ON April 29th, 1912, by permission of the Budapest mounted police, I attended a demonstration by Joseph Ezer, the Tolna blacksmith, who claimed to be able to tame the wildest horse at a single attempt. The newspapers had for some considerable time been full of stories about this man’s extraordinary powers; he was said to be able to reduce the most refractory animal to docility by sheer transference of will, i.e. by suggestion, and a committee, consisting of police officials and senior cavalry officers, assembled in the yard of the police barracks for the purpose of testing the man’s abilities on a particularly unruly animal. This was Czicza, a magnificent four-and-a-half-year-old thoroughbred mare belonging to a lieutenant of Hussars, which was unusable for any purpose whatever because, though a particularly fine animal in other respects, no one had been able to shoe her. She reared and kicked at the approach of any stranger, and even her usual groom had to approach her with caution. At most she would allow him to brush her back; if he made as if to touch her legs she reared and neighed madly. As she was otherwise perfectly sound and careered vigorously round the studfarm, her condition was ascribed to ‘nervousness’ or ‘wildness’, and she had been written off for racing or stud purposes. The object now was to see whether Ezer with his mysterious skill would be able to humble Czicza’s pride and fix shoes on her still-virgin hoofs.
Ezer turned up punctually. He was a short, stocky man of peasant-like appearance, aged about thirty. He seemed pretty self-confident and chatted unconcernedly with all the important personages who had gathered to see him. The mare, which was recognized by all the experts as an outstanding thoroughbred with a first-class pedigree (she was by Kisbéröccse, a well-known Turf winner, out of Gerjer), was then brought in by her usual groom. Czicza used to allow this lad to approach her, but any attempt to lay a hand on her legs caused her to lash out in all directions.
I saw at once that Ezer did not rely exclusively on the exercise of any exceptional mental powers. The performance started by his exchanging the mare’s usual bridle for one he had brought with him. This had a number of heavy chain-rings immediately over the nose and ended in a long leading-rein. As I approached the performance with certain theoretical expectations (which I shall describe later), I prefer to quote a description of what followed by an unprejudiced reporter.1
‘The blacksmith approached the mare, talking to her all the time, distinctly, even from a distance, but with extreme tenderness; he positively cooed. Simultaneously he took the leading-rein from the stable-boy’s hands. “There, there, my beauty!” he said. “There’s no need to be frightened of me, I shan’t do you any harm! There, there, now! …” He made as if to stroke the animal’s breast, but she reared and neighed. While her legs were still in the air he bellowed at her in such a ferocious voice that he startled us all. “You filthy brute, you!” he shouted, simultaneously tugging hard at the leading-rein.2 The mare collapsed, terrified. She tried to rear and kick again, but as she did so she again heard the man’s terror-striking voice and saw his intimidating look.3 A moment later Ezer was again talking to her in the tone of a mother fondling her baby. “There, there, now; don’t be frightened, darling!” he said, his face beaming with love and tenderness. “There, there, now, my beauty!” Slowly but surely, but without at any moment betraying the slightest hesitation, he placed the flat of his hand on the mare’s neck, and from there he let it glide down to her forequarters. This caused her to rear again, almost vertically, making it look as if she were going to smash the blacksmith’s skull in with her hoofs. But he sprang into the air with the mare, bellowing again and tugging at the rein, and once more this quietened her. The first stage in Ezer’s success was that the mare ceased neighing; she obviously realized that any noise she might make would be outdone by the man in front of her. After a quarter of an hour Czicza was trembling in every limb and sweating, and her flashing eyes gradually but perceptibly lost their gleam. After half an hour she actually allowed her legs to be touched, and the blacksmith was able firmly but gently to bend her knee and stroke it. She stood on three legs, as if bewitched, holding her fourth leg in the bent position the blacksmith gave it. So it went on for an hour. Whenever she threatened to become refractory, the blacksmith bellowed at her at the top of his voice, but so long as she behaved quietly he stroked her neck and cooed at her: “Oh, you poor thing, so you’re sweating, are you? So am I! There’s nothing to be afraid of, my beauty, I shan’t punish you for that,1 I know you’re trying to be good! What a good little mare you are!”’
An hour later the blacksmith was hammering at one of the hoofs, and fifty minutes later Czicza was properly shod. True, she showed some signs of exhaustion, but she was quiet and obedient, allowed her legs to be stroked freely, and was led back to the stable.
According to the testimonials that Ezer produced, the effect on the horses he treated in this manner was permanent. They either ceased altogether to be unmanageable, or at least became much more tractable than before.
When the demonstration so admirably described by this keeneyed journalist was over, I was asked whether thought-transference, hypnosis, or suggestion had played a part in it. I replied that there was no need to talk of any extraordinary phenomena so long as the facts of the case could be explained by already familiar scientific and psychological laws. It seemed to me that they could be so explained, for the following reasons.
The psycho-analytic explanation of the results and the working of hypnosis and suggestion had enabled me to trace back all such phenomena to the lifelong survival in the individual of the element of infantile obedience.1 I had been able to show that there are two ways of inducing hypnosis: by love and by authority. The loving method (i.e. affectionate stroking and monotonous appealing, lulling talk, etc.) I called maternal hypnosis; hypnosis induced by authority (compelling, authoritative, loud-voiced commands, taking by surprise, etc.) I called paternal hypnosis.
Whether a person remained susceptible to one or other of these types of influence, or to both, depended on the history of the first four years of his life, and on his relations with his parents in particular.
Thus an adult’s susceptibility to hypnosis depended, not on any special aptitude on the part of the hypnotist, but on his own innate or acquired (i.e. phylogenetically or ontogenetically acquired) susceptibility to being deprived of his own will by love or by fear, i.e. by the educative methods to which he became accustomed in infancy. Claparède was of the opinion that this explanation went much deeper than others. 1 In the course of his very complete treatment of the subject he mentions, among other things, numerous examples from natural history to show that certain animals (frogs, guinea-pigs, chickens, etc.) have a liability, no doubt explicable by the theory of evolution, to succumb to hypnosis on receiving a sudden shock.
By staring at and gently stroking the breast and arms of an untamed female baboon the same writer was able to reduce it to a state of complete passivity and cataleptic rigidity.
He believes this sudden docility can be explained as an instinctual reaction, possibly as an attitude of orgasm expectation, and finds support for this theory in the view put forward by Freud and myself, namely, that suggestibility depends on a sexual dependence on the suggester.2
Morichau-Beauchant1 and E. Jones2 also agreed with my views on this matter, on the basis of their experiences with human beings.
There is no reason why these conclusions should not be applied to the suggestive technique of the blacksmith Ezer. He seems to have been led on his own to using a clever combination of the two possible methods of inducing submission, namely, gentleness and terror, and taming an otherwise untamable animal by a combination of paternal and maternal suggestion. This combination, because of the psychological effectiveness of opposites, made a particularly deep impression on the animal, and it is easy to believe that the subsequent effect of such a profound experience may be as lasting as certain experiences in infancy are in human beings.
True, this kind of training is at most appropriate in the case of the domesticated animals, for whom the primary virtue is obedience. A human being, however, subjected to such excesses of love and terrorization, runs the risk of permanently losing the capacity of independent action. People readily susceptible throughout their lifetime to transferred paternal or maternal suggestion and a large proportion of neurotics are recruited from children who are ‘trained’ in this manner.
There is no way of deciding a priori whether this violent method of training is disadvantageous to a horse’s character or health.
1 German original: Zb. f. Psa. (1913), 3, 83. First English translation.
1 L. Fényes in the evening newspaper Az Est of 30 April, 1912.
2 Which incidentally caused the chain-rings to strike a sharp blow on the animal’s nose.
3 Besides receiving a blow on the nose from the chain-rings.
1 The blacksmith penalized only the mare’s deliberate movements, not her unavoidable reflex actions.
1 ‘Cette théorie va bien plus profond que les autres, en cherchant à expliquer comment cette hypersuggestibilité est déclenché, par quels mécanismes particuliers des actions aussi puissantes que celles que l’on rencontre dans l’hypnose peuvent se réaliser, quel est le véhicule affectif qui va faire accepter au sujet la pilule de la suggestion donnée.’ Prof. Dr. Ed. Claparède, ‘Interpretation psychologique de l’Hypnose’, Journal für Psychologie und Neurologie, 1911, Vol. XVIII, No. 4.
2 Claparède, ‘Etat hypnoide chez un singe’, Archives des Sciences physiques et naturelles, Genève, Tome XXXII.
1 R. Morichau-Beauchant, Professeur à l’École de Médecine de Poitiers, ‘Le ‘rapport affectif’ dans la cure des Psychoneuroses,’ Gazette des hôpitaux du 14 novembre 1911.
2 Professor E. Jones (University of Toronto). ‘The Action of Suggestion in Psychotherapy’, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Boston, Dec. 1910. Vol. 5, p. 217.