It is certainly hard to see how Bernheim would account for this. It is clear, as I have had occasion to remark before now in this book, that even a deeply hypnotized subject is not wholly unconscious, and can resist the suggestions of the hypnotist if they are too outrageous or transgress the subject's ingrained moral code.
Hypnosis and Coercion
The question of the influence (for good or ill) that a hypnotist could have over his subject was not new. It had been simmering since the early days of mesmerism, when the Marquis de Puységur discovered the close rapport that is built up between operator and subject. Was the subject any more than a tool wielded by the magnetist? the mystic marquis wondered, and this of course immediately raised the spectre of sexual and criminal possibilities. Sexual energy also reared its head in the form of the attachment – transference, as Freudians would say – the subject might come to feel for her healer, and possibly the other way round too, as Dickens seems to have become attached to Augusta de la Rue. Opinion was divided even in the early days. D'Eslon believed that it would be possible for a magnetist to take advantage of a woman who had reached the crisis state (which, remember, was often orgasmic in nature anyway); de Puységur asked several of his somnambulists how far they would go, but they all said that while he could make them do something silly, such as hitting him with a fly-swat, he could not make them take off their clothes. The debate continued throughout the nineteenth century without resolving the issue.
Nineteenth-century fascination with mesmerism and hypnotism was tinged with fear, and novelists and stage hypnotists titillated that fear. Stage hypnotists made great play with phrases like ‘You are totally under my control.’ But if this was literally true, then anything could happen. A chaste Victorian maiden could be made to yield her virginity; a man could be turned into an assassin. These were precisely the scenarios hinted at or made explicit in fiction, in a series of books culminating in du Maurier's Trilby and Ambrose Bierce's short story ‘The Hypnotist’. Class and racial considerations muddied the waters: the lower classes were supposed to have larger sexual appetites than the bourgeoisie, and so were more liable to want to take advantage of middle-class women, and Jews were supposed to make better mesmerizers. In 1878 a Jewish dentist in Rouen called Paul Lévy only made matters worse when he was sentenced to ten years for the unlikely crime of having raped one of his patients in his dentist's chair with her mother present in the room. But this was not a clear case of anti-Semitism: it seems that he did have sex with the daughter, while the mother was asleep, having persuaded them both that in order to help with the daughter's chronic dental problems he had first to find out whether Berthe, the daughter, was a virgin. This seduction was classified as rape because of his supposed hypnotic powers.
Once the phenomenon of post-hypnotic suggestion was recognized, the possibilities were doubled. Not only could a novelist have someone kill while actually hypnotized, but also while fully awake, as a result of a suggestion implanted earlier in his mind by an evil mesmerist. These were the fears that spilled over from the pages of novels and smoky theatres into the courts in the Gouffé affair, and at least one other notorious trial some years earlier – a case which, to the modern ear, sounds even less plausible than Gabrielle Bompard's defence.
In 1865 Timothée Castellan was an ugly, club-footed tramp who had been invalided out of his occupation as a cork-cutter and now roamed the countryside of southern France, near Toulon, as a vagabond healer. One evening he turned up at a house in the village of Guiols where a man lived with his fifteen-year-old son and twenty-six-year-old daughter, Josephine. Although Josephine was disgusted by the man's appearance, her father took pity on him and invited him to share the family supper and to sleep in the hayloft that night. During the evening several neighbours dropped by, attracted by Timothée's reputation as a magician. Actually, the man seems to have had delusions of grandeur, since he wrote on a scrap of paper that he was the Son of God. He was using sign language and writing to communicate, because he was pretending to be deaf and dumb.
In the morning Josephine's father and brother left for work, and Timothée too went on his way. But before long he returned and made himself at home again. Once more, some neighbours dropped in, and one of them observed the tramp making strange signs behind Josephine's back. According to Josephine's later report, after lunch Timothée hypnotized her, carried her into the back room and raped her. In the evening, much to the astonishment of the neighbours, Josephine left with Timothée, apparently to join him in his vagabond life. Over the next few days the odd couple were seen in the district, and Timothée boastfully displayed his power over the young woman by making her walk on all fours like a dog, laugh hysterically, and things like that. Her attitude towards him was a strange mixture of alternate affection and loathing. After a few days she escaped and returned home, where in due course she recovered from her fright. Timothée was arrested and at the trial respectable doctors testified that it was possible for one person to control another person as completely as Timothée appeared to have done Josephine. In a version of the normal nineteenth-century attitude towards women as the weaker, more hysterical, less rational gender, they made much of the fact that she was female and he was male. Timothée was found guilty and sentenced to twelve years of hard labour.
More recent experimental work has tended to show, however, that you cannot force a person under hypnosis to do something against his or her will. This is not surprising, given that you can't even hypnotize a person without her consent. What happens if you try to get her to act against her conscience is that she either wakes up or goes to sleep – but in either case she is refusing to cooperate. There appears to be some kind of internal monitor or sentinel which is never put to sleep and which finds a way not to obey commands which transgress the person's moral code. Perhaps it is the same psychological function as the ‘hidden observer’, which we met in Chapter 1. You might ask: ‘Why, then, do people make fools of themselves in hypnotic stage shows?’ The answer is that their inhibitions are lowered, and they feel that it is all just a bit of fun. But more extreme scenarios, in which a criminal hypnotizes a bank manager, let's say, to open a safe, are nonsense.
I may not be able simply to hypnotize you and get you to kill Mr Smith, but suppose that, using the common phenomenon of hypnotic hallucination, I redescribe Mr Smith to you, and make you see him as a chainsaw-wielding maniac who is threatening your loved ones, and … oh, look! You just happen to have a pistol in your hand … Or suppose (more remotely) that through hypnosis I can create a second personality in you, a hate-filled murderous personality.
Oddly enough, even this would not necessarily make it possible for me to get you to kill Mr Smith. Hypnosis may lower inhibitions, but it does not make you oblivious, and it does not rob you entirely of your critical faculties. Some part of you would still recognize that Mr Smith was just sitting peacefully in his study smoking a pipe, with not a chainsaw in view. But what about the fact that under experimental conditions hypnotized people have been persuaded to pick up dangerous snakes, throw acid at others, reveal fake military secrets, shout obscenities at others, mutilate the Bible, expose themselves, and steal examination papers? Here is a dramatic report from one of the main researchers in this area, American psychologist John Watkins. Watkins hypnotized a soldier during the Second World War and told him that when he opened his eyes he would be in a kill-or-be-killed situation with a ‘dirty Jap soldier’. In actual fact, the person in front of him was a senior officer of the US army.
The subject opened his eyes. He then slanted them and began to creep cautiously forward. Sudddenly in a flying tackle he dove at the Lieutenant Colonel, knocking him against the wall, and with both of his hands (he was a powerful, husky lad) began strangling the man … It took the instantaneous assistance of three others to break the soldier's grip, pull him off the officer, and hold him until the experimenter could quiet him back into a sleep condition.
On another occasion, when Watkins tried the sam
e experiment with another subject, the man had a knife in his pocket, which he produced and tried – or pretended – to use against the ‘Jap’. These experiments and all others like them are flawed, however. The participants know that they are involved in psychological experiments, and may be presumed to believe that the testers are responsible enough not really to be asking them to commit murder or whatever. Notice that in the experiment described above there were other people standing around, acting as reminders to the subject or some part of his mind that this was only an experiment. Other experimenters have made use of a glass barrier, protecting the ‘victim’ against thrown ‘acid’ and the subject from really handling venomous snakes. But in addition to the factor already mentioned, it is quite possible that the subject could see the glass – remember that a common effect of hypnosis is hyperaesthesia, the ability to perceive things which are normally hard to see. In any case, psychologist Martin Orne found that the same people who were prepared to endanger themselves and others under hypnosis were also prepared to perform identical actions while not hypnotized. Hypnosis adds nothing for criminals, then.
The most notorious and often alleged crime against a hypnotized victim is rape. (In the USA an advertisement used to run in magazines headed ‘How to Get Girls Through Hypnotism’, and offering a course in the subject. To make its point, the advertisement showed a voluptuous woman unbuttoning her clothes. In our more fetishistic era, things have turned around: the Web now offers videos showing ‘dominant women’ using hypnosis on happy, helpless men.) The topic of rape under hypnosis is tricky, because it is so easy to offend people – especially the victims, if you suggest that they might not be entirely innocent. Nevertheless, that is pretty much what I'm going to suggest; the evidence compels this conclusion.
Ever since the beginnings of hypnosis, in the days of animal magnetism, there have been rumours of hypnotists taking advantage of their patients. In Britain, just to bring things more up to date, there were the cases of Michael Gill in Wales in 1988, and of Nelson Nelson in north Devon in 1991; both of them set themselves up as hypnotherapists and had sex with a number of their patients. Gill's case was more or less dropped because of the difficulty of deciding whether the three women involved had consented at all. Nelson's case is particularly distressing, since his crimes were spread over a number of years and locations – he was fifty-seven when he was convicted in 1991 and had already fled to this country from South Africa, where he was known as Nelson Lintott – and involved possibly as many as 200 victims, some of whom were under age, since he had a distinct preference for teenagers. As the manager of a health club or a swimming pool, he would offer himself as a hypnotherapist for minor problems such as nail-biting or nicotine addiction, and pursue things from there.
Now, I've been claiming throughout this book that a hypnotized person does not lose control, so what is going on in these rape cases? Clearly, the victims were conscious, otherwise they would not be able to report the rape afterwards. They claim afterwards to have been conscious, but in a state of such profound lethargy that they could not be bothered to resist, and some scientists have theorized that in some deeply hypnotizable subjects hypnosis can cause muscular inhibition to such an extent that a person might be unable to fight back, even if she wanted to (I shall use ‘she’ and ‘her’ for the victim throughout this discussion of rape, although there have been cases of male-on-male rape too). Let's look at a particular report, with apologies for the graphic nature of the woman's words. In a previous session, the therapist had caressed her breasts. Nevertheless, she went back again:
I felt heavy, like the other time. He told me that I would like to unbutton my blouse and pants. I didn't do it, but then he said that I would like to prove and show that the first treatment sessions really had helped me [she had gone to him with sexual problems]. He caressed my breasts again and after a while pulled down my pants and panties and he even put his hand in my vagina. I heard him say, ‘You will go deeper and deeper and become more excited.’ I just said yes to everything. He kept on going and wanted me to take his genitals in my hands. I said no, I would rather not, I'm scared. I was very scared. After a while I held his penis, he caressed me and rubbed his lower body against the inside of my legs.
In Chapter 1 I spoke of the double-edged feeling most subjects of hypnosis experience. One part of you knows you need not go along with the hypnotist's suggestions, and another part of you simply can't be bothered to resist. It seems clear that this woman was in exactly that state. But you can snap out of it if you want to; your will to do so may be lowered, but it is not removed.
Let's look at things from another angle too. The hypnotherapists presumably knew enough about hypnosis to know that it doesn't cause oblivion, and so that their patients would know they were being sexually interfered with. In that case, for the hypnotherapists to proceed with rape, they must be deeply stupid people, although some of them do rather ineptly try to induce post-hypnotic amnesia. No doubt some are that stupid, or desperate, but again it does look as though there might have been a degree of consent given by the victim. I'm not trying to justify these cases of rape, but to understand them. And the whole emotive issue needs to be put in the context of some impersonal statistics. In anonymous surveys, up to 5 per cent of all doctors admit to having had sex with a patient, and up to 10 per cent to having got as far as kissing and cuddling. There is something about the doctor–patient relationship which makes a patient vulnerable to her doctor's charms. Suppose, then, that roughly the same number of sexual acts go on in a hypnotherapist's office as in a regular doctor's office. A proportion of these cases are then reported to the police because, looking back, the victim felt abused because of her lethargy. Because of the reputation of hypnosis, she probably expected her will to be undermined, and it is clear that the therapists involved encouraged that belief.
The notion that the victim is not always as unwilling as she later makes out is borne out by the best-documented cases. There is invariably a high degree of ambiguity about the reports alleged hypnotic rape victims give. Why did she go back for a second or third session? Why did she say no but do nothing about it? Why did she take so long before going to the police? Real-life situations are emotionally complex, and this makes it extremely difficult to come to any conclusions about coercion (sexual or otherwise) under hypnotism from experimental evidence, because it is virtually impossible to reproduce real-life conditions in the laboratory. But the majority of the evidence accumulated by recent researchers suggests that the only sensible conclusion to draw is that while it is impossible to get an innocent person to commit murder or submit to sex, it is possible to lower someone's inhibitions, so that if she was inclined towards murder or sex anyway, she might go along with it. Like any doctors who have had sex with their patients, the hypnotherapists involved in these cases are guilty of abuse of trust and abuse of authority; but it is not clear that they are guilty of rape, if that means forcibly having sex with an entirely unwilling victim.
This conclusion is in line not just with contemporary research, but with an important study published in the Archiv für CriminalAnthropologie und Criminalistik for 1900 by von Schrenck-Notzing. As well as discounting the possibility of hypnotic murder, he found the same ambiguities in the grey area of hypnotic rape. To cite just one of his cases:
A certain patient writes in his autobiography that he rendered a young woman, who was tied to a decrepit old man, deeply somnambulic, and commanded her during this condition to perform certain onaninstic manipulations with his genital organs. This she did, but did not remember anything about it after awakening. The sexual intercourse was continued for three months, and was not discovered. The lady, however, possessed a passionate disposition, and loved her seducer. He would in all probability have been able to possess her in the waking condition as well. He chose this peculiar hypnotic way, as he feared detection.
Contemporary arguments about whether it is possible to get a hypnotized subject to commit antisocial acts under
coercion echo nineteenth-century debate, though generally with more sophistication and the backing of more experimental data. Bernheim and other members of the Nancy school – notably Liégeois and Forel – conducted numerous experiments designed to show that a hypnotized subject could commit crimes. With the sense of melodrama that seems to characterize the reports of many such researchers, including Watkins, Liégeois once began one of his reports: ‘I am to blame for having tried to have my friend, M.P., killed – and as if that was not serious enough, I did so in front of the commissary general of Nancy.’ But whether old or new, the discussion can only reach an impasse, since how you read the evidence depends on your predisposition. If a hypnotized subject commits an antisocial act, this may be taken only to prove that he was the kind of person to do so anyway; if a hypnotized subject fails to commit an antisocial act, this may be taken only to prove that he was a poor hypnotic subject, or that the hypnotist was incompetent. In other words, whichever position you want to argue for, you can come up with a conclusive argument.
Obedience to Authority
Although I am inclined, then, to dismiss such fears about hypnotism, they do raise a particularly interesting issue. It is a frightening fact that most of us are prepared to go considerably further than we would like to think in obedience to an authority figure – as the German people discovered in the Second World War. In his famous, disturbing book Obedience to Authority Stanley Milgram describes a series of experiments he conducted in the psychology department of Yale University in the 1960s. Of two people, one plays the role of ‘teacher’, the other of ‘learner’; they have been told that they are taking part in a study of memory and learning. The teacher asks the learner questions, and is told by the psychologist, an authority figure, to administer an electric shock when the learner gets an answer wrong. The voltage is increased every time a wrong answer is given. The teacher is encouraged to believe that this will help the learner correct his mistakes, and the psychologist gradually becomes more insistent that the punishment is applied. In actual fact, though, the learner is an actor, and the impressive electrical machine, with complex dials and switches, delivers no shocks. But the teacher doesn't know this, and Milgram found that many people – over 60 per cent – were quite prepared to administer dangerous doses of electricity in obedience to the psychologist's demands, and so to ignore their own conflict at the belief that the learner was suffering. Milgram played with variables, such as the visibility or invisibility (and inaudibility) of the learner and his increasingly agonized shrieks and pleas for the experiment to stop. An even higher proportion, about 90 per cent, were prepared to go all the way when it was not they themselves, but a third party who was manipulating the dial that was supposed to administer the shocks: they could more easily console themselves that they were not responsible. About 65 per cent went all the way even when they believed that the learner had a weak heart. When the authority figure of the experimenter was removed, or two experimenters gave contradictory orders, no subject administered a potentially dangerous level of shock, even if the learner insisted on it. The subjects of these experiments were not monsters; they were ordinary people, you and me.
Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis Page 29