535. This suppression of pain has naturally been treated from the therapeutic point of view, as an end in itself; and neither physician nor patient has been inclined to inquire exactly what has occurred; - what physiological or psychological condition has underlain this great subjective relief. Yet in the eye of experimental psychology the matter is far from a simple one. We are bound to ask what has been altered. Has there been a total ablation, or some mere translation of pain? What objective change on the bodily side has occurred in nerve or tissue? and, on the mental side, how far does the change in consciousness extend? How deep does it go? Does any subliminal knowledge of the pain persist ?

The very imperfect answers which can at present be given to these questions may, at any rate, suggest directions for further inquiry.

(1) In the first place, it seems clear that when pain is inhibited in any but the most simple cases, a certain group of changes is produced whose nexus is psychological rather than physiological. That is to say, one suggestion seems to relieve at once all the symptoms which form one idea of pain or distress in the patient's mind; while another suggestion is often needed to remove some remaining symptom, which the patient regards as a different trouble altogether. The suggestion thus differs both from a specific remedy, which might relieve a specific symptom, and from a general narcotisation, which would relieve all symptoms equally. In making suggestions, moreover, the hypnotiser finds that he has to consider and meet the patient's own subjective feelings, describing the intended relief as the patient wishes it to be described, and not attempting technical language which the patient could not follow. In a word, it is plain that in this class, as in other classes of suggestion, we are addressing ourselves to a mind, an intelligence, which can of itself select and combine, and not merely to a tissue or a gland responsive in a merely automatic way.

(2) It will not then surprise us if, - pain being thus treated as a psychological entity, - there shall prove to be a certain psychological complexity in the response to analgesic suggestion.

By this I mean that there are occasional indications that some memory of the pain, say, of an operation, has persisted in some stratum of the personality; - thus apparently indicating that there was somewhere an actual consciousness of the pain when the operation was performed. Thus in the Revue de l'Hypnotisme, August 1887, Dr. Mesnet records a case where after an accouchement, rendered apparently painless by hypnotic trance, the patient remembered in a subsequent hypnotic trance the latter part of the delivery; a period, that is to say, when the length of the trial had somewhat weakened the hypnotic control. With this we may compare certain accounts of the revival of pain in dreams after operations performed under chloroform (see 535 A).

(3) Such experiences, if more frequent, might tempt us to suppose that the pain is not wholly abrogated, but merely translated to some stratum of consciousness whose experiences do not enter into our habitual chain of memories. Yet we possess (strangely enough) what seems direct evidence that the profoundest organic substratum of our being is by suggestion wholly freed from pain. It had long been observed that recoveries from operations performed in hypnotic trance were unusually benign; - there being less tendency to inflammation than when the patient had felt the knife. The same observation - perhaps in a less marked degree - has since been made as to operations under chemical anaesthesia. The shock to the system, and the irritation to the special parts affected, are greatly diminished by chloroform. And more recently Professor Delbceuf, by an experiment of great delicacy on two symmetrical wounds, of which one was rendered painless by suggestion, has distinctly demonstrated that pain tends to induce and keep up inflammation (see 534 A).

Thus it seems that pain is abrogated at once on the highest and on the lowest level of consciousness; yet possibly in some cases (though not usually, see 535 B) persists obscurely in some stratum of our personality into which we gain only occasional and indirect glimpses. And if indeed this be so, it need in no way surprise us. We need to remember at every point that we have no reason whatever to suppose that we are cognisant of all the trains of consciousness, or chains of memory, which are weaving themselves within us. I shall never attain on earth - perhaps I never shall in any world attain - to any complete conspectus of the variously interwoven streams of vitality which are, in fact, obscurely present in my conception of myself.