Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis (40 page)

At one point in her book
Hypnotism Made Easy
(which, despite the title, is fiction), French novelist Marie Nimier says: ‘One can inject basically any event, shaped appropriately, into the memory of a
well-disposed individual, as long as it isn't against his principles.' Once such a memory has been installed, it becomes as real, subjectively, as any true memory. This is the phenomenon of confabulation – the trap into which I have just accused Morey Bernstein and Virginia Tighe of falling. Confabulation is when two people unwittingly conspire to create a scenario; they implant a false memory into the subject's mind, and then make it concrete. Suppose a subject has fragmentary memories (true or false) of an event; in confabulation the gaps between these memories are filled in with a seemingly coherent story, which then takes on the appearance of a series of true memories.

The phenomena of confabulation and the creation of false memories (‘retroactive hallucination', as Bernheim accurately called it) were well known in the nineteenth century. If only they had been known 200 years earlier, when, during the notorious Salem witch trials of the 1690s, it is clear with hindsight that the children involved named many of the accused in order to please their questioners and put an end to the hours of interrogation to which they had been subjected. Nineteenth-century researchers also recognized the importance of the feeling of certainty to one's impression of the accuracy of a memory, and the legal repercussions of these phenomena were discussed. Nevertheless, despite this background of nineteenth-century knowledge, there have been too many distressing cases since then, and especially in the 1980s and 1990s.

As Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker reveal in
Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt
, the interview techniques used on children in recent alleged sexual abuse cases are frequently, even invariably, leading. For example, in order to encourage the children to talk about what might have happened, anatomically correct dolls were used. Having got a child involved in imaginative play, the questioner would bring on these dolls and sometimes almost force the child to accuse whoever it might be of performing obscene acts. If the child said that nothing happened, this was taken to be shyness or reluctance, and the questioner, in her enthusiasm for her cause (an enthusiasm often fuelled by feminism or Christian fundamentalism, or both in an unlikely alliance), would continue to press the child to make accusations, and praise the child once he or she had made the accusations. Although a number
of these cases have since been overturned, there are undoubtedly people in prison today who should not be; and even apart from their torment, one wonders what the long-term effect of these forms of questioning might be on the children.

Here is a fragment of an interrogation (not involving the use of dolls) of a five-year-old boy:

The case against Kelly Michaels, it should be added, was thrown out, partly as a result of this kind of interrogation technique – but not before she had spent some years in jail. Perhaps the most astonishing aspect to the whole hysterical business is that the children's accounts were accepted as more authoritative than common sense and good evidence. Even if a day-care worker had been in plain view of other responsible adults, and of dozens of children, all the time, it could still become accepted that he was abusing the children in his care.

Confabulation is not always as crude as this, however; it is subtle
and hard to guard against. Consider these two questions: ‘How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?' ‘How fast were the cars going when they collided?' The first question seems only to use an innocent colloquialism for ‘collision', but in fact when put that way the question elicits responses which exaggerate the speed of the cars. Or again, the question ‘Didn't you see a gun?' encourages respondents to answer yes more than ‘Did you see a gun?'

As an appendix, I cannot resist adding the little-known fact that the modern mass hysteria about sexual abuse of children was played out, on a small scale, in the analysis rooms of Freud. In the early years of his work, he found that almost all the ‘hysterical' women coming to see him had a history of sexual abuse, often of a perverted kind, by their fathers. However, it was gradually borne in on him that hardly any of this was true. For Freud, this was a crisis point; he nearly threw up the whole enterprise of analysis in disgust. If he, the analyst, could be taken in so thoroughly for so long, and if his patients could come up with lies as if they were truth, how could progress be made by means of psychoanalysis? Nevertheless, he persevered – for better or for worse.

Cryptomnesia means ‘buried memory'. We all have them. Sometimes we have buried a memory because it is too distressing to face (though this is rarer than Freudians would have us believe); sometimes an event was just too trivial to be fully registered at the time in our conscious minds, though it was taken in unconsciously. Hypermnesia is the ability to recall, under hypnosis, such forgotten memories.

There is no doubt that hypnosis can significantly enhance memory recall. I argued (in
Chapter 1
) that it is hit and miss, but when it scores a hit it can be very dramatic, and has been used in criminal cases. In 1976, for instance, a school bus was hijacked at Chowchilla
near San Francisco and held to ransom. In the course of the adventure, the driver and the children were shoved into the back of closed vans. Under hypnosis the bus driver was able to recall enough of the number plate of one of the vans to allow the police later to arrest the gang. He caught only the merest glimpse of the number plate, and was unable to remember its details by conscious recall. Actually, he ‘recalled' two numbers, only one of which was right – perfectly illustrating the hit-and-miss nature of hypnotically refreshed memory.

In 1973 a terrorist bomb exploded on an Israeli bus. By great good fortune, the bus had just pulled in at the main station in Haifa and unloaded its passengers, so although there were injuries, there were no fatalities. The bus had been packed; it was a normal busy day for the driver, and he could not be expected to remember all the passengers who had come and gone. But he agreed to be hypnotized by the police, and then he remembered that there was something odd about one of the passengers: he had been sweating profusely, as if in fear. The hypnotist asked him whether he could also remember details of his features, glimpsed for maybe a couple of seconds. A police artist sketched the driver's description not only of the passenger but of a companion who had not boarded the bus – and the police were able successfully to pick up one of the terrorists and chase the other out of the country.

In the 1980s a woman was found wandering in the dark, confused and amnesic, somewhere in North America (the precise place has been suppressed in my source). She had been beaten and sexually assaulted. Under hypnosis she was able to recover quite a few details of the man, the car he had driven (including the make of a can of beer that had been shoved down between the front seats) and the location. She told the police, among other things, that the car had crashed and dented its front wing during the abduction. The police went round repair garages and eventually found one that had fixed a car that fitted the description. They went to the man's house and found, inside the car, not only the squashed can of beer, but also the woman's small purse, which had ended up on the floor of the back seat, covered by some old clothes. The man was tried and convicted.

American psychotherapist Milton Kline once had to deal with a
patient who had inexplicably started to have anxiety attacks. It turned out that these had begun four weeks earlier, the night after she had been invited to a party at her neighbour's; she had refused the invitation, but had lent him her steak knives. Under hypnosis she remembered having heard cries and the sound of a struggle in the next-door apartment. Police broke down the door to find a fourweek-old corpse, apparently killed with one of the steak knives.

Hypnosis has been used to recover memories even in such high-profile cases as the Florida
State
v.
Bundy
– Ted Bundy being better known as the charming, good-looking sex killer of at least twenty-two women in Washington, Oregon and Florida in the early 1970s. Or through hypnosis an innocent person might come to remember details establishing her alibi. More surprisingly, hypnosis has also been used to elicit or confirm confessions from suspects, as in the famous Boston Strangler case in 1962, when under hypnosis Albert DeSalvo willingly revealed details of the series of sex killings which only the perpetrator could have known.

What most impresses about these cases is their matter-of-factness: hypnotism simply seems to work well under these circumstances and can be used by open-minded police forces without fuss or bother. It may help and, with the proper legal guidelines and awareness of its hit-and-miss nature, it cannot hinder. It is a fact that memory can be refreshed under hypnotism in many cases, provided the operator suggests it – memory is not automatically enhanced by hypnosis – and the subject wants to remember. The technique is a form of age-regression: the subject is regressed back to the event details of which he or she is to remember. The hypnotist is either a professional brought in by the police, or, increasingly, a trained police officer. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) pioneered the training of its own people, starting in the 1970s.

It goes without saying that checks and controls are needed. Only experienced hypnotists should be used, not policemen fresh from a four-day course on the topic – this has actually happened, and led to abuse: two suspects to a crime were identified and even arrested before it was found out that the victim was making the whole thing up. And whenever hypnotic testimony is given in court, it needs to be clearly stated that this testimony was gained under hypnosis,
so that judge and jurors can look at it in that light. For, as we will see, although hypnosis can refresh memory, our memories are far from accurate.

Up until about the 1970s courts in the English-speaking world tended to rule that information gained under hypnosis was inadmissible. They did so for a variety of reasons, both good (such as worries that the hypnotist may have asked leading questions) and bad (such as ignorance about hypnotism). But one of the basic reasons was the equal inadmissibility of the evidence of a lie-detector test. Both methods of arriving at the ‘truth' were felt to offer useful corroborative evidence out of court, but to be too unreliable for the degree of certainty courts aspire to attain. Only gradually did courts come to see that hypnosis could be a valuable tool where, for instance, a defendant had a complete blank in his memory due to alcoholic stupor, perhaps. And even now courts chop and change. In the 1959 Californian case of
Cornell
v.
Superior Court
it was clearly stated that the defendant had a right to be hypnotized to help him recall forgotten facts, but in the 1982
People
v.
Donald Lee Shirley
it was equally clearly stated that the testimony of witnesses who had been hypnotized to aid their memories ‘should not be admitted in the courts of California'. Similar rulings have been passed in other American States (such as
State
v.
Mack
(1980) in Minnesota). British and French courts don't accept testimony which has been elicited under hypnosis, although like most other courts around the world they are prepared to give it a guarded hearing, provided it has been confirmed by proper police investigation. In America, although hypnotic testimony can be viewed with some suspicion, courts are reluctant to outlaw it altogether, because that would restrict the right, under the 14th amendment, to due process, and the right, under the 6th amendment, to call witnesses.

The landmark case in the States was
State of New Jersey
v.
Hurd
in 1981, which outlined conditions for the use of hypnosis on a witness. The most important of these conditions are that a trained medical doctor should be used, not an amateur hypnotist; that the witness should have given his or her testimony in the first place
before
being hypnotized, so that there is a point of comparison in case the hypnotized version of the story differs; and that the witness
should be hypnotized by the expert with no one else present, to prevent any undue pressure.

Before these sensible guidelines were in place, there were some extraordinary cases. Perhaps the most outrageous happened entirely within the court, in Columbus, Ohio, in 1962. The defendant was Arthur Nebb, who, in front of witnesses, had broken into the home of his estranged wife and shot both her and her lover, the latter fatally. It seemed an open-and-shut case, with only the quirk that Nebb had or claimed to have no memory of the events. At the defence lawyer's request, the judge allowed Nebb to be hypnotized
in court
to enable him to recall the fatal evening's events. Although members of the public were allowed to stay, the jury was temporarily removed from the court while induction went on, and were then brought back in to hear the hypnotized man's testimony. His account of the events differed crucially from that of the witnesses; he claimed, for instance, that it was during a struggle with his wife that the gun had first gone off, as opposed to the prosecution's claim that he had calmly walked into the room and opened up. Nebb's account of the events obviously won the day, because he was found guilty only of second-degree murder, and imprisoned for a term of one to twenty years, which would make him liable for parole in a mere eight months.