Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis (35 page)

The poor man is then taken before an imaginary judge. On another occasion, Bernheim, sounding rather like a stage hypnotist, got the same subject in rapid succession to imagine that he was a young boy, a young girl, a military commander, a priest and a dog. Each time C. does his eager best to comply.

But Bernheim's work with criminal cases was not all misguided. His emphasis on suggestibility also led him to be the first to recognize and clearly state that alleged criminals could be induced to make false confessions, and witnesses give false reports, in order to please their interrogators, and to suggest guidelines to check that no such falsification is taking place.

On the criminal potential of hypnotism, Gilles de la Tourette was the spokesman for the Salpêtrière in response to Nancy: he argued that subjects are play-acting, that hypnotism does not alter character. A famous event at the Salpêtrière seems to prove de la Tourette's point:

On one occasion Charcot had invited a distinguished audience of jurists, magistrates, and specialists in forensic medicine to a demonstration in the lecture theatre at the Salpêtrière. Blanche [Blanche Wittmann, Charcot's subject], in a state of somnambulism, had obediently performed the most bloodthirsty tasks, ‘shooting', ‘stabbing', and ‘poisoning'. The notables withdrew
from a room littered with fictive corpses. The medical students who remained, being very like medical students in all times and places, then told Blanche (still in a state of somnambulism) that she was alone in the hall and should undress and take a bath. But Blanche, who had waded through blood without turning a hair, found this suggestion too infamous and came abruptly out of hypnosis.

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.

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 same 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.