Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis (37 page)

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.

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.

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.

In France the mystical mesmerists added to the German repertoire a variety of parlour tricks, including playing card games while blindfolded, and reporting on the personal history of the owner of a random object handed to them. But French somnambulists had their
more serious side too, and there are reports of dramatic clairvoyant solutions to crimes. Madame Morel was a famous hypnotic clairvoyant in the 1910s. She helped police locate missing persons, sometimes describing their whereabouts in minute detail. Once, on being given a book by a third party, she gave an accurate account of the owner, and how he had died in battle. The French could also on occasion rise to the spiritist and bizarre heights of their German counterparts. The closest parallel to the Seeress of Prevorst is the remarkable Adèle Maginot, who on one occasion ‘travelled' to Mexico, complained how hot the sun was, and was found on her ‘return' to have one side of her face tanned as if by the sun. Never mind the uncritical researchers of the Puységurian era – even sober academics later in the century were not immune to the lure of clairvoyance. Pierre Janet hypnotized a supposedly clairvoyant subject, Léonie B., and asked her to travel from Le Havre, where they were, to Paris, and to visit the laboratories of his friend Charles Richet. She cried out: ‘It's burning. It's burning.' This was true: there had been a fire in Richet's laboratory on that very day.

Psychometry is the psychic reading of the ‘vibrations' or whatever given off by objects. The word was coined by the American writer on mesmerism Joseph Rodes Buchanan (1814–99), the founder of the remarkable-sounding Eclectic Medical Institute of Covington, Kentucky. The Mexican seeress known in the annals of the American Society for Psychical Research only as Señora Reyes de Z. was one of the most famous psychometrists. Once, in a controlled experiment, she was hypnotized and handed four pieces of pumice stone, cut from the same lump, which had been subjected to different treatments in the prior weeks. The first had been soaked in a tincture of gentian and asafoetida; the second had been put inside a clock; the third had been rolled in sugar and saccharine; the fourth had been heated by burning sulphur. When presented with these four pieces of pumice, she reported that the first gave her an impression of taste, the second of rhythmic sounds, the third of sweetness, and the fourth of heat and sulphur dioxide. She was just as accurate with objects which were inside closed boxes.

It's often hard to distinguish telepathy – the inexplicable communication of two minds – from clairvoyance or psychometry. Consider again the case of Señora Reyes de Z. Was she ‘reading' the
stones, or picking up from the minds of those around her what they knew of the recent history of the stones? What we would now call ‘telepathy' (the word was coined in the late nineteenth century by Frederic Myers) is part of what was in earlier times called ‘sympathy'. Sympathy was one of the most popular phenomena of Victorian times, as we have seen. It is the phenomenon whereby, even though the subject may be desensitized himself, he still responds to stimuli applied to the operator: if the operator's arm is raised, the subject's arm is raised; if the operator's sole is tickled, the subject giggles. All this, of course, goes on behind the subject's back.

In his book
Psychical Research
, published in 1911, Sir William Barrett reports an experiment in which he played a part in 1870. A child was hypnotized and given instructions to respond to no one else who was in the room other than Barrett. Once this rapport was established between Barrett and the child, Barrett took a number of different substances and put them in his mouth – salt, sugar, ginger, pepper and so on. The child accurately sensed each of the tastes in her own mouth. Perhaps the child could see what was going on; we have no record of how far apart the two of them were. But in later experiments Barrett tested other subjects' ability to ‘see' playing cards that he was seeing. One subject had a 100 per cent success rate even when the two of them were in different rooms. In another experiment, a blindfolded hypnotized boy could tell which parts of Barrett's body were being pricked by a pin, to an astonishingly high degree of accuracy. In France Pierre Janet was conducting similar experiments, and in Germany Dr Albert von Notzing (later von Schrenk-Notzing) conducted experiments for paranormal faculties in a hypnotized subject, Lina, which caused such controversy that the police threatened to dissolve the Society for Scientific Psychology (Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Psychologie) under whose auspices he was working. Von Notzing's experiments were truly remarkable: Lina felt the pain of others being pricked behind her back with a pin, in the exact places where they were being pricked; she reproduced drawings made behind her back; she received precise telepathic communications, such as the instruction to go to the bookshelves and open a particular book at a particular page.

Peculiarly, much the same sympathy sometimes obtained between a hypnotized subject and an inanimate object. The subject
held a glass of water (or an apple or something) and was told to drain all the feeling from her arm into the water. When the water was pierced by a needle, she reacted, but when her own arm was pricked by the needle she felt no pain. In this experiment, good results were obtained even when the glass was taken into another room, out of sight of the subject, in case she could see through or around her blindfold.

Telepathic hypnotism – the ability to hypnotize someone from a distance, even when she doesn't know that the experiment is taking place – was taken very seriously in the nineteenth century, though far less work was done on it in the last century. At the end of the nineteenth century, in the era of more reliable experiments, even mainstream scientists such as Janet and Bernheim were doing research into this area. Janet claimed that it had worked for him, though not with perfect consistency, while Bernheim regretted that it hadn't for him. Janet experimented with telepathic hypnotism over various distances, from near by to a mile away, and achieved a high degree of success.

Ostrander and Schroeder report that certain Russian and Bulgarian scientists were experimenting with telepathic hypnotism from the 1920s to the 1960s, and achieved successes at distances of up to 1,000 miles. It's hard to know what controls there were on these experiments. For instance, in one experiment, the subject was lowered into a kind of lead casket, and the experimenter, Professor Leonid Vasiliev, found that he could still entrance him; but with all this elaborate preparation, the subject must have known what was going on, and have been prepared to go under. More impressive – astonishing, in fact – are reports of telepathic hypnotism where the subject was completely unaware that she was the subject of any such experiment, but still fell into a trance. But (even assuming these reports are valid) the scientists acknowledge that very few of us are susceptible to telepathic hypnotism, so there is little cause for alarm: you are not going to be prevailed upon in this way by an unknown assailant!