Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis (4 page)

In analysing fiction like this I run the risk of spoiling the fun. ‘It's fiction,' you say. ‘Of course I don't take it seriously.' But that's where you're wrong. The lighter the book or film the lighter the conscious attention given to it – and these are precisely the circumstances in which ideas sneak in under our guard and become lodged in the mind as if they were the truth.

Another main source for popular conceptions and misconceptions of hypnotism has been the practice of stage hypnotists. There is a high degree of continuity between the performances of the earliest stage mesmerists and ‘electro-biologists', and those of today. The techniques are similar, the phenomena more or less identical.

It is mostly from stage hypnotism, which is essentially a form of showmanship, that we get our image of the hypnotist as a flamboyant and authoritarian figure: ‘You will go to sleep
now
! You are under my spell!' He will wave his arms around as if dealing with a quasi-physical electrical or magnetic substance; he will employ theatrical tests to check whether the punter has been hypnotized, such as the arm-levitation test, or the hand-clasp test, whereby the subject locks her hands together and is told that she cannot pull them apart. Then he will put his subjects through the most extraordinary (and sometimes demeaning) manoeuvres. Partial or total catalepsy, when
a part of the body or the body as a whole is made rigid, is a popular choice. The most famous form of this is the trick known as the ‘human plank', when a subject is put into catalepsy and suspended between two chairs, with his head resting on one chair and his ankles on the other. At this point the hypnotist's beautiful assistant, or a member of the audience, will be asked to stand on the rigid hypnotized person, or, even more dramatically, a piece of stone will be put on a cushion on the subject's stomach and then smashed with a sledge-hammer. Then he will make a couple of them carry on a conversation in Martian, or forget how to count to ten, or have a man nurse a baby.

Hallucination is another hypnotic phenomenon commonly exploited by stage hypnotists, so that a subject might be made to dance with a broom, thinking it is Marilyn Monroe. Anaesthesia is another, in which a subject is made to endure something that would otherwise be painful, even to the extent of sticking needles through her arm, burying her hand in icy water, or something like that. Anosmia – loss of the sense of smell – allows subjects to take a whiff of ammonia under the illusion that it is attar of roses. A skilful stage hypnotist will have several subjects up on stage at once, each performing a different act. Then he may well make use of posthypnotic suggestion, telling the subject (or victim), for instance, that every time he hears a bell he will act like Elvis Presley.

Stage hypnotists have to do all this, because they are, first and foremost, entertainers. Even if they start with a gentle relaxation technique, they will move on to more flamboyant suggestions as soon as they can. The examples I've given are mostly fun, but there are also a good many shows which are designed to humiliate the subjects, especially in a sexual or lavatorial context. ‘You have lost one of your breasts. As you walk back to your seat, you must look for it' – that kind of thing. But there is one secret of stage hypnotism that should be revealed: many of the subjects are not really hypnotized.

To the serious-minded student of hypnotism, who wishes to produce a hypnotic show for entertainment purposes, it is recommended that he forget all about trying to be a legitimate hypnotist … Experience has shown … that the hypnotic show
must be faked, at least partially so, to hold audience interest and be successful as an entertainment.
^*

In his autobiography Mark Twain tells a story about a charlatan stage hypnotist who came to his home town when he was a child. Twain went night after night, and eventually summoned up the courage to go up on stage and be one of the hypnotist's subjects, in order to perform all kinds of bizarre and degrading acts. But he was not hypnotized, and he faked various performances, with the hypnotist at each stage crying out to the audience: ‘Of course, I just told him to do that. He is under my spell!'

For obvious reasons, a stage hypnotist does not have time for a full hypnotic induction, which takes time and patience. This too gives a false idea to the audience – the idea of omnipotence: ‘Look at that guy! All he has to do is touch them on the shoulder and they fall asleep!' This in turn leads to the fear that a stranger could hypnotize you all of a sudden in a train and take advantage of you in some way. If you see this kind of performance on TV, it is very likely that the induction has taken place beforehand, to save time and because it is illegal to show a hypnotic induction on TV (at any rate, in Britain), in case it works on people in their front rooms, and in case people all over the country start practising on their friends and relatives. ‘Dad, you are finding that you want to increase my allowance,' says the teenage son!

A performer in a theatre or club, however, might employ a shortcut, such as pressing the carotid artery near the ear, which rapidly induces a pseudo-trance, more accurately described simply as dizziness, since it cuts off the blood supply to the brain. More commonly, he will have planted in the audience one or two ‘horses' – associates who are either really good hypnotic subjects or good actors. When the hypnotist invites members of the audience up on stage, these horses will go up first. The hypnotist will either hypnotize them, or pretend to; in either case, once he has found out by some simple tests who among the others are suggestible, he will keep them on stage and dismiss the rest, because the suggestible ones will happily imitate the horses. They may be hypnotized, or
they may believe themselves to be hypnotized, but in any case, being self-selected, they are happy to go along with the show, for fun. Even the ‘human plank' trick can be carried out by anyone, I'm told – though perhaps not for quite as long as a hypnotized subject might do it.

In other words, the conditions for a successful stage act are as follows. First, those who go up on to the stage are already prepared to listen to the hypnotist. Second, a simple test eliminates those who are not readily susceptible. Third, nervous expectation heightens suggestibility. Fourth, advance publicity has stressed the hypnotist's powers and made people more inclined to be hypnotized by him. Fifth, seeing one person go under increases the chances that the next will and so on by the domino effect. Sixth, there may well be an element of peer pressure, if one has friends in the audience.

If you're in the audience watching a stage hypnotist at work, you might well suppose that his subjects, who are more or less making fools of themselves, are completely unconscious of what they are doing. This is not so, and it introduces us to a recurrent theme of this book: you cannot compel someone, under hypnosis, to do what she would not otherwise have done. You can lower a person's inhibitions or (to say the same thing from another angle) bring out her latent talents, but that is all, and the reason is that there is a part of you, including your conscience, that remains alert. If someone is prepared to make a fool of himself, he is just saying to himself: ‘It's just for a laugh. I'll go along with it.' If he is asked to do something too preposterous or humiliating, he will find a way to refuse.

The American psychologist George Estabrooks tells an odd story:

A stage operator was demonstrating in the local theater. One of the audience, a dignified member of the community and a deacon in his church, turned out to be a very good subject. The hypnotist had him stand on his head, bark around the stage on all fours, take off a goodly portion of his clothes and give, in general, a very humiliating exhibition. He then awakened his subject who just as promptly knocked him down.

In order for this to happen, the subject would have to be very easily hypnotizable. In a light trance, you are still wholly conscious, and so
cannot be made to do things you would rather not do. In a deep trance, you are more open to the suggestions of the hypnotist, but a part of you is still alert, as is shown by the fact that the deacon in this story knew what was going on. In all probability, the good deacon could have resisted, and would have done if asked to do something totally outrageous, but went along with the suggestions for a laugh, only to feel so embarrassed afterwards that he released his tension by lashing out.

In a later chapter I will touch on the question whether there is any danger, apart from embarrassment, in stage hypnotism. For now my point has been to show that we get some false ideas about hypnosis from these shows. Nevertheless, these shows are not unimportant. Historically, at times when hypnosis has been out of favour in medical or academic circles, stage performers have kept the art alive and the public interested. And the public is interested. If you see a good performer at work, it is amazing, and it helps to show that there is more to the human mind than is apparent.

I need to devote a section to this topic here, in the first chapter, because many people, whether they have simply been brought up in a nominally Christian society, or are practising Christians, believe that their Church condemns hypnotism as morally reprehensible or even spiritually dangerous. Other religions, such as Judaism, have nothing to say about it, but there has been some condemnation from the ranks of Christianity. It was not always so. In the last century, when it was believed that the ecstatic feats of mesmerized clairvoyants proved the existence of the soul and of higher realms, many people rediscovered their Christian roots as a result. In the pages of fiction, this is exactly what happened to Dr Minoret in Honoréde Balzac's
Ursule Mirouet
(1842). Balzac, who practised magnetism himself, evidently did not feel that hypnotism and Christianity were incompatible – and if he was right in supposing that hypnotism
reveals the objective existence of transcendent realms, then of course they are not incompatible.

Still, even in the nineteenth century, there were those who were concerned. The Papal States in Italy held out against hypnosis longer than most countries, and it became such a fad that worried Catholic clergymen from all over Europe wrote to the Vatican asking for guidance. In 1856 Cardinal Vincenzo Macchi responded: ‘The ordinary of each diocese must do his utmost to avert the abuses of magnetism, and to bring them to an end, so that the Lord's flock may be preserved from the attacks of the enemy, that the faith may be maintained in its integrity, and that the faithful committed to their care may be saved from the corruption of morals.' By ‘abuses' he meant that magnetism, a purely physical phenomenon (or so the Vatican assumed), should not be used as an explanation for things that are supernatural. In other words, magnetism was fine as long as it was used as a therapy, but employing it to produce paranormal phenomena was a sin. This has remained the Vatican's position, and was reiterated by Pope Pius XII in 1956, who suggested that hypnotism should be regarded the same way a Catholic regards medicine.

In reality, the various Churches have always tolerated a division of opinion over hypnosis (except for Christian Scientists, who unanimously condemn it). At the same time that some clerics were condemning it as satanic in the nineteenth century, others were busy practising it. A group of Catholic theologians in Germany at the start of the nineteenth century held out great hopes for the combination by priests of pastoral care and mesmerism. Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford and later of Winchester in the latter half of the century, immersed himself in the subject and could find nothing irreligious in it. In fact, he held that its very power meant that Christians should study and practise it, in case it fell into the hands of unbelievers. Since its healing powers seemed almost miraculous, even a physical healing was heralded by some priests who practised mesmerism as a spiritual event, which would help their parishioners, not condemn them to hell. The hierarchical aspect of mesmerism – the apparent imposition of one will on another – suddenly took on a spiritual dimension, as priests in mesmerizing members of their congregation claimed to be vehicles for God's will, and to be doing
no more than Jesus and a number of others had done in healing the sick. But other clerics and religious philosophers only found a reason to try to distinguish mesmerism from miracles.

Many from the fundamentalist and evangelical churches claim, in a most misinformed way, that hypnotism opens you up to the devil. It is not a new accusation. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the case was put stridently by the Abbé Wendel-Würtz, and in the middle of the century in Britain the charge of satanism from a Liverpool preacher called Hugh McNeile provoked a famous response from James Braid. Most of their arguments do not deserve the name, but are sheer rant. But if I had to guess where they're coming from, I'd point to the fact that traditional Christian practice would involve going as far as one can on one's own conscious resources, and then handing over in silence to God. But hypnotism can take one further than one's own conscious resources, and therefore seems to oust God. This is not a problem with hypnotism alone, but with psychology in general, ever since the discovery of the unconscious and methods of tapping into it – and indeed there are elements in the Christian Churches who are suspicious of psychology too.

The idea that someone who is hypnotized has been taken over by the devil seems to me so irrational that I will not even dignify it with commentary, except to point out that interpretation of trance states has always been subjective. The dancing frenzy – St Vitus's Dance – which gripped the Low Countries and northern Italy in the fifteenth century was attributed to diabolic possession (or, in Italy, to the bite of the tarantula), despite the obvious good it did to relieve the poor of their misery. On the other hand, Shaker trances were taken to be a sign of possession by God.

Later in the nineteenth century hypnotism was closely bound up with spiritism and other occult practices, and this might raise Christian doubts about hypnosis. But (assuming for the moment that occultism is evil) if occultists made use of hypnosis, that no more makes hypnosis bad than an evil use of a car, to injure someone, makes cars bad.