Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis (44 page)

Or are things out of hand? If my complaint before about one-dimensionality has any force, then sixteen personalities add up to a more rounded human being. And remember that nineteen more personalities later appeared in Eve. Sybil just expresses more of herself than Eve originally did, on this sceptical hypothesis. Psychologists who believe in MPD talk of the secondary selves ‘depleting' the primary personality – depriving it of emotions and motivations; but this is just another way of describing what common sense calls the one-dimensionality of each personality. Talk of ‘depletion' is a redescription, not an explanation, as often happens when scientists try to explain away something bizarre. Consider this paragraph from
Sybil
in which the personality called ‘Mary', a practical homebody, is explaining why she has to come out:

Well, Dr Wilbur, right now, it's a practical matter. You probably know that Sybil and Teddy Reeves – a friend from Whittier Hall – have just taken an apartment together on Morningside Drive. You know what a new apartment involves. At 8:45 yesterday morning I had to come out to receive the workmen who are putting in new windows. I had to come out again at
7:15 p.m. because I didn't want Sybil to put up the new drapes. I feel it's up to me to keep the home going.

Surely it makes sense to think of ‘Mary' simply as a projection of Sybil's practical self. Those who are committed to the reality of MPD talk of the ‘autonomy' of the separate personalities, by which they mean that ‘Mary', for instance, can function in the world just as well as Sybil could. But when I am exhibiting the generous side of my nature, I am functioning in the world just as well as when I am exhibiting the mean side. If my scepticism is right, Sybil and her kind are merely suffering from a severe case of dissociation.

Dissociation may be defined as a division of consciousness into two or more simultaneous streams of mental activity, especially when one of these streams influences experiences, thought and action outside phenomenal awareness and voluntary control. It's quite easy to explain the concept of dissociation, because most readers will have experienced it. When you're a little bit drunk, in the state we call ‘being less inhibited', what you've done, in effect, is given another side of your character permission to come out and play. This is a mild form of dissociation. When you're stoned on marijuana, it's even easier to see that this is a dissociated state, because one of the effects of the drug is a certain clarity of observation of oneself. When you're extremely drunk, you can enter the quasi-amnesic condition in which (perhaps thankfully) you don't remember the next morning what you did. In this case, the dissociation is far more extreme, but no one thinks that a drunk is an MPD sufferer. Or again, many children have an imaginary playmate: this is a case of quite extreme dissociation. Such a playmate may even speak in a different voice and be heard, as if externally, by the child. I suggest that Sybil and her kind choose at some point to fragment themselves so thoroughly that they experience a combination of amnesia and objectification of sides of their character.

Although it's not clear from
The Three Faces of Eve
what originally made Eve retreat into MPD, in the subsequent
I'm Eve
Christine explains how it was early shocks relating to violent death that caused her first dissociations. In Sybil's case it was the awful, cruel and sexually perverse tortures inflicted on her by a schizophrenic mother, and the terrors of the rigid fundamentalism with which she was
brought up. Recent studies of MPD have been closely connected with the scare, especially in the States, over childhood sexual abuse, since many apparent multiples reported such abuse as the source of the amnesia and the consequent separation of personalities. I take it that this scare has now been more or less laid to rest. It was a form of mass hysteria, compounded by confabulation between therapists and patients. Of course, incest and sexual abuse of children occur, and may even be more common than we like to think; but at the height of the scare it seemed as though some 50 per cent of people had been abused, and that is too much.

Sybil gradually learnt to recover the other personalities' memories for herself, and to integrate a more complete human being, a new Sybil. Hypnosis was not used at first, but the breakthrough came using a drug, sodium pentothal, which was administered for many months. When Sybil showed signs of becoming dependent on the drug, it was withdrawn, and hypnosis was used instead. In the first place, because some of the personalities were stuck in childhood, it was used to progress them all to the same age, Sybil's age, to aid integration. Then it was used to visualize integration and make it real. But none of this was instantaneous; it took several more years (Sybil had 2,354 sessions with her analyst in all, spread over eleven years). As integration began to happen, hypnosis was used only for the purposes of analysis – to bring about temporary dissociation of the separate selves to enable the therapist to communicate with them. Finally, hypnosis was used to check that Sybil could recall everything the other selves recalled. There were no gaps: Sybil was integrated.

Though hypnosis played less of a part, it is also worth mentioning the remarkable case of Billy Milligan, a young criminal who terrorized the women of Ohio State University for a while in 1977 as a rapist and burglar. Cornelia Wilbur, Sybil's therapist, was again called in, because someone suspected that he might be suffering from MPD. In the event he was found to have no fewer than twenty-four separate personalities – but what is most astonishing is that he was acquitted of his crimes, found not guilty by reason of insanity. Instead of being sent to prison, he was put in the charge of a therapist at a medical centre. Not that MPD is really a form of insanity, in the sense that each of the various personalities may be
perfectly sane and capable of functioning in the world, without hallucinating or whatever, but this was the nearest category in the judicial world that the judge could find to acquit him. Among Billy's main personalities was Arthur, who spoke with an English accent, was a scientist, and was fluent in Arabic; Ragen Vadascovinich, a vicious Yugoslavian; and Adlana, a female personality who was a lesbian and was responsible for the rapes. (I should say that multiples often have alters who are children, while they are grown up, and others that are the opposite gender.) His doctor worked towards the integration of the separate personalities under a new, responsible personality – as worked, more or less, in other MPD cases – and progress was being made when Billy was accused (with uncertain justice) of the rape of a woman at the medical centre. Billy regressed, and was eventually sent to prison.

So, is there such a thing as MPD? I am not qualified to give a definite answer to the question, but I have raised certain doubts that occur to me as a lay wielder of common sense. I suppose I feel about it pretty much as Margaret Atwood does, in her novel
Alias Grace
, in which she alludes to the phenomenon. The ‘Grace' of the title is Grace Marks, a historical figure notorious in Canada in the 1840s for having allegedly assisted in the double murder of her employer and his housekeeper, and having helped her lover dump their corpses in the cellar of the house where she was a servant. At one point in the novel, which takes place after Marks has been in prison for sixteen years already, Atwood has Marks hypnotized and she reveals a separate personality, that of Mary Whitney, who had been a friend of Grace. While possessed by Mary, it seems as though she could have carried out the murders. But, cleverly, on reading this episode, you're not sure that it's not all a hoax, designed to get Grace off the hook, since the hypnotist, Jerome DuPont, is actually an old friend of Grace's in disguise, and we know from earlier in the book that the brand of stage hypnotism he practises is largely fraud.

MPD has had a chequered history. Once, with the help of hypnosis, it was the searchlight that cast its beam on the road that led to the discovery of the workings of the unconscious. Once it was the flagship in the fleet of pathologies, but now it has fallen victim to the cutbacks of modern scepticism. The bottom line is that nowadays many psychologists think that sufferers from MPD
are simply making it all up, exaggerating a tendency we all have. Believers in MPD often point to research indicating that different personalities exhibit different brainwave patterns on an electroencephalograph (EEG). But this is neither here nor there: we all exhibit different brainwave patterns when we are in different states, and no one denies that each personality is a different state. For instance, suppose a deeply angry person has (for whatever reasons) forbidden herself to express her anger. That anger will burst out from time to time as an ‘alternate personality' – an angry person within the apparently calm person. I would not be at all surprised if the angry person displayed different EEG readings. Even actors playing different roles have been found to display different EEG readings. It is also disturbing that while the number of multiples multiply in North America, the disorder is virtually unknown elsewhere in the world; and that 90 per cent of the sufferers are middle-class women. It begins to look as though MPD is simply, as the philosopher Ian Hacking said, ‘a new way to be an unhappy person'.

One day around the middle of the 1870s, while a medical student of Vienna University, Sigmund Freud happened to buy a ticket to see the Danish stage hypnotist Hansen do his tricks. He was impressed:

While I was still a student I had attended a public exhibition given by the ‘magnetist' Hansen and had noticed that one of the persons experimented upon had become deathly pale at the onset of cataleptic rigidity and had remained so as long as that condition lasted. This firmly convinced me of the genuineness of the phenomenon of hypnosis. Scientific support was soon afterwards given to this view by Heidenhain; but that did not restrain the professors of psychiatry from declaring for a long time to come that hypnosis was not only fraudulent but dangerous and from regarding hypnotists with contempt. In
Paris I had seen hypnosis used freely as a method for producing symptoms in patients and then removing them again. And now the news reached us that a school had arisen in Nancy which made an extensive and remarkably successful use of suggestion, with or without hypnosis, for therapeutic purposes. It thus came about, as a matter of course, that in the first years of my activity as a physician my principal instrument of work, apart from haphazard and unsystematic psycho-therapeutic methods, was hypnotic suggestion.

Freud graduated as a doctor in 1881, and the following year his friend and colleague Josef Breuer introduced him to hypnotherapy. In June 1885 Freud worked as a locum at Heinrich Obersteiner's private clinic near Vienna, where hypnosis was practised. In October he went to Paris to study neurology under Charcot. He stayed in Paris until February 1886, and during this time he frequently attended hypnotherapy sessions at the Salpêtrière. He also visited Bernheim in Nancy, where he became convinced (by the phenomena of amnesia and post-hypnotic suggestion) that there could be powerful mental processes in people that were hidden from our normal everyday consciousness. This conviction stayed with him for the rest of his life, of course, and from time to time he acknowledged the importance of hypnotism in making this clear to him.

In the 1880s he was a passionate spokesman for hypnosis, in the face of the usual incredulous suspicions of the establishment, as revelatory of the psychological processes not just of hysterics, but of everyone. Back in Vienna he established his own practice, gave lectures on hypnotism to several learned societies, translated books by both Bernheim and Charcot, and wrote a number of studies on the subject. He attended the pioneering First International Congress for Experimental and Therapeutic Hypnotism in Paris in 1889, incorporated hypnosis into his own practice in the form of direct suggestion, sometimes accompanied by pressing his hands on the patient's head, and used it continuously from 1887 to 1892. The ‘small but significant successes' he achieved – the phrase comes from a letter to his friend Wilhelm Fliess – gave him confidence and removed the feeling of helplessness that had dogged his first attempts at psychotherapy. In later years he confessed that it was flattering
to be regarded by those he hypnotized as something of a miracle-worker. But by the middle of the 1890s he had more or less given hypnosis up, and on one occasion he condemned it as ‘a senseless and worthless proceeding'.

What were his reasons for abandoning hypnosis? This is an important question to answer, because if I had to pinpoint a single reason for the marginalization of hypnosis as a psychotherapeutic tool these days, I would have to pick Freud's abandonment of the practice. Every analyst knows that he made use of it early in his career; every analyst also knows that he had abandoned it by 1896 in favour of free association – the ‘talking cure', as Breuer's Anna O. called it. Nearly every analyst makes the assumption that he did so because he was unsatisfied with it and, therefore, out of an understandable desire not to re-invent the wheel and out of awe of Freud, they don't bother to investigate further or consider hypnosis a viable therapeutic option. But in fact, as we will see, Freud's reasons for giving up hypnosis are more complex than this simple picture assumes, and certainly don't imply that he found it useless. On the contrary, in one respect he found it too powerful.

Freud's reasons for abandoning hypnosis are both personal and objective. First, we should not discount his personal enthusiasm at having discovered the importance of dreams and of free association, initially relating to dream themes: he wanted to explore the possibilities of this method, and this meant that other techniques were relegated to a dusty corner of his therapeutic arsenal. Second, he simply found that he himself was not a very good hypnotist. Third, it made him feel uncomfortable, in two respects: since the method he used had him making passes over the patient's head and upper body, Freud found himself stared at by his patients for hours every day, and he didn't enjoy it; also, he didn't understand how it worked, since he had been convinced by the theories of neither Charcot nor Bernheim. Fourth, he found that the phenomenon of transference was enhanced under hypnosis, so that the patient's affection for the therapist could increase beyond desirable limits. This is the respect in which hypnosis was too powerful a tool for Freud: the hypnotherapist has to be careful to prevent too intense a relationship developing between himself and his clients, as they go on a journey of exploration together. In hypnosis the patient becomes very aware of the hypnotist's
feelings and motives. This, in Freud's view, is a limitation: it obviously arouses the possibility of the client doing and saying things to please the therapist rather than out of any deeper impulse. On one occasion a hypnotized female patient flung her arms around Freud, to his embarrassment. The entry of a servant into the room interrupted the ensuing painful discussion. He found hypnosis too hot to handle.