Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis

by Waterfield, Robin

  I am told that King George VI of Great Britain used to suffer from terrible stage fright and stammering – a distinct drawback in a king and emperor who had to make a lot of public speeches and appearances – and that he was cured by hypnotism. The same therapist treated the writer W. Somerset Maugham for his terrible stammer. The treatment would probably have focused first on getting them to relax at a muscular level, to decrease their fear at the prospect of speaking. Once that was well established, they might have been given a visualization of a calming scene, to induce feelings of inner tranquillity. The hypnotist would have given them suggestions and post-hypnotic suggestions to help remove the anxiety. They would have been taught self-hypnosis, so that they could call up the calming visualization whenever they needed it, and relaxation techniques. Finally, if necessary, the therapist might have used visualizations to boost their self-image. Royalty and bestselling authors aside, just to bring matters down to a homely level, on 29 April 1999 The Times reported, under the headline ‘Hypnosis Beats Exam Stress’, how a school in Cheshire had brought in a hypnotherapist to help students to relax and improve their revision before exams.

  Sergei Rachmaninoff, the brilliant Russian composer, suffered from total composer's block after the failure of his First Symphony in 1897. He continued to find acclaim as a concert pianist, but he could not write a note. He sought out the hypnotist Nikolai Dahl, who taught him, in three months of daily sessions, to relax, and instilled in him the suggestion that he would be able to continue composing. The immediate result was Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto, reckoned to be one of his best pieces, which was first performed in Moscow on 9 November 1901. In gratitude, Rachmaninoff dedicated the concerto to Dahl.

  It is odd that the reputation hypnotherapy has for the public is that it is good with addictions. Overall, tests have shown that it is less effective for self-initiated behaviours (e.g. obesity, addictions) than for other kinds of disorders. Quite a large proportion of smokers treated by hypnosis do not permanently give up. The method adopted by therapists with addictions is usually a form of aversion, to put the smoker off cigarettes (or whatever it may be) in the future. But an 88 per cent success rate (higher than usual) was achieved by a radical alternative therapy, in which smokers were brought to a state of appreciating the kind of gratification they got from cigarettes, and then hypnosis and follow-up self-hypnosis were used to induce precisely the same gratification in the subjects. They had found an alternative way to gain the same gratification.

  Although the use of hypnotherapy as a cure for addictions is well known, hypnotist Frank Genco puts it to the opposite use. Rather than cure people of their addiction to gambling, the one-legged marathon-runner Genco teaches self-hypnosis as a means for people to shed their ‘loser's image’ and win. Everyone who has played poker knows how mood seems to have an effect on the run of the cards.

  Genco's use of hypnosis is a small example of its ability to uncover or unlock potential, which is one of its most familiar aspects – familiar from its use in fiction, since it is the basic role that hypnotism plays in, say, both George du Maurier's Trilby (where Trilby's talent as a singer is revealed by Svengali) and Henry James's The Bostonians (where Verena's talent as an inspirational lecturer is unlocked by her father). We've all heard stories of people who have performed a physical feat well beyond their usual capabilities – a mother, perhaps, whose child is trapped under a car and who has lifted the car on her own to free the child. These stories show that our unused physical potential can be unlocked by the right motivation.

  Sports hypnosis is a way to unlock that potential for athletes, and to deal with other problems that can slow them down that vital fraction of a second, such as pre-competition nerves, lack of self-esteem, or some more general anxiety. A surprising number of athletes have used hypnosis or similar techniques (especially visualizations) to improve their performance. It was used to instil the ‘killer instinct’ in Ingmar Johansson in 1959 so that he could win the world heavyweight boxing championship against the formidable Floyd Patterson by a knockout in the third round. Fourteen years later Ken Norton used self-hypnosis before the astonishing match in which he beat Mohammed Ali, and broke his jaw in the process. Mike Brearley, England's cricket captain in the late 1970s, was plagued (as many England captains have been) by low scores; he attributes an improvement to his consultation of a hypnotherapist. Early isolated uses such as these paved the way. In 1962 the Olympic Committee considered that hypnosis should be banned, along with a range of drugs, as giving athletes an unfair advantage. They soon changed their mind, obviously because they realized that hypnosis cannot make a sportsman gain powers he would not otherwise have, just unlock his abilities. Only one motivational psychologist accompanied the US Olympic team in 1988, but a mere eight years later there were 100. Nowadays, it is perfectly normal for top athletes, whether their sport is tennis or sumo wrestling, to have their own motivational psychologist on their staff, or to check in from time to time at a centre offering to fine-tune skills through such means. Hypnosis works brilliantly with motivational encouragement – as long as nothing goes wrong. In an episode of the popular satirical cartoon The Simpsons a sports hypnotist who, in a monotonous voice, is encouraging his team to ‘give 110 per cent’ accidentally makes a member of the team behave like a chicken and gets out of trouble in the end only by hypnotizing the boss into thinking he did a good job.

  Sports psychologists use hypnosis along with affirmations and visualizations to encourage the sportsmen and women under their charge. As I write, the Oxford University boat crew has just beaten Cambridge for the first time in many years, and against the odds. Before the race it was reported on the front page of The Times for 25 March 2000 that Oxford had employed a motivational psychologist, a former rower herself, Dr Kirsten Barnes, whose methods of visualization and affirmation she herself describes as ‘verging on hypnosis’.

  In short, hypnosis can change the way you feel about yourself, and apart from the obvious psychological benefits of that, there are physical results as well. We will soon see why.

  Hypnosis and Blood Flow

  Hypnosis has a good track record with the cure of warts. Sceptics often point out that warts come and go rather mysteriously on their own, as a result of psychological conditions that are still obscure to medical science, and so that the hypnotic cure of warts really proves nothing. But this leaves them rather stuck to explain the following test. A group of wart-infested patients were hypnotized and told that the warts on one side of their bodies alone would clear up. And that is exactly what happened. But since warts are also commonly treated by placebos and various forms of faith healing (in remote parts of Britain, one can still come across ‘wise women’ who can cure warts), it seems that hypnosis itself is not a necessary factor. Suggestion alone will get rid of the nasty little things. Hypnosis is good in situations like this because it increases our responsiveness to suggestions.

  In the 1932 film Rasputin and the Empress, the Mad Monk of Russia hypnotizes the czar's haemophiliac son in order to stop his bleeding. This is not too far removed from the truth: hypnosis has been shown to be good at controlling blood flow, and to do so even in haemophiliacs. In fact, it is possible that this is how hypnosis gets rid of warts, since starving them of blood seems to do the trick. Somerset Maugham's 1944 novel The Razor's Edge contains one of the few sensible fictional treatments of hypnosis. In one episode Larry cures someone's migraine after a straightforward induction. Maugham was probably unaware of the mechanism, which again has to do with blood flow, since migraines are accompanied or caused by dilation of blood vessels in the head. Perhaps we could also use the success of hypnosis with blood flow to explain how quite a few women have been able through a combination of hypnosis and visualizations to enlarge their breasts by up to 1½ inches. The visualizations, by the way, were along the following lines: ‘Imagine that the sun is shining on your breasts and feel the heat flowing through them. Imagine your breasts growing as they did in puberty, a
nd feel the tenderness and tautness of the skin over the breasts. Imagine that your breasts are becoming warm, tingling, pulsating and sensitive, and that they are growing.’

  Who can doubt that hypnotherapy can be effective for things like rashes when there is good evidence that through suggestion or autosuggestion alone inflammation, blisters and bleeding can be produced? A hypnotist called H. Bourru in nineteenth-century France traced a patient's name on his arms with a blunt instrument and told him, when he was deeply entranced, that in the afternoon his arms would bleed along the lines he had traced. They did just that, showing red and oozing drops of blood. A number of similar cases were reported in the nineteenth century, until scientists felt the need to give a name to the phenomenon: rather cutely, they called it ‘autographic skin’. The willed production of blisters has been tested in modern laboratories; it is a genuinely recognized phenomenon of hypnotism.

  One of the most extraordinary products of mind–body interaction is the appearance of stigmata, the apparently miraculous manifestation of bleeding wounds corresponding to Christ's wounds on the cross. Since scientists have been able to cause spontaneous bleeding in certain subjects by suggestion alone, we can be pretty sure now that this phenomenon is not miraculous but comprehensible – in so far as the powerful effect the mind can exert on the body is yet comprehensible. Nor is this a new-fangled theory; the psychosomatic origin of stigmata was first proposed in 1855 by the French physician Alfred Maury. More recently, researchers have found a background of psychological trauma; stigmatists are often hysterical, masochistic, depressive, frigid and dependent, and suffer from nervous anxiety. Add a good pinch of religious fervour to such a personality, and you may well get a stigmatic, someone who by autosuggestion can produce all or some of the marks on her skin. But I must immediately add that not all stigmatics fit this profile: Padre Pio (1887–1968), whose stigmata made him an international celebrity and his monastery in Italy a place of pilgrimage, seems to have been a hearty and robust person, fond of his beer and wine.

  I sincerely hope that this paragraph will not offend some people. In the first place, I hope they can accept that at least some ‘miracles’ (even those of Jesus) may become explicable as time goes on; clinging to an explanation in terms of divine miracles in such cases is not religion but superstition, and the distinction some writers make between hysterical and religious stigmata is hard to maintain. In the second place, one of the main points I am trying to make in this book, and especially in this chapter, is that however close science might come to explaining mind–body interaction, some of the phenomena and abilities of the mind are truly remarkable. It is astonishing – perhaps even miraculous – how much bigger we are than we think we are. If we could realize and remember that, each of us would live in a larger, more meaningful world, which it is one of the purposes of religion to promote. As Jesus said: ‘That they might have life and have it more abundantly’ (John 10:10).

  The most famous stigmatist was St Francis of Assisi, who developed the marks on 14 September 1213, and kept them until his death in 1215. He was the first, and since then there have been several hundred cases, mostly women. In a typical case of mass suggestion, another thirty cases were known by the end of the thirteenth century. Other famous stigmatics are Anne Catherine Emmerich (born 1774), Gemma Galgani (1878–1903) and Marie-July Jahenny (late nineteenth century). But scientists and medical men were able to study two in particular: Louise Lateau and Therese Neumann. Louise Lateau was a Belgian peasant girl, born in 1850, who showed more than 800 stigmata in her short lifetime (she died in 1883), which started when she was eighteen. She would go into a trance state after receiving Communion in church, and then start bleeding, typically from her hands, feet and under her left breast (where, remember, Christ was wounded by the Roman soldier's spear). Generally, the appearance of the stigmata was preceded by headaches; she was anorexic and often bedridden. Therese Neumann was a very similar case – a peasant girl filled with religious fervour. Born in 1898, she suffered from hysterical paralysis, blindness and false appendicitis, until in 1926 she began to show stigmata, which bled very freely. She too would go into a kind of trance before the bleeding started. Her stigmata continued until her death in 1962.

  There is a very good reason why I have concluded this survey with the effect of hypnosis on blood flow, and have lingered a little over the phenomenon of stigmata. It is common knowledge that hypnosis is a mental treatment which can have only mental or psychological effects, or at any rate deal with only mentally caused illnesses. But this common knowledge is wrong! The remarkable truth is that hypnosis and autosuggestion can have organic, physiological effects. Just ask the women who have increased their breast sizes. This is not to say that hypnosis can cure cancer (though as we have seen it can help in certain respects), but it is the case that it is not limited to the mind, but works on the body via the mind. Research in the last forty years has demonstrated beyond the slightest doubt that the mind can bring about organic changes in the body. I will go into this in more depth shortly.

  After-effects

  While we're on the subject of hypnotherapy, I should lay to rest the idea that hypnosis has harmful after-effects (or ‘sequelae’, as doctors will insist on calling them).

  In 1897 in New York State a seventeen-year-old boy called Spurgeon Young died. For six months prior to his death he had been a practising hypnotic clairvoyant. The court investigating his death asked a panel of medical experts whether the fact that he had been repeatedly hypnotized contributed to his death, since it was widely believed at the time that hypnosis had a deleterious effect on the nervous system. The experts concluded that his ‘nervous organism’ had been ‘shattered’, and that, if he had not died, he would have at least been driven insane or imbecilic.

  Times have changed. Nowadays, everyone is agreed that the after-effects of being hypnotized are minimal and are classifiable as complications rather than as dangers. The trance per se is benign, and any complications that arise come from the induction procedure or something other than the trance itself. There is certainly no evidence that you will fail to wake fully from the trance, or that you will be liable to unwanted trance flashbacks later, or that your will is weakened. As for waking up, it is true that a very few individuals are hard to dehypnotize, but if they were left alone they would either gently wake up of their own accord, or would fall asleep.

  Some irresponsible or thoughtless commentators have occasionally accused hypnosis of bringing on severe disorders such as schizophrenia, but this is rubbish; there is no evidence that the subject would not have suffered from schizophrenia anyway. Being hypnotized can be a significant event in someone's life, and that significance can shift the person towards a potential so far dormant, but it is not the hypnosis in itself that causes the shift. In other words, what dangers there are are coincidental dangers.

  Complications are likely to arise more from stage shows than hypnotherapy, basically because some showmen are less responsible. Imagine a performer suggesting to a person that she is walking on a tightrope, without first checking whether she has a fear of heights. This sort of thing has actually happened. In September 1993 a twentyfour year-old woman, Sharron Tabarn, died hours after taking part in a show at a Lancashire pub. The hypnotist concluded his show by suggesting that the audience would feel a 10,000-volt electric shock in their seats, and that this would wake them up from the trance. Sharron felt dizzy, went home, vomited in her sleep, and choked to death. It was later discovered that she had a fear of electricity. In Israel in the 1970s a particularly dim-witted hypnotist regressed a middle-aged member of the audience back to her childhood – back to the time when she and her sister had been hidden in a house in Paris for the duration of the Nazi occupation, and triggered a psychosis that lasted for many years before being resolved. The Tabarn case received a good deal of attention, and a British government committee was convened to investigate the death; they concluded that hypnosis was not responsible.

  These are
very rare occurrences. The vast majority of people who go to see a stage hypnotist experience nothing but pleasure. In Britain these days no one under the age of sixteen is allowed on stage to take part in a hypnotic show, and certain tricks are banned, such as eating an onion as if it were an apple, and smelling ammonia as if it were the sweetest perfume. But the point is that not being in a one-to-one situation, the stage hypnotist may not have taken the time and trouble to screen his subjects and build up a psychological profile, as of course any reputable therapist would have. And since they generally pack up their bags and leave town for their next gig elsewhere, they are not available for consultation afterwards should they be needed. It follows from all this that stage performers should err on the side of extreme caution. A well-meaning Federation of Ethical Stage Hypnotists was set up in Britain in the early 1980s, but it had no means of seeing that the code of practice it drew up reached the statute books. Among its conclusions were that stage hypnotists should never be allowed to induce catalepsy or rigidity in subjects, or put them through age-regression, or suggest that they have eaten or drunk anything unpleasant; and that all post-hypnotic suggestions should be removed not only from the people who had actually been hypnotized up on stage, but also from all members of the audience. Stage hypnotism is now banned in several states of the USA, in parts of Australia and Canada, and in Norway, Sweden and Israel. In many other countries, as in Britain, performers have to be granted a licence by the local authority before they can put on a show. It would be a shame if the irresponsibility of some stage hypnotists deprived the rest of a good living and the audience of a lot of fun.