What is important here, and what interests me, as earlier in this chapter, is that the human mind is capable of these feats of imagination. There is a famous case of an American chaplain who under hypnosis came up with vivid memories of his experiences as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. There was just one snag: he never went to Vietnam. If the Vietnamese War had taken place centuries ago, enthusiasts would have taken this to be a case of past-life recall, but in fact it is recent history, and within the lifetime of the subject in question. As it happens, I have a pseudo-memory. For all my teenage years, I knew for an absolute fact that as a child, some time between the ages of four and seven, I had once been taken to a doctor's office, had electrodes fitted to my head, and been wired up to some machine or other. This was as vivid as any memory – more vivid than most, in fact – and I was completely persuaded of its authenticity. Aged about twenty, I asked my parents what I was being tested for – only to be met with their denial that the event had ever taken place. Now, my mother happens to keep meticulous appointment diaries, and at that time also hung on to them for years. I pored through about six or seven years of diaries, and failed to find any reference to any relevant doctor's appointment. I now accept, without any feeling of loss, that this was a pseudo-memory. The question is: how does one distinguish memory from imagination?
There is plenty of evidence that therapy creates a narrative by the technique of free association, despite the fact that patients and therapists alike may mistake this narrative for historical truth. I am not denying that the narrative may have therapeutic value, but that doesn't make it true. In a therapeutic context, meaning is more important than history – but that is not the case in a forensic context. Its therapeutic value comes from the fact that it can provide the patient with emotional release, and the images constructed may point towards significant factors in the subject's psychological make-up.
It is also clear that the therapist's own preconceptions are often dominant in giving meaning to a narrative. For instance, therapists may assume that a symptom (such as low self-esteem) is indicative of a memory of childhood abuse, and then steer the therapy along the lines of this assumption. We all know how unreliable dreams are, and yet in a therapeutic context dreams are frequently taken to be memories. Once the therapist confides her suspicion about these ‘memories’ to her client, the two of them work together to fit pieces into place and recreate the situation, now taken to be historical, that these jigsaw pieces make up. The close bond between therapist and client, or the dependence of the latter on the former, only help to make the narrative all the more convincing. They both invest in the belief that it is true. This happens not just in cases of childhood abuse, but also in many cases of MPD: the pattern of therapeutic indoctrination is remarkably similar. Most MPD victims do not display any symptoms before they begin therapy; it is only after therapy has been going a while that they start to flip from babyish behaviour to devilish behaviour, from male to female, from old to young. A therapist committed to the reality of MPD will claim that in actual fact his patient did display the symptoms before therapy, but that, since ‘alters’ (alternate personalities) tend not to remember what other alters do, he simply didn't remember the symptoms. An alternative explanation, however, is that therapy actually creates MPD.
As if all this were not enough to cast doubt on the use of hypnosis to recover memories, tests have also shown that it is possible for hypnotized subjects to lie, to tell deliberate falsehoods. A minority view of this, however, is that in all cases where the subject tells lies, he was not properly or fully hypnotized. It is notoriously hard to tell whether someone is fully hypnotized. The 1987 Miranda Downes case in Australia shot to fame when Ernest Knibb, the main suspect (who was later convicted of the murder), appeared on TV and described how, if he had been Downes's killer, he would have gone about it. The TV programme also arranged for him to be hypnotized. Throughout the hypnotic session, Knibb continued to lie, pretending that he saw other possible suspects on the beach where Downes had been run down by a four-wheel-drive car, raped and drowned. Whether or not Knibb was fully hypnotized, the basic point is that self-defence mechanisms are not necessarily undermined in a hypnotic session.
Hypnosis is often assumed to be a royal road to accurate recovery of memory, an idea which ignores the fact that memory can be enhanced without hypnosis. The assumption is that (as Herbert Lom puts it in the film The Seventh Veil) under hypnosis a patient lets down all his guards, including everything that might be hindering one from remembering something. Unfortunately, there is no real reason to assume that accurate recovery of memory is certain even under hypnosis. In fact, pseudo-memories may be created even more effectively under hypnosis, because of the increased suggestibility of the subject. Sensitive to the slightest nuances of the hypnotist's questions, he eagerly responds in a way that will satisfy the implicit demands of the hypnotist. His confidence in his memories increases when he is hypnotized, but confidence does not mean reliability. This is where the whole fallacy of reincarnation recall comes in: a subject's confidence in the images infects the hypnotist, and between them they concoct a reincarnation narrative.
Now, all this must cast doubt on the use of hypnosis as an aid in legal situations, at any rate in the interrogation of suspects rather than victims or witnesses. In fact, these days hypnotism is rarely used to interrogate suspects, for precisely the reasons just outlined. After all, presumably one of the main reasons for the statute of limitations in America is that memories from long ago are recognized to be inaccurate. There may be extreme cases, however, when hypnosis is called for in a legal situation. Suppose a defendant's grasp on reality is so impaired (as a result of mental retardation or emotional disturbance, perhaps) that he is incapable of mounting a defence on his own; perhaps evidence gained from hypnosis should then be taken into consideration. Another kind of situation when hypnosis may legitimately be used to refresh memory is when the benefits outweigh the possible adverse effects of memory distortion, or when human life is threatened, as in a kidnapping case. But even so, it should be taken with a pinch of salt. It should guide the police into a channel of investigation, rather than being taken to be gospel; the ‘facts’ need double checking. And in order to avoid confabulation, the hypnotist should know as little as possible about the alleged crime – just enough for him to be able to conduct a meaningful session.
A Dramatic and Ambiguous Case
Perhaps some readers will have read one of the several books on the case of George Franklin, or seen the TV movie. As we will see, hypnosis may or may not have been involved, but it is still a case that well illustrates the dangers of memory in a forensic situation.
In September 1969 eight-year-old Susan Nason vanished while running a domestic errand in Foster City, California. Three months later her decomposed body was discovered by accident. The police investigation was enormous and thorough, but no suspects were ever found or charged.
Twenty years later, in November 1989, Eileen Franklin Lipster walked into a police station and said that she had suddenly remembered, after all this time, that her father, George Franklin, had murdered her friend Susan Nason. She said that she remembered being in his Volkswagen minibus with Susan and her father, that her father performed a sex act with Susan, and then beat her to death with a rock. Police soon found that her father did have violent and paedophiliac tendencies, which had been indulged with his family and, for instance, with babysitters. He had an extensive collection of child pornography. Indeed, family members had often wondered aloud whether he might not be the killer.
George Franklin was brought to trial, and the case received huge media attention. It was an astonishing trial, in that the evidence of psychologists and psychiatrists played as big a part in it as the evidence of the supposed witnesses (as in the Gouffé case in nineteenth-century France). The main psychological issue was whether it is possible to forget such an event. It is easy to forget things for twenty years, and then suddenly to recall them, but they tend to
be trivial things, like the colour of the curtains in a childhood bedroom. But in cases of extreme dissociation, it is possible to forget major traumatic events. Perhaps this is what happened in Eileen's case.
But traumatic events are generally repressed when they are repeated – say, constant abuse by a close relative – rather than a one-off event such as Eileen's witnessing the murder. So Eileen's repression of the memory would be unusual, but not impossible. However, such repressed memories usually have an effect on behaviour, yet Eileen remained on good terms with her father, and even travelled in the same minibus with him on other occasions without feeling any aversion. Further doubts may be cast by the fact that she was not a very truthful witness. In particular she kept changing the story of the circumstances in which she had suddenly remembered the events of twenty years previously. At first she said that she had been hypnotized by the therapist she was seeing at the time; later she denied that hypnosis was involved. Did she now want revenge on her father for his drunken, sexually abusive treatment of her as a child, and had she been warned that hypnotic evidence was not allowed in a Californian court? Finally, it is worth mentioning that she didn't produce any new evidence: her story consisted of nothing she could not have read in newspapers.
Nevertheless, she was a good witness in court, the jury believed her, and her father was convicted of first-degree murder. The appeal court also upheld the conviction. But there is, of course, room for doubt. Was Eileen lying? Or was she an ‘honest liar’ – that is, someone who genuinely believes in the accuracy of her memory, despite the fact that it is a construct? There is no doubt that George Franklin was an unsavoury character; he may even have been the killer, for all we know – but there are reasons to doubt Eileen's testimony.
Hypnosis and Alien Abduction
I was intrigued to read in the personal finance section of the Sunday Telegraph for 25 June 2000 that at least one London-based insurance company has already made a few million pounds offering insurance against alien abduction. No one has yet made a claim – and indeed, if the abduction is really successful, it's hard to see how they would.
After the last few pages, the reader will find it easy to guess what my position will be on the topic of alien abduction – polite scepticism. In the last quarter of the twentieth century there was something of a craze for the idea of alien abduction. This was kick-started in 1966 by a book by John Fuller called The Interrupted Journey, about the experiences of Barney and Betty Hill. Then the craze died down somewhat, until Whitley Strieber (who until then had been a not-too-successful fiction writer) published Communion in 1987. In this book (and in the follow-up, Transformation), Strieber recounts how ever since childhood he has been abducted for brief periods by aliens – the grey, child-sized, almond-eyed, insectoid figures who are now pretty familiar, largely as a result of Strieber's bestseller, as inflatable dolls and cartoon characters – who invade his home, stick needles in his head, take him up to their ship, and do further experiments on him, including buggering him with something penis-like and making him get an erection. A sexual component is common in such abduction experiences: men are masturbated by machines, woman are made pregnant by implants and then have the foetus removed later. But these are just the most striking of the ‘experiments’ that are carried out on people, which regularly seem to involve instruments being stuck into their noses or ears.
Aliens are supposed to have the power to make those they abduct forget all about it afterwards, or the trauma of the abduction is so great that they bury the memory. Experiencers commonly find that they have covered up the memory of the abduction with a screen memory of seeing some kind of magical creature, such as an owl or a deer, under unusual circumstances. And that is where hypnosis comes in. Since hypnosis has, or is assumed to have, a good track record in recovering repressed memories, hypnotists get their subjects to remember details of their abductions. Strieber says: ‘Because of the evident presence of fear-induced memory lapses and even possible amnesia, this therapist [the ideal therapist he was looking for] would have to be a skilled hypnotist as well.’ In other words, Strieber's working hypothesis, despite his recognition elsewhere that it is possible to lie under hypnosis, is that memories recovered under hypnosis are infallible. It is true that in his case no leading questions were involved, so that there was little or no confabulation between him and the therapist, but that is not the only possible source of error: there is also fantasy, the excitation of the imagination, the creation of false memories. In hypnosis one is put into a sleepy, dream-like state, but we don't take all our dreams to be true; the imagination can become just as active in hypnosis too, and the mere vividness of the experience convinces subjects (and often their therapists as well) that it is recall. This was identified as a source of error in hypnotic experiments in the middle of the nineteenth century by James Braid, but it is still overlooked. There is also often a strong element of wish-fulfilment, as the aliens tell abductees that they have been specially chosen, and sometimes promise to save the planet from ecological disaster or something like that. Abductees are often aware of the weakness of their reliance on hypnosis, because nearly all cases of abduction emerge or emerge in detail only under hypnosis. But they defend themselves only against the charge of confabulation, as if that were the only possible source of error.
The standard psychological explanation for these experiences runs parallel to that for supposed memories of past lives. They consist of fragmentary memories of other experiences, and of things read and seen on TV, embedded within a fantasized narrative. But in this case it may be worth floating an alternative view, even though this might seem to explain one oddity by another. The reason for looking for an alternative view, however, is that, astonishingly, the evidence for alien abduction is stronger than one might think. It is based mainly on the striking similarities between the abduction accounts of ‘experiencers’ from all over the world who have had no chance to talk to one another. But we still don't need to talk about literal abduction. Suppose that we understand the act of seeing not just as seeing something that is objectively ‘out there’. Suppose that the act of seeing always, to a greater or lesser extent, involves the imagination. If I look out of my window I seem to see rooftops and leaves; actually, all I see are colours and shapes, and I interpret those, on the basis of past experience, as rooftops and leaves. Vision is never unmediated by the mind. In that case, it is easier to understand how some people might see things which are not there for other people, even for the majority of people. This is essentially the thesis well argued for and illustrated in Patrick Harpur's important book Daimonic Reality. In the context of alien-abduction scenarios, it means that it is plausible to think of them as a modern myth, neither true nor false, but a bit of both, mediated by the archetypes of the collective unconscious (such as the evil scientist experimenting on and manipulating human beings for his own obscure purposes) and the imagination. Under hypnosis, the imagination is stimulated to embroider the myth and make it a personal experience. The case of Candy Jones, outlined in Chapter 12, shows that exactly the same kind of narrative can crop up in different circumstances: the parallels between her case and alien abduction make it all the more plausible to talk of archetypes.
One of the interesting offshoots of recent research into hypnosis has been the discovery that a proportion of the population, perhaps as many as 20 per cent, have what is now known as ‘fantasy-prone personalities’ (which is very similar to what other psychologists have called ‘imaginative involvement’ or just ‘absorption’). Such people spend a great deal of their life fantasizing. I know a woman – a skilled musician – who often imagines, as she plays the piano, a scenario such as that she is a gifted gipsy princess who has just been discovered by some royal court and asked to give a concert. Secondly, these people have the ability to hallucinate what they fantasize as really real; this may give them, among other things, the enviable ability to reach an orgasm without physical stimulation! Thirdly, they are prone to psychic and out-of
-body experiences. They do sometimes find it difficult to differentiate fantasized from real events and persons, but being sensitive to social norms, they keep their fantasy lives very private. You may know many such people, but unless you are in their confidence, you might not guess at the richness of their inner worlds. These are the people who under hypnosis will concoct strange ideas about past lives and alien abductions.
Paranormal and Supernormal
Speaking for myself, I certainly do not rule out the possibility that some people are psychically gifted. As I have said, I have had certain extraordinary experiences myself, and so it is impossible for me to rule it out. And who knows what results future scholarly experiments may bring? Nineteenth-century researchers, who waxed enthusiastic about their paranormal findings, resemble the amateur archaeologists of the same era. These people plunged in, dug trenches and tunnels, and took out the artefacts, all in the space of a few weeks. Today's archaeologists work at a snail's pace, carefully sifting, methodically searching every square centimetre, looking for minute variations in soil colour as much as gold and silver and foundations. Modern psychologists are like that too: it is slow, painstaking work. But some freaky results have come up already. Think of surgical memory, discussed in Chapter 1. Or here's another instance. I have already mentioned that researchers might use automatic writing to tap into a subject's unconscious. Of course, often what is written down comes out as an illegible scrawl, incomprehensible even to the awoken subject, let alone to the operator. But another hypnotized person can often decipher the scribbles.
Even if the evidence for paranormal phenomena is slight, nevertheless the mind does have supernormal abilities. Hypnosis is an excellent means of discovering amazing facts about the mind and our capacities. Without going into the realms of the supernatural, evidence gleaned from hypnosis does constantly have the ability to make us go ‘Wow! We are capable of that?’, and to make us realize that there is far more to being a human being than is commonly supposed. To start with psycho-physical phenomena, hypnotized subjects can, for instance: reproduce on the surface of their skin tissue injuries sustained at some previous point in their lives; not just ignore the pain of, say, a lighted cigarette being held to the palm of their hand, but not even blister either (or conversely to blister when told that they are being touched by something hot, which is actually cool); produce something akin to stigmata; localize the anaesthetic effect to particular areas of their bodies, as in ‘glove anaesthesia’; and, of course, they can undergo surgery, even painful surgery, while under hypnosis. At the mental level, there is the possibility of superlearning and the phenomenon known as ‘transcendence of normal volitional capacities’ – a state where the subject's thoughts have remarkable clarity, creativity and meaningfulness. The Russian Dr Raikov has achieved significant results in bringing out latent artistic talents in hypnotized subjects. And even at the physical level work on athletes has demonstrated an increased ability to perform.
Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis Page 34