders is immediately transmitted to the child.
Wittask reports that when looking at pictures, he managed to instill in children one or another sensory reaction at will, depending on whether he himself found pleasure or displeasure with the presented object.
Plecher also had similar observations. Putting a glass filled with not quite strong vinegar on the table, he drank it in the presence of a little girl with all signs of pleasure, after which the girl asked for the same and drank half a glass. Although the girl’s face tightened at the same time, she said «good» and soon after demanded the rest. In another case, the question: “Is your doll good?” — an energetic answer was obtained: “Yes”, but when the author departed with the remark that the doll was bad and that it was evil, the girl put the doll down with fear or threw it in a corner, although at other times she adored her.
Thanks to the amazing suggestibility, the testimonies of children suffer from untruthfulness, as most authors agree.
Plecher gives a striking example of suggestibility from his own practice to illustrate what has just been said.
He asked his disciples about 11 o’clock in the afternoon: did any of them see anything lying on his table? Nobody said anything. To his further questions, did anyone see the knife he laid down, out of 54 students, 29, that is, 57%, answered that they saw it, and moreover, a certain number of such students answered in this way, who from their place could not see anything ; 7 students even saw how he cut paper with a knife and then put the knife down, 3 how he repaired a pencil and 1 how he cut off an elastic band for physical experiments. In response to Plecher’s explanation that the knife had disappeared from the table after a break in classes, there was initially silence, then they began to find out that the boy G., who had been accused of stealing a short time before, had kept close to the table during the break in classes, as if wanting to inspect the delivered devices. In fact, the author did not take the knife out of his pocket during the entire pre-dinner time. Pupil G. left the room among the first and during the break was all the time in the school yard in close proximity to him.
How great is the inspiring influence on children of even simple questions, is demonstrated by the well-known experiments of Stern, which, by the way, show, like the previous case, what value the testimonies of children can have in court. The author presented the picture to the children under test for 3/4 of a second and demanded that the children report what they saw, after which he offered them previously prepared questions. It turned out that with a simple message, the number of false answers reached 6%, with polls it reached 33%. This result is explained by the fact that every question to some extent already has an inspiring effect on the subject.
Lipmann, conducting special experiments on the influence of suggestive questions on children, made sure that suggestibility in children of a younger age is much greater than in older children.
Kosog performed experiments on 9-year-old children with the special goal of elucidating suggestibility in individual organs. At the same time, it turned out that when testing touch, the suggestive influence could be set at 45%, in the organ of vision — at 55, in the field of hearing — at 65, in the field of smell — at 72,5-78,75, in the field of taste — 75%. . Yet 600 individual experiments yielded 390, or 65%, successful suggestive influences. At the same time, suggestibility, according to the author, was more found in a more capable student than in an average one, and in the latter more than in a less capable one; but the author admits in this case the possibility of chance.
Amazing childish suggestibility explains, among other things, such phenomena as children’s psychic epidemics, and among them one of the amazing phenomena of this kind is the children’s crusade of 1212. Is it really possible to explain otherwise than by the power of suggestion, the strange the attraction of children who, against the will of their parents, jumped out of windows to join the passing crowds of children heading to the Holy Land in order to free the Holy Sepulcher. The crazy idea to free the Coffin with the help of children’s hands completely suppressed in children any fear of the unknown and carried them under the guise of an imaginary divine mission that captivates the imagination onto the path of certain death and slavery.
Since then, such terrible childhood epidemics have not happened in history, partly, perhaps because children now usually live in conditions that preclude large concentrations of them on the streets. However, in schools, children’s mental epidemics happen all the time. They have been described by many authors, and it is hardly necessary to give examples of such school epidemics here. Most often they are expressed in the spread among children of convulsive and other forms of hysteria and hysterical chorea. Although such phenomena as hereditary disposition, anemia, etc., play a role in the origin of these childhood psychic epidemics, the immediate cause here is still a psychic contagion based on the inspiring effect of an example and the experience of a corresponding emotion. Everyone knows that one hysterical or epileptic seizure among children is enough for, in certain cases, a convulsive epidemic to develop, affecting several schoolchildren.
The influence of suggestion on a child’s mind is also proved by cases of secret flight of children to carry out distant journeys, for example, to America or to the North Pole, under the influence of reading books by Mayne Reed, Jules Verne, etc. Thus, two little 13-year-old Bavarians, having read books, captured secretly from relatives money and weapons and went on a trip to the North Pole to hunt for polar bears (Plecher).
Reading books that act on the imagination generally has a great inspiring effect on children. There are examples that children have committed serious crimes solely under the influence of reading books that describe crimes and where the criminals themselves are heroes. So, four 13-14-year-old boys, under the influence of reading robber stories, founded a gang of thieves and committed a number of large thefts (Plecher).
The same author reports how, in 1908, after a story of extortion through threatening letters sent to a wealthy Munich man demanding 100 marks, a whole series of similar stories of extortion through threatening letters followed in other parts of Germany, and The perpetrators of all these stories were children under the age of 000 years. Needless to say, these phenomena were common in Russia during the period of expropriation, and probably from Russia they spread to Germany. In Russia, they were also often committed by teenagers and children out of imitation and under the influence of descriptions that filled the columns of newspapers at that time.
Equally known are suicides under the influence of the same conditions. N. Plecher tells how one 17-year-old girl, Fanny Schneider from Wilhelmshafen, decided to commit suicide by turning on the gas jet. The reason was that she had read a novel, under the influence of which she wanted to die one day «as beautifully» as described in this novel. Already dead, she still held the book of her novel in her right hand.
Even more striking examples of childish suggestibility are pathological cases, especially cases of the development of nervous states under the influence of external impressions. Everyone knows, for example, that fright, a simple fright, is one of the frequent causes of the development of epilepsy, which in such cases often remains for life.
Also, often under the influence of experienced fear, children are subject to stuttering, which over time is fixed and becomes even more intense with new unrest.
Further, it is known that the child, once seeing convulsions, is itself subject to convulsive conditions. Thus, choreic and hysterical convulsions often develop in children. I think that these facts are so well known that it is quite superfluous to give examples of them here.
No less frequent are cases of paralysis that develop in children by suggestion. One could cite numerous examples of the development in children of such paralysis, which, once developed, also quickly disappeared with appropriate suggestion.
And here, for example, a boy of 9-10 years old, delivered to the clinic with a diagnosis of spinal cord enlargement. He had flaccid paralysis of both legs and other concomitant phenomena. The misdiagnosis, however, was discovered as soon as the electrical examination was started, for the child suddenly jumped off the bed and ran. It turned out that the boy was somehow thrown off and at the same time he heard a story about how another child became unhappy after such a fall. As a result, his gait became worse and worse, until it came to paralysis of the legs.
Such or similar cases of hysterical disorders of one kind or another in children could be pointed out many. Baginsky gives several examples where illnesses in children, having developed in a mental way, were then corrected by simple suggestion. But I will give here only one more case, which was under my supervision.
A girl of about 12 years old, running around the rooms while playing, accidentally stumbled with one side of her stomach on the corner of the piano. The bruise itself would probably not have had consequences due to its insignificance, if it were not for the fright of the child, and the groans and gasps of adults over him. As a result, the girl falls ill with paralysis of the lower extremities with contracture, from which she was freed only a few months later by a simple suggestion in hypnosis about the possibility of walking.
No less convincing evidence of children’s suggestibility is the development of sexual perversions. Although it has been recognized and is recognized by many that sexual perversions are the result of unfavorable heredity and inborn deviations, it is undoubted that, apart from the conditions of neuropathic heredity, most of them are due mainly to childish impressionability, leading to the fact that once experienced impressions, for some reason accompanied by erotic excitation, are preserved in the form of a strong association like a combination reflex, due to which the connection of two phenomena is sometimes strengthened for a lifetime — a given external impression and erotic excitation — to such an extent that each time, along with the appearance of the same impression, erotic of this excitation, under unusual conditions, the possibility of normal sexual function is disturbed and even lost.
It is hardly necessary here to go into details of what determines in general children’s impressionability and amazing children’s suggestibility. Suffice it to say that its basis, as one might think, is, on the one hand, insufficiently developed restraining mechanisms in the centers and, on the other hand, insufficient experience, the absence of a well-established worldview, as well as a poorly developed critical ability of children, due to which they easily take on faith what adults meet with criticism of reason. This is also aided by the habitual recognition of authority over elders, whose actions and words usually serve as the subject of children’s imitation and suggestion.
All of the above leaves no doubt about how great the significance of suggestion in the mental life of a child is, what effect it has on children in general, and what consequences it can lead to in certain cases.
This explains the importance of suggestion in education.
The importance of suggestion for education, as far as is known, was first pointed out by Berillon in his reports back in 66 and 87. Later, other doctors and teachers also dwelled on the importance of suggestion in the matter of education. By the way, Fogel recognizes suggestion as the main guide to correct education. «A good part of pedagogy,» he says, «rests on suggestion correctly understood and carried out.»
According to Werworn, all education rests on suggestion. The child perceives the ideas that we give him without further testing, without even having the opportunity to check to what extent the ideas that we arouse in them and which they assimilate are correct and appropriate. We tell the child: you mustn’t do this, you can’t do this, you must do it this way, it’s good, it’s bad, etc. The child accepts what is said without delving into it, and thus receives the first basic aesthetic concepts.
The initial stages of spiritual development generally consist in the assimilation of such suggestions. But all these suggestions continue to act also in the later life of adults, for what a child has learned for himself, as is known, is much stronger than what is acquired in adulthood or at a later age.
Our upbringing in general is based to a large extent on suggestion and imitation as inevitable ways of influencing parents and elders in general on children and adolescents.
The personality of the teacher for children usually has more influence than the parents, whom the children know not only from good, but also from weaknesses, while the weaknesses of the teacher remain hidden or little known to them. According to Plecher, the three main conditions of suggestion: imitation, affirmation, and repetition operate in the teacher’s personality. The child takes the words of the teacher in most cases for the absolute truth. If they are repeated often enough, then there can be no more doubt for him.