Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis

by Waterfield, Robin

  But even this should not raise the hopes of a would-be hypnotizing criminal. Note, first, that it ruins a great many fictional scenes – the kind in which a stranger on a train hypnotizes an innocent young woman and … just then the train enters a tunnel and draws a discreet veil of darkness over what happens next. This kind of instantaneous overcoming of moral barriers just cannot happen. It takes time and patience, or at least conformity with established patterns, even to try to establish oneself as a valid authority figure. In the second place, it is not at all likely that the criminal would succeed in investing himself with the right kind of authority.

  There are a number of variables, above all the following: how suggestible the subject is; how deeply hypnotizable the subject is; how good a hypnotist the operator is; how deeply embedded the criminal suggestions are; the usual character and tendencies of the subject (that is, does she already have criminal tendencies?); the temporary condition of the subject. Only if all these variables fell into line would hypnotized crime be possible – and note that even then it would not be involuntary criminal action, since by one of the conditions the subject must already have criminal tendencies.

  In short, hypnosis would be a very erratic tool of crime. There is no guarantee of success. The same goes, by the way, for hypnotic amnesia, which one could imagine might also be useful in criminal circumstances. It is true that a hypnotist can plant a suggestion that his subject will not remember something later, but success is not assured, and in any case another hypnotist (working for the police, perhaps) could come along and recover the memory.

  Not all thrillers, simply qua thrillers, make sensationalist and inaccurate use of hypnosis. Ian Rankin's Knots and Crosses breaks the mould by simply having a hypnotist unlock the suppressed memories of a traumatized policeman, enabling him to solve the case. But The Mesmerist, by Felice Picano, is a thriller which exploits every single cliché about hypnotism. Set in the early years of this century in a small town in Nebraska, the mesmerist of the title, Dinsmore, has the ability to make men and women his puppets for life. He uses his skills for the purposes of sexual domination and to gain political control; he can drive people to suicide and murder; he can hypnotize them in an instant merely by reflecting the sun off his cufflinks into their eyes. They often suffer from negative after-effects. At one point, towards the end of the book, he hypnotizes a whole crowd of 300 people, including a man previously found to be unhypnotizable, by glinting the sun off the manacles binding his hands. Such clichés are finally condemned by their own unreality, for if there ever had been a Dinsmore, he would by now control the whole world.

  In addition to the question whether a hypnotized person could be made to commit a crime, there is also the question whether a hypnotist could use his powers to commit a crime against the subject, for instance by getting him to commit suicide. This is more plausible. A hypnotist could tell a subject to drink a glass of water which was really poison (but he could do that anyway, without hypnosis), and in a more extreme scenario might even be able to get him to self-induce a heart attack. This, as far as I can see, is the only possible criminal use of hypnosis – but it is pretty implausible. The hypnotist would have to have taken time to build up a relationship of trust with his subject, which would involve either disguising his hostility (even against hyper-sensitivity) or being a supposed friend in the first place. I know of no such cases ever having come to light.

  ‘Hypnotized’ Criminals in the Twentieth Century

  In the nineteenth century, fears about hypnotism were such that it was occasionally invoked successfully as a defence in court cases. In 1879, for instance, a young man, who was a patient of a hypnotherapist, exposed himself in a public lavatory. When his case came to court, in France in the early 1880s, he was held to have suffered an attack of spontaneous somnambulism and amnesia, and was acquitted. Times have changed.

  Two of the most notorious serial killers of recent times, Kenny Bianchi and Angelo Buono, worked as a pair and were known as the Hillside Stranglers. In the late 1970s they terrorized Los Angeles, until their capture in 1979. Now, the late 1970s were also characterized by a higher degree of sympathy towards alleged ‘multiples’ (people with MPD, multiple personality disorder), and this had even been successfully used as a defence, as a form of insanity. Bianchi and his lawyers seized on this. Bianchi did his homework by reading The Three Faces of Eve and seeing the movie Sybil. He was examined by a psychologist who was professionally sympathetic towards the genuineness of MPD, and hypnotized. Under hypnosis he duly produced an alternate personality. The prosecution lawyers, however, were convinced that Bianchi was faking. They brought in Dr Martin Orne, director of the Unit for Experimental Psychiatry in Philadelphia, a world-renowned expert on hypnosis. He watched the videotape and decided Bianchi did not know enough about hypnosis to fake it successfully. He tested Bianchi under hypnosis – and Bianchi failed the tests. For instance, when asked to hallucinate his lawyer sitting in the chair next to him, he loudly expressed surprise when it was pointed out to him that his lawyer was actually standing at the back of the room. Hypnotized people do not do this; one of the standard features of the hypnotic trance is what is called ‘trance logic’, the ability to accept anomalous situations. In another test, Bianchi was hypnotized and told that a particular area of his hand, within a drawn circle, was anaesthetized, while the rest of the hand was not. With eyes closed, he was asked to say ‘Yes’ when he was touched outside the circle, and ‘No’ when he was touched within the circle. This was a trap, because anyone who was genuinely anaesthetized would say nothing when he was touched in the numb area, since he couldn't feel it. But Bianchi duly said ‘No’. He failed other tests too – and both he and his cousin Buono were subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Courts are no longer quite so gullible about hypnosis as they were in the nineteenth century.

  In the 1966 trial of Dr Carmelo Coppolino in New Jersey on the charge of murdering Colonel Farber, his lover, the colonel's wife, claimed to have been hypnotized by the good doctor and instructed to kill her husband. The court rejected this argument on the grounds that she could not be made to kill her husband against her will, and in any case what she was calling hypnotism was probably no more than strong sexual attraction. Coppolino was acquitted, by the way – but later found guilty in Florida of killing his own wife.

  In the 1981 United States v. Phillips the defendant was charged with having shot and almost killed two US marshals in an attempt to help her husband escape as he was being brought into a federal courthouse. She claimed that she had been hypnotized by her husband, and her husband admitted having hypnotized her many times for a number of years. This defence did Ms Phillips no good, and she was found guilty.

  One of the most amusing cases occurred in 1959 when two escaped prisoners were caught. One of them, Thomas Marsh, claimed to have been hypnotized by the other, whose name was Jack Cox. Cox claimed that the escapes were all the result of a bungled hypnotic experiment. In an attempt at age-regression, he had told Marsh to go back to where he was happy. Marsh had taken the instructions literally and walked out of prison! Realizing what he had done, Cox had followed him to explain the mistake and persuade him to return to prison before he got into trouble. This cunning defence was rejected by the court.

  In a somewhat similar case, from Copenhagen in the 1950s, the court's verdict was rather more ambiguous. One criminal, who is referred to only as H in the transcript of the case, met another, N, in prison. They shared a cell and H came completely under N's influence. N hypnotized H repeatedly, and continued doing so after they left prison. N got H to rob a bank, and during the robbery two bank officials were shot. When the case came to trial (in a state of disorientation, H had allowed himself to be caught), N was sent to prison, but on the grounds that he was insane, or in a state comparable to insanity, H was committed to a lunatic asylum. This was hardly an acquittal, though, as might have happened in the nineteenth century.

  Hypnotism
is not a truth serum: it cannot make you unwittingly reveal all the skeletons in your cupboard, your deepest and darkest sexual fantasies, your youthful dreams and misdemeanours. You can even lie when hypnotized, either deliberately or unconsciously, in the sense that you might be recovering pseudo-memories. Some of the fears surrounding hypnotism are justified, but only to this limited extent: hypnotism cannot make you do things that are utterly contrary to your nature, but it can lower your inhibitions to the extent that you might do things you would otherwise have stopped yourself doing.

  8

  Psychic Powers and Recovered Memories

  This chapter is going to seem a little strange to some readers, but no history of hypnotism would be complete without covering, in even more detail, the topic of the paranormal abilities which have been claimed, ever since Mesmer's time, to be awoken in certain hypnotized subjects. The theory underlying the supposed connection between hypnosis and paranormal feats is not in itself implausible. In hypnosis the subject's attention is withdrawn from all the distractions of the outside world and allowed to focus on fewer stimuli. Perhaps this withdrawal from the outside world allows it to uncover reaches of the mind which are not normally in play, because we are normally too distracted by sensory data and so on. It is at any rate clear that our sensory apparatus and ego systems are designed as much as anything as filters, to limit the amount of material getting through. What might happen if those filters are removed? This is the kind of question the occult mesmerists were asking themselves from early in the nineteenth century.

  Not that the belief that hypnosis can trigger or develop occult powers is confined to the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, we find perhaps the most dramatic and well-known instance of this belief realized in the person of Edgar Cayce, the most famous clairvoyant, prophet and healer of the century. In 1898, at the age of twenty-one, Cayce was suffering from a gradual paralysis of his throat muscles and had nearly lost his voice. A travelling hypnotist was called in to treat the young man. Under hypnosis, Cayce manifested a quite different personality, and began to exhibit the powers that he went on to use for the next forty-three years, until his death, starting with clairvoyant self-diagnosis and diagnosis of others. And the idea that there is a connection between hypnotism and psychic powers has been perpetuated by bestselling authors such as Jane Roberts, who channels an entity called Seth, and is recognized to be one of the more sober and sane channellers. Two chapters of her first book, How to Develop Your ESP Power (1966), are devoted to the use of hypnotic trances to achieve heightened states of awareness and to uncover the deeper reaches of the human psyche.

  Two related claims are made for hypnosis in the context of psychic abilities: it can bring out such abilities in anyone, and it can greatly increase the abilities of someone who is already naturally psychic. The first claim is the one that has dominated the minds of researchers; the second has only occasionally been explored in the West, but more in pre-glasnost days in Russia and Czechoslovakia, as reported in the bestselling book Psi: Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain, by Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder. However, the modern pioneer of parapsychology, J.B. Rhine, of Duke University, eventually found that hypnosis did not significantly increase ESP performance (ESP stands for ‘extra-sensory perception’), and most recent works on parapsychology tend to ignore hypnosis more or less completely. The only qualification that needs to be made is the one I made before: there does seem to be a correlation between increased ESP performance and a slightly unfocused, relaxed mental state. If, as seems likely, hypnosis could help a subject reach and maintain that state of mind, then there could be a significant link between hypnosis and ESP.

  Although I could write this chapter from the standpoint of an objective reporter, I feel inclined to begin by confessing my own position. Like any healthy-minded investigator, I adopt the simplest explanation for things. Paranormal faculties are very often not the simplest explanation. Let's go back to John Elliotson and the O'Key sisters in the middle of the nineteenth century. When handed half a dozen lumps of metal in a random order, they could tell which one had been magnetized by Elliotson. Were they psychic? It would be hard to prove it on the basis of this test. It is more likely that the ‘magnetized’ piece of metal retained more warmth from Elliotson's hands than the other pieces, since he had to hold it to magnetize it, and the O'Keys responded on the basis of this perceived warmth.

  Or again, at several times in the history of hypnotism a prize has been offered for any hypnotist who could successfully prove to a scientific committee that his subject possessed clairvoyant powers. Not a single one of these prizes has been claimed, and contestants who came forward sometimes proved their charlatanism by refusing to let the committee use their own blindfolds. In all such cases, it blunts Occam's razor not to suppose that these ‘clairvoyants’ were mere conjurers, peeping out from slight cracks around their blindfolds.

  It is important to be clear what is at issue here. The question is this: does the hypnotic state involve nothing more than an imagined fantasy on the part of the subject, which, however compelling, has no reality outside his or her imagination? Or does the hypnotized subject have the ability to transcend the imagination – indeed, to transcend all normal states of mind – and touch on some higher level of reality? All professional academic psychologists today would react straight away by claiming that this is a non-issue – that there is no question of such transcendence, only of vivid fantasy.

  I maintain that inexplicable things happen in everyone's lives. One of the most hard-boiled people I know is in fact one of the most psychic people I know. We have all experienced telepathy, or psychometry (picking up ‘vibes’ from a room), or something. Most often such experiences are brushed under the carpet, because they are immensely threatening to the world in which we normally live. They are threatening because, if such things are possible, what else might be possible? The safe, tidy world view we have constructed over the years seems to blur and crumble at the edges. For most of us, such experiences are rare; for the few they may be more common. It is the same in the history of hypnosis. For all the obvious charlatans, there are cases that cannot easily be rationalized, and enough of them to make anyone with an open mind pause before dismissing the whole domain as fantasy and rubbish.

  A Historical Survey of the Main Paranormal Abilities

  Although Mesmer himself largely refrained from commenting on the apparent mystical effects of magnetism, his disciples and successors, starting with the Marquis de Puységur, were not so modest, and made enormous and often far-fetched claims about the arousal of paranormal abilities in their mesmerized subjects. These abilities ranged from the ability to see through closed eyelids, via self-diagnosis of ailments, to clairvoyance, telepathy and spiritist contact with the dead. This occult or mystical tendency was fed by the mystical movements current at the time (the ideas of, especially, Swedenborg, the German mystic Jacob Boehme and Saint-Martin), by the Romantic revolt against the Industrial Revolution, the ‘dark satanic mills’, and by von Schelling's nature-philosophy. These thinkers boosted the mystical strand of mesmerism by giving it a voice and grounding it in respectability.

  The mystical mesmerists relied heavily on the publication of case histories to prove their point, most of which involve the mesmerized individual (usually a young woman) clairvoyantly seeing something that was happening a long way off in space, but simultaneous in time. These visions could be either spontaneous, or sought for in an experimental manner. Some of them concern events elsewhere in France, say, but there are also bizarre reports of journeys to the moon and elsewhere, and descriptions of beings and civilizations there. There are also spiritist reports of contact with the dead. Typical is the work of the magnetist Justinus Kerner with the famous Seeress of Prevorst, covered in Chapter 4. As happened with others, the Seeress's remarkable gifts were triggered by magnetism, which was initially employed in an attempt to alleviate her pitiful and chronic physical ailments.