ABSTRACT
The meaning of suggestion. The term suggestion is sometimes confined to the communication of a proposition which is accepted ‘ with conviction ’ through the influence of the suggestor and not on the basis of evidence.1 A wider definition includes the causing of another person ‘ to accept and obey instructions ’, explicit or implied, ‘ without other motive than the simple impulse to obey \ 2
Some of the phenomena of suggestibility appearing in early infancy are not mere acceptances of beliefs or ideas : or even mere responses through an impulse to obey. They include, as we shall see, processes in which the relative importance of the cognitive, conative and affective aspects seems to vary : in which at one time the prestige or personal influence of the suggestor is supremely important, there being little other motive to accept his suggestion. At other times there seems a strong impulse only awaiting suggestion just to set it off. Thus we shall be led to consider suggestion as including various ways in which one person acts upon another, otherwise than through rational argument, and so causing an action or a mental attitude or a belief. We may add, too, that the person responding to the suggestion is unaware that the reason for his doing so is the influence of the suggestion. We are thus approaching nearer to Rivers’s view of suggestion, namely, as ‘ a comprehensive term for the whole process whereby one mind acts upon another unwittingly ’.3 Rivers’s insistence on the unconscious, or as he says ‘ unwitting ’, nature of the process we may accept in so far as the child is not fully aware of why he responds to the suggestion. What I have called ‘ primary imitation ’ is, however, properly treated separately ; because though the imitatee (as we saw in the chapter on Imitation) may be important, the interesting nature of the action imitated is often the predominant influence.
