Anti-Suggestive Barriers

The artful use of suggestion to stimulate the mental reserve capacities and accelerate the learning process necessitates the skilful handling of the anti-suggestive barriers we all necessarily have.

“The first task of suggestology and suggestopedia is to remove people’s prior conditioning to de-suggest, to find a way to escape the social norm and open the way to development of the personality. This is perhaps the greatest problem suggestology is confronted with, since the person must be ‘convinced’ that his potential capacity is far above what he thinks it is. The individual protects himself with psychological barriers, according to Dr. Lozanov, just as the organism protects itself from physiological barriers:

• an anti-suggestive emotional barrier which rejects anything likely to produce a feeling of lack of confidence or insecurity: “This anti-suggestive barrier proceeds from the set-up in every man.”

• an anti-suggestive barrier of man’s rational faculty, which through reasoning rejects suggestions it judges unacceptable: ‘This barrier is the conscious critical thinking’. But, very often this barrier is the camouflage of the emotional barrier.

• an ethical barrier, which rejects everything not in harmony with the ethical sense of the personality.

“These anti-suggestive barriers are a filter between the environmental stimuli and the unconscious mental activity. They are inter-related and mutually reinforcing and a positive suggestive effect can only be accomplished if these barriers are kept in mind. The overcoming of barriers means compliance with them. Otherwise suggestion would be doomed to failure. ”It is clear that the suggestive process is always a combination of suggestion and de-suggestion and is always at an unconscious or slightly conscious level.”