intoxication by alcohol or some other drug, mental or physical shock or exhaustion, or organic brain disease, his repressing forces become weakened and his words and actions similarly become those of a lunatic, for examples the delirium of fever and drunkenness, whose manifestations vary from patient to patient.

In diseases in which there is progressive degeneration of the nervous system, such as general paralysis, the patient gradually loses all the academic knowledge he has ever acquired in the reverse order of its acquisition until his knowledge and perception become that of a new born child. At the same time, he loses control of his instincts in exactly the reverse order of the acquisition of that control. From being careful about his financial position, be becomes a spendthrift; then he loses control of his sexual passions, and sexual crimes may occur; next his acquisitiveness becomes uncontrolled and he may become a thief; then his destructiveness, then the instinct of combativeness and cruelty to others and lastly he loses the habit of cleanliness in relation to his evacuations, which he originally acquired at the age of 2 years or perhaps earlier. For the purpose of brevity I have mentioned only a few of these stages by way of illustration; but those who are familiar with the development of children, and I suppose there are few among my present audience who are not, will observe that the control of the instincts, which is synonymous with morality, is lost in the reverse order of its evolution, the last control to come being the first to go. In this disease we can definitely state that intellectual and moral degradation proceed pari

passu.

Now let us return to a consideration of these cases in which we find that a perfectly intelligent child is a delinquent. He comes to our notice when he has reached the age of 10 or 12 years, and seldom before. The reason for this is that, although he may previously have been guilty of misdeeds common enough in childhood, his present delinquency is of such a nature as to lead the parents to consult a doctor. In other words it is recognised by the parents to be a symptom of mental disorder. The usual misdeeds are stealing, lying and destructiveness; and, on psychoanalysis, we find that it is no accident that the symptoms have appeared at puberty, for these crimes invariably have an unconscious sexual meaning. In both sexes the objects stolen have phallic significanceare symbolic of the male organ, and the thefts refer to the castrationcomplex-invariably in my experience. In the three cases of destructiveness (all boys) I have investigated, the objects destroyed were always 'containing objects,' such as the mother's jewel-case, dressing-table or

drawers, which are womb symbols. The destructiveness therefore symbolises sadistic attacks upon the mother (mother-fixation). Lying is, in some cases, merely an attempt to escape punishment; in other cases, the lies are fabrications symbolising unconscious sexual wishes, usually-in my experience of a perverse character, in some cases indicating that the child has an unconscious desire to be a member of the opposite sex1.

These cases, then, are psychoneuroses and they can usually be cured by psychoanalysis; but not always, because in some cases the resistances are so strong as to cause the patient to break away from the treatment by various devices. The point I wish to make, however, is that these are not cases of intellectual defect.

Our conclusions may thus far be summarised as follows:

(1) In both evolution and dissolution of the mind, moral and intellectual defect run parallel; but there is no evidence of inter-relationship except in the case of motherhood, when the real delinquent is the other party to the crime.

(2) Delinquency may occur in intellectually normal children from an absence of moral training.

(3) Delinquency may be a psychoneurosis occurring in an intellectually normal child, curable by psychoanalysis. In this connection, the question may arise whether defectives are more liable to psychoneuroses than normal children. My opinion is quite the reverse, viz. the psychoneurotics are mostly found among the educated intellectual classes; but, in order to stabilise this opinion, I consulted the Lady Almoner at St Thomas's Hospital and she informs me that, if the patients sent to my department for mental deficiency and organic brain disease be excluded, my patients are above the average intellectual status of the patients in other departments. My interest in this aspect of the subject was especially stimulated by a paper recently read by our President before the Psychiatrical Section of the Royal Society of Medicine, in which he gave an account of two patients who had become mentally defective in consequence of a psychoneurosis (psychical traumata, if you like) occurring in early life.

I submit that these are the three causes of delinquency in childhood. Dr East's contribution justifies me by precedent for adding a few words to include adult delinquency, including habitual criminality, although this is outside the scope of this Section of the Society.

Alcoholism is itself a psychosis and many crimes are moreover the

1 I am not here referring to cases of Pseudologia Phantastica occurring in early adult life.

result of alcoholism. Paranoia and allied paranoid states are responsible for many crimes. Both alcoholism and paranoia being psychoses, I must add that some delinquency in adults is of psychotic origin.

Hence our final conclusion is that delinquency, whether in the adult, the child, the mentally defective. or the insane, invariably results from one of these four factors:

(1) Moral defect coexisting with intellectual defect.

(2) Moral dissolution accompanying intellectual dissolution (including psychosis).

(3) Absence of moral training.

(4) Psychoneurosis.

Of each factor there are numerous degrees and this must be taken into account when we think of the crimes committed in cold blood which lead to the many noted trials at the Assizes. Here the lawyers seek and find only such factors as motive, temptation and opportunity; but the motives, temptations and opportunities, of which we read in any great trial, are such as occur to hundreds of people who do not commit crime. We must therefore take into consideration peculiarities in the psychology of the criminal himself. The four psychical factors above-mentioned are sometimes sufficient in themselves to provoke delinquency. I submit that the three legal factors are insufficient to do so by themselves, but they may be sufficient when they act upon a person already predisposed to delinquency by one or more of the psychical factors.

It always seems to me that the motives, temptations and opportunities assigned by the lawyers at any of the criminal trials, which receive so much notice in the Press, would not be sufficient to induce me to commit the same crime and I hope, for your own sakes, that you are of a corresponding opinion. On the other hand, the public interest taken in the recent case of Bywaters and Mrs Thompson seems to reveal that an enormous number of people unconsciously (or consciously) identified themselves with those criminals.

One of my reasons for rather wandering from the point at issue is that this symposium has suggested to me, as an Officer of the Society, that the formation of a Criminological Section would result in much work being done for the State in general and for this Society and Psychology in particular.

THE NATURE OF AUTO-SUGGESTION1.

BY ERNEST JONES.

FROM time to time in the course of the past fifty years or more a fresh wave of interest has been aroused in the subject of auto-suggestion. These waves fall into four or five fairly well-marked periods, but it is not proposed to give any historical description of them here. On reviewing the literature produced by these different periods one does not, I am afraid, get the impression that the last half-century has seen any serious addition to our knowledge of the subject, which remains much as it was in the days of Baragnon, seventy years ago, who discussed it under the name of automagnétisation.

That being so, it would be tempting to seek elsewhere than in scientific curiosity for the source of the interest that periodically continues to be taken in the subject, and one might in this connection throw out the following suggestions. Assuming that there really is a phenomenon of auto-suggestion, and that its therapeutic value can compare with that of the usual suggestion treatment, then it is clear that the use of it presents two features that are bound to make a wide appeal. In the first place, the idea caters to the universal desire for 'free will' and flatters the narcissistic sense of omnipotence by according with its favourite conception of the ego as a self-sufficing and self-acting agent, independent of the outer world and able to gratify all its wishes by the incantation of magic verbal formulae3. In the second place, it specifically delivers the patient from the most dreaded form of outer dependence, namely the sexual transference which psycho-analysis has shown to underlie what must for the sake of convenience be termed hetero-suggestion. The motives just indicated probably apply to the physician as well as to the

1 Read before the Medical Section of the British Psychological Society, March 22, 1923. 2 Étude du magnétisme animal, 1853, pp. 198 et seq.

3 On the narcissistic importance of words see Ferenczi, Contributions to Psycho-Analysis, 1916, pp. 194 et seq.

♦ I cannot refrain from remarking here on the very imperfect acquaintance with psychoanalytic writings displayed by McDougall in his statement that this theory of transference is "based merely on the fact that some subjects show signs of erotic excitement when in hypnosis, and on the Freudian prejudice, etc." ("A Note on Suggestion," Journal of Neurology and Psychopathology, vol. 1. p. 4.)

patient, for in treating numbers of patients en masse by 'auto-suggestion' he can gratify the hypnotist's sense of power without needing to become aware of the accompanying personal (and sexual) dependence of the patients. The medical dread of this transference relationship is well known, and I surmise that we may also attribute to it the fact that so many hypnotists have during the past forty years insisted on their preference of "suggestion in the waking state" to hypnotism proper; one need only instance the names of Bernheim, Bramwell, Forel, Van Renterghem and Vogt.

Leaving aside these questions of popular fashion and motive, we may turn to consideration of some of the still unsolved problems relating to auto-suggestion. In proposing discussion of these problems I am further moved by the consideration that so far they have received no attention from the standpoint of psycho-analysis.

The first problem of all is of course whether there is such a thing at all as auto-suggestion, i.e. whether there is any endopsychic process showing the characteristics that distinguish what we ordinarily call suggestion. When I raised this question in opening the discussion on auto-suggestion at a recent meeting of this Society my remark was evidently taken in jest, but I noted that both the reader of the paper (Dr William Brown) and all the other speakers confined what they had to say to the subject of hetero-suggestion, so that my question cannot be regarded as unjustified; incidentally, McDougall has expressed a similar scepticism1.

It is impossible to proceed, therefore, without first coming to some understanding about what are the essential characteristics of suggestion in general. Here, unfortunately, there is a lack of agreement in some important particulars2, and it is easy to see that the view adopted by a given author in these respects determines his attitude towards the problem of auto-suggestion. The difference of opinion mainly exists over which should be regarded as the most important and characteristic of the processes comprising suggestion. It is generally agreed that these can be grouped under three headings. In the first place there is the emotional rapport existing between the subject and the operator, the state determined by Durand (de Gros)3 hypotaxia and by myselfa 1 Op. cit. p. 9.

2 See Bernard Hart, "The Methods of Psychotherapy," Proc. Roy. Soc. Med. (Psych. Sect.), vol. XIII.

3 Philips (a nom de guerre), Cours théorique et pratique de Braidisme, 1860, p. 29.

4 "The Action of Suggestion in Psychotherapy," Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 1910, Vol. v. p. 219. Reprinted in my Papers on Psycho-Analysis, Third Ed., 1923, Chapter XIX.