by Colin Wilson
Hudson himself became convinced that he could also perform miracles of healing with the aid of the subjective mind and decided to try to cure a relative of severe rheumatism that had almost killed him. The man lived a thousand miles away. Hudson decided that the best time to send “healing suggestions” was on the edge of sleep, when the “objective mind” is passive – exactly as in hypnosis. On 15 May 1890, he told a number of friends that he meant to start the experiment. A few months later one of the friends met the invalid and found that he was well again; the attacks had ceased and he was working normally. Asked when the attacks ceased, he said, “About mid-May” – exactly when Hudson had started his “experiments”.
Hudson claimed that he went on to cure about five hundred people in the same way. He failed in only two cases and these – oddly enough – were patients who had been told that he intended to try to cure them.
This, Hudson believed, underlined another peculiarity of the subjective mind: its powers have to work spontaneously, without self-consciousness. As soon as it becomes self-conscious, it freezes up, like the hand of a schoolboy when the teacher looks over his shoulder as he is writing. This also explains why so many “psychics” fail when they are tested by skeptics. It is like trying to make love in a crowded public square.
Because we have two minds, our powers tend to interfere with one another. In the 1870s a stage hypnotist named Carl Hansen loved to demonstrate a spectacular trick; he would tell the hypnotized subject that he (the subject) was about to become as rigid as a board. The subject was then placed across two chairs, with his head on one and his heels on the other, and several people would sit or stand on his stomach; he never bent in the middle. What happened was that the objective mind had been put to sleep, and the hypnotist then took over the role of the objective mind. Normally, “you” tell your body to stand up or sit down. But “you” are often negative or tired or unsure of yourself, so your “orders” are given in a hesitant voice. We are undermined by self-doubt. The hypnotist delivers his orders like a sergeant major, and this has the effect of unlocking the powers of the subjective mind. It obviously follows that if you could learn to give orders with the same assurance, you would also be capable of “miraculous” feats.
But in that case, why aren’t self-confident people capable of miraculous feats? Because they have developed the objective mind, the conscious “self” that copes with reality, rather than the subjective mind. Genius – and miracles – is about contact between the two minds.
Hudson was also certain that all so-called psychic phenomena are due to the powers of the subjective mind. He attended a séance at which a pencil wrote of its own accord on a slate, delivering messages that were relevant to Hudson and to the other “sitter”, a general. Yet when thinking it over later, Hudson concluded that nothing was written that could not have emanated from the mind of the medium, if the medium had telepathic powers. He decided that the medium had – unconsciously – read the mind of his sitters and then used the miraculous powers of his own subjective mind to make the pencil write on the slate. And if that was possible, Hudson argued, then all psychical phenomena, including ghosts and poltergeists, could be explained in the same way. In fact, Hudson was ahead of his time. It would be several years before psychical researchers came to the conclusion that poltergeists are due to the unconscious minds of disturbed adolescents.
Here it could be argued that Hudson was carried away by his own brilliant insights into the powers of the subjective mind. I have argued elsewhere that the evidence for “spirits” cannot be so easily dismissed. In fact, he was quite definitely wrong when he came to deal with the curious power known as psychometry, the ability of certain people to “read” the history of an object they hold in their hands. Some of the most remarkable tests in the history of psychical research were carried out by a professor of geology named William Denton. He would wrap geological and archaeological specimens in thick brown paper packages, shuffle them until he no longer knew which was which, then get his “psychometrists” – his wife and sister-in-law – to describe the contents and history of packages chosen at random. Their accuracy was amazing – for example, a fragment of volcanic lava from Pompeii produced an accurate description of the eruption, while a fragment of tile from a Roman villa produced a description of Roman legions and a man who looked like a retired soldier. However, this latter experiment worried Denton, because the tile came from the villa of the orator Cicero, who was tall and thin, and the “soldier” was described as heavily built. It was only some years later, after publishing his first account, that Denton learned that the villa had also belonged to the Roman dictator Sulla, who did correspond accurately to the description.
But all this leaves Hudson’s central insight untouched: that man has two minds and it is because of these two minds impede each other instead of supporting each other that our powers are so limited. His basic proposition is that if we could learn to tap the powers of the subjective mind, we would develop into supermen.
Hudson’s book became a bestseller and went into edition after edition between 1893 and Hudson’s death in 1903. Why, then, did its remarkable new theory not make a far greater impact? The reason can be summarized in a single word: Freud. The objective and subjective minds obviously correspond roughly to Freud’s ego and id – or conscious and unconscious. But there is a major difference. Freud was a pessimist who saw the unconscious mind as a passive force, a kind of basement full of decaying rubbish that causes disease – or neurosis. The conscious mind is the victim of these unconscious forces, which are basically sexual in nature. Hudson would have been horrified at such a gloomy and negative view of the subjective mind. But because Freud was a “scientist” and Hudson was merely a retired newspaper editor, the latter’s achievement was ignored by psychologists.
Yet the “two minds” theory was to receive powerful scientific backing a few decades later. Even in the nineteenth century it had been recognized that the two halves of our brains have different functions. The speech function resides in the left half of the brain; doctors observed that people with left-brain damage became inarticulate. The right side of the brain controls recognition of shapes and patterns, so that an artist who had right-brain damage would lose all artistic talent. One man could not even draw a clover leaf; he put the three leaves of the clover side by side, on the same level.
Yet an artist with left-brain damage only became inarticulate; he was still as good an artist as ever. And an orator with right- brain damage could sound as eloquent as ever, even though he could not draw a clover leaf.
The left brain also governs logic and reason, which are involved in such tasks as adding up a laundry list or doing a crossword puzzle. The right is involved in such activities as musical appreciation or facial recognition. In short, you could say that the left is a scientist and the right is an artist.
One of the odd facts of human physiology is that the left side of the body is controlled by the right side of the brain, and vice versa. No one quite knows why this is, except that it probably makes for greater integration. If the left brain controlled the left side and the right brain the right side, there might be “frontier disputes”; as it is, each has a foot firmly in the other’s territory.
If you removed the top of your head, the upper part of your brain – the cerebral hemispheres – would look like a walnut with a kind of bridge connecting the two halves. This bridge is a knot of nerves called the corpus callosum, or commissure. But doctors learned that there are some freaks who possess no commissure yet seem to function perfectly well. This led them to wonder if they could prevent epileptic attacks by severing the commissure. They tried it on epileptics and it seemed to work. The fits were greatly reduced, and the patients seemed to be unchanged. It led the doctors to wonder what the function of the commissure was. Someone suggested it might be to transmit epileptic seizures; another suggested it might be to keep the brain from sagging in the middle.
In the 1950s experiments in America b
egan to shed a good deal of light on the problem. Someone noticed that if a “split-brain” patient knocked against a table with his left side, he didn’t seem to notice. It began to emerge that the split-brain operation had the effect of preventing one half of the brain from learning what the other half knew. If a cat was taught a trick with one eye covered, then asked to do it with the other eye covered, it was baffled. It became clear that we literally have two brains.10
Moreover, if a split-brain patient was shown an apple with the left eye and an orange with the right, then asked what he had just seen, he would reply, “Orange”. Asked to write what he had just seen with his left hand, he would write Apple. A split-brain patient who was shown a dirty picture with her right brain blushed; asked why she was blushing, she replied truthfully, “I don’t know”. The person who was doing the blushing was the one who lived in the right half of her brain. She lived in the left half.
This is true of all of us (except left-handed individuals, whose brain hemispheres are reversed). The person you call “you” lives in the left half – the half that “copes” with the real world. The person who lives in the right is a stranger.
You might object that you and I are not split-brain patients. That makes no difference. Mozart once remarked that tunes were always walking into his head fully fledged, and all he had to do was write them down. Where did they come from? Obviously, from the right half of his brain, the “artist”. Where did they go to? To the left half of his brain, where Mozart lived. In other words, Mozart was a split-brain patient. And if Mozart was, then so are the rest of us. The person we call “I” is the scientist. The “artist” lives in the shadows, and we are scarcely aware of his existence, except in moods of deep relaxation or of “inspiration”. We all become more “right brain”, for example, after an alcoholic drink; it makes us more aware of our “other half”. It does this, to some extent, by anesthetizing the left brain (which explains why you find it harder to do a mathematical problem when you have had a few glasses of wine). This is why alcohol is so popular. The same – unfortunately – applies to other drugs.
We can see that the left and right halves of the brain correspond roughly to Hudson’s objective and subjective minds. And how does this help us to understand hypnosis? Well, it would seem that the hypnotist “anesthetizes” the left brain – makes it fall asleep – while the right remains wide awake. If Hudson is correct – and there seems every reason to believe that he is – the right brain is then able to operate with the full powers of the subjective mind. There seem to be obvious clues here to how we could all make better use of our powers.
According to modern medicine, hypnosis merely enables you to relax and become less self-conscious. It has no power to make you “superhuman”. Yet once again, this is contradicted by the facts. We have already seen that the Marquis de Puységur was able to communicate telepathically with Victor Race when Victor was in a trance. And anyone who takes the trouble to look into the four volumes of Eric J. Dingwall’s Abnormal Hypnotic Phenomena – which is devoted mainly to the nineteenth century – will find dozens of cases that leave no doubt whatever that “telepathy under hypnosis” has been demonstrated over and over again. One of Dingwall’s most astonishing accounts concerns the brothers Alexis and Adolphe Didier, who could both perform remarkable paranormal feats under hypnosis. For example, the two would play a game of cards with cards that were turned facedown. Nevertheless, one brother would be able to tell his partner which cards the other held, as if he were looking over his shoulder.
The father of the Didiers was himself a remarkable hypnotic subject who would sometimes go into a trance at the breakfast table while reading the newspaper – and continue reading the newspaper although he had dropped it onto the table and was not looking at it. Alexis, the more talented of the two brothers, was particularly expert at “traveling clairvoyance”. The person he was talking to could ask him to describe what he (the “client”) had been doing that day, or to “travel” to his home and describe it. This sounds as if it could be explained by telepathy – except that Didier could tell the client things he did not know himself. On one occasion Didier described a magistrate’s study with great accuracy and mentioned that there was a bell on the table; the magistrate denied this. But when he got home he found that Didier was correct; his wife had placed the bell there since he had left home.
Alfred Russel Wallace, codeveloper (with Darwin) of the theory of evolution in the mid-nineteenth century, became interested in hypnosis when he was a young schoolteacher, and he discovered that some of his pupils were excellent hypnotic subjects. One boy would actually share Wallace’s perceptions when in a trance; if Wallace pinched his own arm, the boy started and rubbed his arm; if Wallace tasted sugar, the boy smiled and licked his lips; if Wallace tasted salt, the boy grimaced.
In the 1880s, the French psychologist Pierre Janet was able to place one of his patients, a woman named Leonie, in a hypnotic trance from the other side of Le Havre and summon her to come to him. The experiments were performed under test conditions under the auspices of the Society for Psychical Research.
Almost a century later Dr Gustav Pagenstecher discovered that one of his patients, Maria Reyes de Zierold, was able to share his own sensations, tasting substances he put on his tongue and wincing if he held his hand over a lighted match. The first time he hypnotized her, she told him that her daughter was listening at the door; Pagenstecher opened the door and found that this was true. This sounds as if she may simply have heard the girl outside; but she was also able to describe what Pagenstecher was doing when he was in the next room. Under hypnosis, Maria also became an excellent psychometrist and could describe with great accuracy the history of objects placed in her hands.11
All of this obviously raises a fascinating possibility – that hypnosis may not merely involve placing someone in a trance through suggestion but that it might be the direct influence of one mind upon another. In Over the Long High Wall, writer J. B. Priestley tells how, at a boring literary dinner in New York, he told the person sitting next to him that he intended to try to make one of the poets wink at him. He chose a serious-looking woman, “no winker”, and concentrated on her. After a while she turned and winked at him. Priestley’s neighbour was inclined to doubt whether it had been a wink, but after the dinner, the woman came up to him to apologize for winking at him, remarking, “I don’t know what made me do it”.
This brings us back to the question raised at the beginning of this article: whether a hypnotist can influence someone to commit a criminal act against his will. The evidence suggests that it is possible. In 1865, in France, a vagabond named Thimotheus Castellan was tried for abducting and raping a young peasant girl named Josephine. He had knocked on the door of her father’s cottage, begging shelter for the night. The next morning, when the father and brothers had gone off to work, neighbours noticed him making passes in the air behind Josephine’s back. Over the midday meal, Castellan made a movement with his fingers, and she felt her senses leaving her; he then carried her into the next room and raped her. She said she wanted to resist but was paralyzed. Later, he left and took her with him, demonstrating his power over her at various farms where they stayed by making her walk on all fours like an animal. He was finally arrested and sentenced to twelve years in prison.
In 1934 a Heidelberg hypnotist named Franz Walter met a woman on a train and caused her to pass into a trance simply by taking her hand. After raping her, he ordered her to work for him as a prostitute. He subsequently ordered her to make several attempts on her husband’s life; when these failed, he ordered her to commit suicide. She was saved by passersby on two occasions. Finally, a police surgeon guessed that she had been hypnotized and ordered to keep silent about it; he succeeded in “unlocking” her memory, and Franz Walter was sentenced to ten years in prison.
In 1985 two Portuguese criminals, both named Manuel, succeeded in parting a number of victims from their life savings through hypnosis. One woman described how s
he had simply been talking to one of the men when he took her hand and she felt “cold all over”, then went into a stupor in which she obeyed orders to go home and withdraw her savings; she handed over more than £1,000. The two men were caught by accident when a hairdresser heard one of her clients agreeing (over the telephone) to meet them and give them money; she had heard of the earlier case and notified the police. The men were deported.12
All of this seems to suggest that there is a telepathic element in hypnosis – of one mind directly influencing another – and that legends about real-life Svengalis may have some basis in fact. Ferenc Volgyesi, whose book Hypnosis in Men and Animals has already been mentioned, was convinced that legends about the “hypnotic gaze” of the snake were not without foundation; he cites examples of toads, frogs, and rabbits being “transfixed by a snake’s gaze”, which involved the expansion of its pupils; but he has photographs of other creatures engaged in “battles of will” in which they simply stare at each other. In one case, a toad won a “battle of will” against a snake.
This is not, of course, to deny the validity of the generally accepted theory of hypnosis – that it is basically a matter of suggestion. Hypnosis, as we have seen, is based on a state of abstraction, and hypnotists undoubtedly create this state by suggestion – usually by suggesting that the subject is becoming sleepy, that his limbs are becoming heavy, and so on. But it is the right brain – the “other you” – that accepts these suggestions and puts “you” to sleep, while it remains wide awake. Its powers are then at the disposal of the hypnotist (which suggests, in turn, that a good hypnotic subject ought to be able to cure people at a distance, as Hudson did).