Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis

by Waterfield, Robin

  One thing hypnosis is not is sleep. It's true that the word is derived from the Greek word hypnos, meaning ‘sleep’, but this is because the closest analogy to hypnosis in familiar experience is sleep. But there are differences, the most important of which is that when hypnotized you are aware of incoming sensory data, such as the hypnotist's voice, and can carry on a conversation. In fact, because you are focused on the hypnotist's voice, to the virtual exclusion of a great deal of other stuff that would normally be distracting you, you're more awake than at other times, and you may well feel an increased vigilance.

  The main thing that misleads is the term ‘hypnotism’. Almost every book I've read credits the Scottish physician James Braid with the coining of the term in his 1843 book Neurypnology. Even this is not strictly accurate, since Braid had already used the term ‘hypnotic sleep’ the year before, in an open letter sent to the Reverend Hugh McNeile (or M'Neile) on 4 June 1842. In this letter he seeks to defend himself against the charges of satanism which McNeile had brought against him (while not naming him), and to distinguish hypnosis from its precursor, animal magnetism, which he declares to be founded on ‘a gratuitous assumption, unsupported by fact’. In an incidental way, he describes the ‘stupor’ into which his subjects have been put as ‘hypnotic sleep’.

  However, although Braid certainly popularized the term in the English-speaking world, and may have invented it independently, it had been in use some thirty-five years earlier in France and was a favourite of the French writer Etienne Félix d'Hénin du Cuvillers (1755–1841), a mesmerist with a classical bent, who edited the important journal Archives du magnétisme animal, issued from 1820–3. Braid later came to regret the term, since he came to associate hypnosis not so much with sleep as with fixation. So he coined another word, ‘monoideism’, but it never caught on. By the same token, although stage and fictional hypnotists talk about the ending of the trance as ‘waking up’, if hypnosis is not a form of sleep, talk of ‘waking up’ is incorrect and misleading, and some modern hypnotists prefer the term ‘dehypnotization’. I'd be prepared to bet that it doesn't catch on either.

  The story of hypnosis is an adventure story. As a species, we are endowed with curiosity. We climb mountains, explore the depths of space and the oceans; we split the atom just to see what happens, and then we have to take responsibility for the results of our curiosity. We deny this curiosity at our peril, running the risk of stagnation or attempting the impossible task of turning back the clock. Hypnosis has for many years been one of our main tools for exploring the further reaches of the mind, and it remains true today that we know less about some of the workings of the mind than we do about the moon. Without wishing to sound too like a cheap stage hypnotist – and I hope your eyelids are not already getting heavy – I would like to take you on this historical journey.

  1

  Hypnosis in Fact and Fiction

  When you stop to think about it, it's very strange that at a few well-chosen words quite a number of us – perhaps all of us – can fall into a sleep-like state in which we are more open than usual to suggestions from a person we trust, and capable of some unusual mental and physical feats. It is an oddity, a reminder of the extraordinary capacities and capabilities of the human brain and mind. I would like the reader to keep this in mind throughout: you are bigger than you think you are, capable of more than you imagine. In a book of this length, the facts about hypnosis may start by repetition to seem ordinary. They are not. Since these extraordinary phenomena are produced by the human mind, it follows that the human mind – yours and mine – is extraordinary in its capabilities.

  Although my main purpose is to tell the story of hypnotism from a historical perspective, it will help to devote a preliminary chapter to laying some ghosts and building some bridges. There are two topics to cover: what people generally think of hypnotism, and what actually happens.

  Popular Conceptions of Hypnotism from Fiction

  Everybody has heard of Svengali. You can even look him up in a dictionary, since his name has entered the English language. My Chambers dictionary gives the following definition: ‘A person who exerts total mental control over another, usually for evil ends.’

  George du Maurier, the creator of Svengali, was actually a successful cartoonist for Punch. One day, late in the 1880s, he outlined to his friend, the American novelist Henry James, the plot of a story. James was impressed and told him he ought to write it down. ‘But I can't write!’ protested du Maurier, and offered the plot to his friend. Henry James refused, saying that it was too valuable a gift, and so it was left to du Maurier himself to tell the tale, which was published in 1894 as Trilby.

  Trilby tells the story of Trilby O'Ferrall, a young artist's model in Paris. Three young English art students are in love with her, and she becomes engaged to one of them, William Bagot (who is nauseatingly called ‘Little Billie’ throughout the book). But their relationship breaks down and she falls into the clutches of Svengali, a Jew ( Jews were often thought in Victorian times to have mesmeric powers), gaunt and grim, with a pointed beard and dark, staring eyes. Svengali, from Hungary, is a musician, and by the use of hypnotism he turns Trilby, who has a resonant speaking voice but is tone deaf, into an outstanding singer.

  The book is not as melodramatic as the many film versions of it would have one believe, except in du Maurier's own illustrations. Nor is mesmerism as pervasive in the story as in the films. Svengali displays his hypnotic power early in the book by alleviating a neuralgic pain from which Trilby is suffering. A little later he tries to hypnotize her again, against her will, as a way of gaining control over her, because he wants to marry her, and is foiled only by the bluff Englishmen, who look after her and are deeply suspicious of Svengali. So when Svengali and Trilby reappear, later in the book, as a married couple, the great diva and her manager, we know he's been up to his tricks. In the middle of a triumphant tour of Europe, Svengali dies in the theatre, Trilby's gift fails her and she makes a laughing stock of herself; she can sing only when entranced and fixed by his eyes. After Svengali's death, her former life as an international star seems totally unreal, only vaguely remembered, if at all. She remembers only his kindness to her, not his bullying and physical violence. ‘There were two Trilbys’, as du Maurier puts it in the book – or, in psychological parlance, her hypnotized self was dissociated from her waking self.

  Du Maurier's novel was a huge success on both sides of the Atlantic, selling over 200,000 copies in the first year alone. Trilby's songs from the book were sung by socialites at parties, and the book was soon turned into a stage play. But the plot is not as original as du Maurier might have pretended to Henry James. It's not just that a number of earlier novels had featured an evil, manipulative mesmerist or hypnotist. James Braid, the Scottish doctor who exploded the myth of magnetism and introduced hypnotism, wrote in 1850 of how he hypnotized a musically incompetent girl and took her through some of the most difficult exercises in the repertoire of Jenny Lind, the soprano, known as the ‘Swedish Nightingale’, who was conquering the world at the time. Moreover, in Alexandre Dumas's Memoirs of a Physician, first published in French in 1848, Joseph Balsamo mesmerizes Lorenza Feliciani, after saving her from rape, and marries her while she is under his spell. She, too, manifests two different personalities: in a trance she loves her husband and is grateful to him for rescuing her from the bandits; but when ‘awake’ she hates him and longs to be allowed to go to the convent where she was heading when she was set upon by the bandits.

  But the success of Trilby has made Svengali the prototype, and the deepest spell cast by him has been over future fictional treatments of hypnosis, and hence over the minds of generations of audiences. Unwittingly, we have all taken in false beliefs, such as the two perpetuated by du Maurier, that a person can be kept in a permanent hypnotic trance and that we can be made by a hypnotist to do something we would not ordinarily do. The evil Medina in John Buchan's 1924 thriller The Three Hostages also keeps his victims in a perm
anent trance. Total dominance of will through hypnosis features prominently in numerous cheap thrillers, but also in more upmarket treatments. Cipolla, the deformed and boastful conjuror and stage hypnotist of Thomas Mann's Mario and the Magician (1930) likes to impose his will on members of the audience even to the extent of humiliating them. In Somerset Maugham's slightly ponderous tale The Magician (1908), the evil Haddo (a character based on Aleister Crowley, whom Maugham knew) hypnotizes Margaret in order to revenge himself upon her fiancé by taking her away from him. His will completely dominates hers, and the evil in him brings out the latent evil side of her nature. At one point in Peter Carey's excellent Jack Maggs (1997) the hypnotist's control over his subject's will is so total that the subject, implausibly, cries out: ‘Let me wake up!’

  The Russian monk Rasputin was evidently a larger-than-life character, and over the years has become even more so in various fictional treatments. In the 1966 Rasputin, the Mad Monk (a poor movie salvaged only by Christopher Lee's efforts in the title role), he gets women to stare into his eyes: ‘Look deep into my eyes. Think only of me. Listen and obey.’ They are putty in his hands, to satisfy his sexual appetite and his ambition. He even uses hypnosis to get a woman with whom he has grown bored to commit suicide. To many people's minds Rasputin, Svengali and even Dracula merge, because of the similarity of their treatment on film: the camera pans in on their piercing eyes – never better than in the original 1931 Dracula film, starring Bela Lugosi, or in the 1932 Svengali with John Barrymore. But, at the risk of spoiling the fantasy, I'm sorry to have to say that in actual fact Rasputin did not practise hypnotism. Not only did he consistently deny that he did so, but in February 1914 – that is, towards the end of his life (he was assassinated in December 1916), long after he had become famous for his healing powers – he took lessons from a hypnotist called Gerasim Papandato, nicknamed the Musician, because he was afraid his powers were waning and he wanted to supplement them by learning hypnotism. But I doubt that future film-makers will let the truth stand in the way of a good story.

  Fiction has steadily perpetuated the idea that women are more liable to be entranced than men. The sexual undertones of this are rarely brought out into the open (or are at least treated with some delicacy, as in Maugham's The Magician or Henry James's 1874 short story ‘Professor Fargo’), but The Power of Mesmerism: A Highly Erotic Narrative of Voluptuous Facts (1880) is a piece of anonymously written Victorian pornography which goes all the way. The hero of the book has learnt hypnotism at school, and throughout the book uses it to seduce others, until the licentious side of their natures has been awoken enough for hypnotism and convenient amnesia to be unnecessary. Within a few pages he has had sex with his sister, mother, father and school friends – often in threesomes and foursomes. And so the wearisome book proceeds. Where films are concerned, Barbra Streisand remarks at one point in On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970) to her hypnotist (Yves Montand): ‘That's quite a weapon you've got there. I mean, you guys must have one glorious night after another.’

  The fascination of film directors with hypnotism is shown by the fact that as early as 1909 D.W. Griffith, who is best known for his slightly later masterpieces The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, made a film called The Criminal Hypnotist. No copies of this movie exist, unfortunately. The earliest extant film in which hypnotism plays a major part is the 1919 Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari, directed by Robert Wiene. This atmospheric classic of expressionist cinema reflects both the main ideas of Trilby – the evil hypnotist and permanent entrancement.

  Dr Caligari appears as a fairground huckster, offering to predict the future through his somnambulist, Cesare, who has reputedly been kept entranced for twenty-five years. But Caligari also uses Cesare to carry out murders. Things go badly wrong when Cesare fails to murder Jane Olsen, the girlfriend of the film's hero, Francis. Her beauty wakens him from his trance, and he soon drops dead. Caligari is chased by Francis back to the insane asylum of which he turns out to be the head doctor. Francis recruits the help of the other doctors; they search his office and find indisputable evidence that the doctor took control of a somnambulist patient, in order to try to repeat the experiments of a mad monk of the eleventh century called Caligari, who toured with a somnambulist called Cesare, and to test the theory that a somnambulist may be made to commit murder. The doctor is hauled off in a straitjacket to join the other patients. But there is a final twist: it turns out that Francis and Jane are actually inmates of the hospital. These are all the fantasies of a pair of paranoid patients!

  Other fictional treatments are even more alarming or macabre. In ‘A Tale of the Days to Come’ (1927) H.G. Wells gave a fore-taste of the brainwashing scare of the 1950s, the ludicrous consequences of which will entertain us in a later chapter. Wells speculated that in the future the art of hypnotism will be able to change a person's character permanently (or at least until the change is reversed by the original hypnotist) by effacing or replacing a person's ideas and feelings, so that she has no memory at all of an element of her former life (in this case, the existence of a lover whom her father considers unsuitable, which is why he brought in the hypnotist).

  In Conan Doyle's 1885 short story ‘The Great Keinplatz Experiment’ (later to be plundered by H.F. Heard for the plot of his 1944 novel The Swap) Professor von Baumgarten believes that the phenomenon of clairvoyance proves that the mind can separate from the body, and that it does so during hypnotism. He simultaneously hypnotizes his young assistant Fritz von Hartmann and himself to see if in its disembodied state his spirit can see Fritz's spirit. But the experiment goes ludicrously wrong when the two minds reincarnate in the wrong bodies. The scary 1964 movie Devil Doll takes this idea of transposing souls to a more bizarre level; the story depends on a stage performer using hypnosis to steal a young woman's soul and transfer it to the dummy he uses in his ventriloquist act.

  The possibilities hypnosis holds – in fiction, at any rate – for baffling the authorities have often been exploited in fictional media. For instance, in the 1972 film starring Robert Redford, The Hot Rock, the employee of a bank is hypnotized to help a gang of thieves rob the bank, the idea being that the bank employee would then forget all about his involvement and appear genuinely innocent to the police. For a similar reason, in the 1949 movie Whirlpool, directed by Otto Preminger and starring Gene Tierney and José Ferrer, the hypnotist (played by Ferrer) hypnotizes himself to commit a murder! Or again, the virtual unassailability of the murderer in Michael Connelly's tense 1996 thriller The Poet depends on his hypnotic abilities. But as we will see later in this book, hypnosis would be at best an erratic tool for criminals.

  Another myth perpetuated by fictional treatments has been that hypnotism involves or bestows supernatural powers. This is familiar not just from Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari and from countless Dracula movies, but more insidiously has appeared in children's fiction. T.H. White's 1957 children's adventure story The Master is an example of this. The Master has the ability to hypnotize people (male and female, children and adults) and enter into telepathic communication with them while they are hypnotized; they can't communicate in this way unless they are under his spell – the trance they are in gives them their special powers.

  In On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, Barbra Streisand sits in on a psychology lecturer's demonstration of hypnotism, and is accidentally hypnotized herself, leading to comic consequences. Every time she hears the word ‘Wednesday’, she takes off a shoe. Or again, in the 1956 musical The Court Jester, Danny Kaye is hypnotized by a scheming courtier, and there is plenty of excellent comic play with the idea that a mere snap of the fingers can change him from his timid real personality to his daring hypnotized alter ego. Both these movies trade on another popular fallacy about hypnosis – that a trigger word (like ‘Wednesday’) or action (like a click of the fingers) seeded by a hypnotist will work whoever says it or does it. This is not so: only the hypnotist himself or a limited number of people he himself has specified could affect th
e subject's psyche in this way, and then only with her cooperation.

  In analysing fiction like this I run the risk of spoiling the fun. ‘It's fiction,’ you say. ‘Of course I don't take it seriously.’ But that's where you're wrong. The lighter the book or film the lighter the conscious attention given to it – and these are precisely the circumstances in which ideas sneak in under our guard and become lodged in the mind as if they were the truth.

  Stage Hypnotism

  Another main source for popular conceptions and misconceptions of hypnotism has been the practice of stage hypnotists. There is a high degree of continuity between the performances of the earliest stage mesmerists and ‘electro-biologists’, and those of today. The techniques are similar, the phenomena more or less identical.