Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis (57 page)

Finally, a word must be said here about the incredible case of Candy Jones. In 1976 Donald Bain published
The Control of Candy Jones
, in which he claimed that under hypnosis Ms Jones (whose real name was Jessica Wilcox, but she had taken the name Candy Jones when she was a model) had revealed that she had, throughout the 1960s, acted as a courier for the CIA. The reason it took hypnosis to bring this out of her was that she had been hypnotized in the first place, by a doctor working for the CIA, who had effectively created an alternate personality. In a trance her other self had been sent off on all kinds of missions, on at least one of which she was tortured, and the plan was to induce her to commit suicide when her usefulness had run out.

Given the inherent implausibility of the creation by hypnosis of any such perfect tool, I read the book with considerable scepticism. My scepticism was only increased by a remarkable parallel. If I mention that Candy ‘remembered' under hypnosis being prodded, poked and tested, often in a sexual fashion, by a Dr Gilbert Jensen (whom Bain tried and failed to locate), the reader will recall from
Chapter 8
that tales of alien abduction invariably include exactly this element. The most plausible scenario seems to be this. A person's false memories, when they are tinged by fear, attach themselves to a spectre. This spectre will change according to culture and the
Zeitgeist
.
One would not expect such a bogeyman to be the same in a remote Pacific Island as in the USA, and one would not expect it to be the same in 1800 as in 2000. Nowadays, in the so-called space age, aliens are the great unknown; in Candy Jones's time the thing to fear was the secret police.

Fear and bemusement about brainwashing in the 1950s led, among other things, to the US Air Force sponsoring a study, by a number of distinguished scientists, of what really could be achieved. This study was later written up and published as
The Manipulation of Human Behavior
, edited by Albert D. Biderman and Herbert Zimmer. Although most of the articles in the book are written in that uptight and jargonese fashion many academics still use to protect their professional status, it is a pity that it is not better known, because it acts as a useful counterbalance to bestselling books that alarm the general public.

The scientists accept, of course, that one person can influence another. That is why we have the concepts ‘influence', ‘control', ‘manipulation' and so on. But all their experiments and theories suggest that there are severe limitations on such influence, provided that the target person is unwilling to be influenced. The fictional or hysterical belief in the opposite, that one can be taken over despite one's best intentions, is an example of the syndrome whereby ‘the aspirations and anxieties that not so long ago were projected onto conceptions of the wizard and witch are now directed to the scientist'. Interrogators are not supermen, no technique is infallible, and all require a responsive subject in order to be successful.

Suppose physiological methods are used, such as sensory deprivation or sleep deprivation. These methods are certainly guaranteed to impair the subject's brain functions. He will move from fatigue and inability to perform more complex tasks to irritability or depression, alternating with apathy, to lack of concern with manners
and honesty and patriotism, until he ends with total confusion and disorientation, and even unconsciousness. At any point towards the latter end of this scale, he will be willing to cooperate with his interrogator, even to the extent of confessing to something he has not done: he can no longer separate fantasy from reality. In other words, ironically, the more cooperative a prisoner becomes, the less reliable his statements become at the same time.

Some people have the ability to hold out against such methods for a longer time than others. The chief factors here are the subject's personality and his attitude towards the experience. In other words, if you go in expecting that you will be able to resist whatever is thrown at you, you are more likely to be able to resist than if you go in scared and certain of your ‘cowardice'. Personality and attitude are even more important when it comes to more direct methods such as torture, starvation and the threat of pain – that is, to methods which do not in themselves impair the functioning of the brain. Some people can resist such tortures to the bitter end, while others crack quickly. Torture is designed to ‘soften people up' – to make them willing to impart information, because without that willingness the information will not be given. But again, the irony is that the longer the torture goes on, the less reliable the information given is likely to be. In any case, torture is not universally successful, because if a moral code of not giving information is deeply ingrained in the subject, he will not talk. It follows that no one can be made to give information against his will, and that information given under torture is not necessarily honest. It is merely a ploy to make the torture go away.

Drugs are also unreliable, since they are affected more than the layman would imagine by variable factors such as the attitude of the donor, and the attitude and physiological condition of the recipient. The popular press, fuelled by incautious statements by one or two early researchers, pounced on certain drugs as ‘truth serums', and this notion has been perpetuated in many a movie and novel. But it is false: a confession induced by scopolamine or sodium amytal, for instance, might be nothing more than narcotically inspired babbling, or might be presented in an unintelligible fashion.

By now the reader will not be surprised to learn that the same or similar limitations also apply to the use of hypnosis in interrog
ation. Martin Orne's excellent essay in Biderman and Zimmer's book concludes that it would be extremely difficult to hypnotize a reluctant subject. The only situation in which hypnosis might be surreptitiously induced is if there is a relationship of trust between operator and subject – and it may safely be assumed that no such relationship exists between interrogator and prisoner. In any case, even if a prisoner could be hypnotized against his will, there is no guarantee that he would tell the truth. At the same time, it would be stupid to try to use hypnosis to strengthen someone's resistance in case he was ever captured and interrogated. The fact that a hypnotist had told a spy, for instance, to resist would actually have the opposite effect, since the spy would be better off relying on his own ego and strength of will.

In short, Bowart and his kind are living in a fantasy world. The suggestion that hypnotism is an all-powerful tool belongs to the pages of thrillers, not to books which are to be classified as nonfiction. This conclusion obviously meshes with the conclusion of
Chapter 7
that you cannot be compelled by a hypnotist to do anything you would not otherwise have done. I can confidently say that there are no hypnotized secret assassins roaming the streets, waiting for the coded phrase that will galvanize them into action; and I can confidently say that there are serious limitations on the effectiveness of hypnosis in all conspiracy-theory contexts.

Whatever consciousness is, it is not single or simple. There is, presumably, such a thing as full unconsciousness, the nearest approximation to which in reasonably common experience is the state of being anaesthetized for a surgical operation. There may, if the mystics are to be believed, be such a thing as full consciousness. But as well as these two extremes there are a number of different states, such as sleep (with its various depths and gradations), wakefulness, drunkenness, daydreaming, ‘highway hypnosis', concentration and so on. Some of these states are known as ‘altered states of consciousness' (ASCs) – altered because they vary from the paradigm state of waking consciousness. Apart from hypnosis, the most important ASCs are dreaming, daydreaming, creative states (especially the inspirational phase of the creative act), psychedelic states caused by mind-altering drugs, meditation, mystical rapture and shamanic ecstasy, states of dissociation and hallucinatory psychotic states. Even if all or most of these are odd states, it needs to be stressed that they are common. In fact, one study found that 89 per cent of the 488 societies for which there were adequate ethnographic data had institutionalized ways of entering trance states, chiefly through religious rituals.

Note that I have written ‘as well as these two extremes' of full consciousness and total unconsciousness, where it would have been natural to write ‘between these two extremes'. But this would perpetuate a false idea which impairs a great deal of thinking about consciousness. We tend to think in terms of a scale, with unconsciousness at one end and consciousness at the other. We would put sleep and hypnosis, for instance, closer to the unconsciousness end of the scale, and in fact one common professional definition of sleep is ‘the natural periodic
suspension of consciousness
during which
the powers of the body are restored'. That seems innocuous enough – until you remember that when you are asleep you dream, and that there is the phenomenon of lucid dreaming, in which we are conscious not just of our dreams, but of the fact that we are dreaming. So consciousness is not at one end of a scale, but is something that can be applied to the full range of mental states, including those like hypnosis which are generally thought to be unconscious.

I have maintained throughout this book that not every trance state is a hypnotic state: it is one ASC among others. Nevertheless, ASCs share a number of features. They commonly require focused attention, some means of cutting out distractions; as usual, focused attention leads to a degree of dissociation, since by narrowing things down other fields of attention seem to belong to another part of yourself. And so you acquire a certain freedom from your normal ego boundaries, and this leads to new ways of looking at things. Some ASCs refocus memory. What psychologists call ‘implicit memory' is what allows us to walk and ride a bicycle without thinking about these activities at all; it is opposed to ‘explicit' or ‘declarative' memory, which is what enables us to recall facts and events. In some ASCs, you might find your attention being drawn to the way you walk or do some equally mundane and everyday task, previously stored in your implicit memory banks; in meditation you pay attention to your breath and/or to the arising of thoughts. ASCs are often induced by repetition, such as drumming, regular breathing or chanting. They involve time-distortion. Critical thought-processes are interrupted, with imagery and emotional expression taking their place (this may be characterized as a shift from left-to right-brain activity); you could say that thinking becomes pre-logical and pre-verbal to a certain extent, and so ASCs give access to what is normally unconscious. This is why the experiences are difficult to remember and give an account of afterwards. They commonly require trust, in a group or an individual, and the consequent willingness to allow oneself to be receptive to the coming experience. People in an ASC are often more suggestible than normal. ASCs may be produced by too much or too little sensory stimulus; a bored child in school retreats into daydreaming, whereas LSD increases sensitivity.

These are all subjective changes, but what about objective measures? Our brain is always giving out certain electrical impulses, called brainwaves. In a focused waking state, these waves fall in the range of 13–30 Hz, which is called the beta rhythm; when resting and relaxed, the alpha rhythm is prominent, between 8 and 13 Hz; when drowsy, the theta rhythm occurs, between 4 and 7 Hz; and very deep sleep is characterized by waves at roughly 1–4 Hz, which is called the delta rhythm. But objective physiological markers of ASCs are sometimes hard to find. You can hook someone up to an EEG machine and give him a massive dose of LSD, and his brainwave patterns may look normal; on the other hand, the sometimes subtle difference between deep sleep and light sleep is invariably measurable on an EEG. Some ASCs involve a measurable state of relaxation, and so they will show alpha or even theta rhythms, and other physiological markers of relaxation.

In this chapter I will touch on some of the most important ASCs which to a casual observer seem similar to hypnosis, and also some methods of achieving altered states which are commonly used in conjunction with hypnotherapy. All of the states produced by these practices display
some
of the characteristics of the so-called hypnotic state; none of them display
all
of these characteristics. Therefore, none of them is the same as hypnosis.

Mesmer's practices were pounced on by the rhetoricians of the French Revolution as anti-aristocratic. In nineteenth-century Britain mesmerists sided with the poor against the rich, and with progressives against the establishment. Romantics in all periods have been attracted to hypnosis as part of their revolt against materialism. It's fascinating to see that the same thing is happening again today. However one characterizes the New Age movement, it is a rebellion, stemming from the hippies of the 1960s, against traditional and/or scientistic ways of doing things, in religion, medicine, business, technology, farming and so on and so forth. It is no coincidence that there is such a large number of hypnosis-like practices available in the New Age market-place.

Winston Churchill is said to have used it. Countless New Age practitioners think it's the same as meditation. Hypnotherapists invariably teach it to their patients as a follow-up technique they can practise at home to reinforce the benefits of the therapy. Self-hypnosis is simply hypnosis carried out on one's own. A typical technique – this one is taken from Leslie LeCron's book – is to get into a position where you can be comfortable and stare at a lighted candle. Breathe quietly and deeply, and as you gaze at the flame of the candle, say to yourself: ‘As I watch this candle, my eyelids will become heavier and heavier. Soon they will be so heavy that they will close.' Let them close, and as they do so, say to yourself: ‘Relax now.' Relax your body systematically all the way from your toes up to the top of your head. Take your time over this. Once you have finished this phase, say to yourself: ‘Now I will go deeper.' Visualize an escalator or a staircase, and go down it, counting backwards from ten to zero. By the time you reach the bottom, you should be in a light trance. After remaining there for a short while, you can seed any suggestions you want to make to yourself. When you want to wake up, you just say to yourself: ‘Now I will wake up', and count back up from one to ten. The kind of trance you can get into through self-hypnosis varies in depth, but you won't go into a very deep state; an external hypnotist is needed for that.

One of the most common forms of self-hypnosis, though little known in English-speaking countries, is autogenic training (AT). Invented by Johannes Heinrich Schultz (1884–1970), a German neurologist who was interested in hypnosis, it is used widely by doctors in Germany for psychosomatic illnesses, and has also been extensively researched in Japan and Russia. It has solid medical credentials. The principle is one that we have met in
Chapter 11
. Relaxation makes the central nervous system passive, and so allows the autonomic nervous system to get on with its natural business of regulating the activity of the internal organs. Since these organs – the heart,
lungs, liver and digestive system – are essential to health, then AT promotes health. But the healing process is not left to relaxation alone: in order to target the required internal organ, there are six verbal formulae to repeat, which are used in conjunction with visualization of the appropriate part of the body. The overall effect is to focus passive attention on to the required organ. First, for muscular relaxation, you focus on your dominant arm (the right arm if you're right-handed) and repeat: ‘My arm is very heavy.' For vascular dilation, you again focus on the dominant arm, and say: ‘My arm is very warm.' For the heart: ‘My heartbeat is calm and strong.' For the lungs: ‘It breathes me.' For the visceral organs, focusing on the solar plexus: ‘Warmth is radiating over my stomach.' For the head: ‘My forehead is cool.' It takes about eight weeks to become adept at the full set of exercises.

Those who are familiar with biofeedback will notice a resemblance between its methods and those of AT. In fact, the pioneers of biofeedback were influenced by Schultz's work. Biofeedback is a way of learning psychosomatic self-regulation by using sensitive instruments to monitor activity in some part of the body, until one learns to modify that activity. Both AT and biofeedback demonstrate what would have been unthinkable until as recently as the 1960s: that one can ‘interfere' (I put the word in scare quotes, because the kind of interference involved should be passive) with the functioning even of physical processes previously thought totally instinctive and beyond one's control.

Although there is more to AT – adepts often go on to psychological visualization exercises – it is clearly physically and medically based. A good range of ailments has been treated by this means – basically, anything in which the nervous system is involved. Particular successes have been achieved with bed-wetting, asthma, stress, angina, infertility, insomnia, migraine and Raynaud's disease. But this physical and medical bias is unusual in the domain of self-hypnosis. Most of what passes as self-hypnosis has a quite different rationale. In a New Age context, it is a form of self-therapy that makes you feel good about yourself and the world, and is often combined with affirmations, which I will survey in a moment. One such New Age website has for sale tapes offering ‘brain wave technology and subliminal audio/music programs for weight loss, jogging, yoga,
meditation, relaxation, traditional-alternative medicine, and spiritual development'. That should just about cover it!

Self-hypnosis has been marginalized in this book because purely inner states and internalized practices are not accessible to the historian. In any case, self-hypnosis is just hypnosis with oneself acting as both operator and subject at once. But it is important to introduce it now, because most of the practices outlined in this chapter are carried on by oneself, and so knowing a little about self-hypnosis gives us a yardstick against which we can see whether these other practices are hypnotic.

We've met the phenomenon of channelling, especially in the guise of the nineteenth-century mediumistic trance, often enough already in this book, but it needs bringing in once more here, in the context of New Age trance practices. Close to the beginning of his book on channelling, American anthropologist Michael Brown gives a description of J.Z. Knight at work. J.Z, as she is known, is one of the most famous and successful channels; the being who speaks through her is called Ramtha.

J.Z.'s head drops. She breathes heavily … Her head begins to rock. Slowly she brings up her arms until they are braced rigidly on the arms of the chair. Her feet drop to the floor, and she rises stiffly, hands balled into fists. She stamps her right foot, then her left. Gruffly, she shouts ‘Indeed!' to one side of the ballroom, then the other. Each time, the audience responds, ‘Indeed.' Her eyes open. She begins a series of geometric movements: bowing to the chair behind her, lifting her arms, profiling her body to the camera. She moves to a man sitting in a chair to her right, evidently her husband. ‘Beloved Jeffrey, indeed how be you?' … The strong angular body movements and twisted syntax signal that she is now Ramtha.

There exist a number of how-to books on channelling. One of the first channelled entities was Seth, whose medium was Jane Roberts. She wrote a book called
How to Develop Your ESP Power
, which was later retitled
The Coming of Seth
, once Seth had become a household name – at any rate, in certain households. In this book she describes the experiments in psychic powers that she and her husband undertook, and which resulted in her becoming a channel for Seth, and explains how the reader can do them for himself. The enterprise is commendable: many people who are interested in psychic powers expect them somehow to come naturally, forgetting that, as in every other sphere, practice makes perfect. The instructions contained in these books are basically instructions in self-hypnosis designed to put you into a passive state in which you are receptive to whatever voices may come – whether you regard them as part of yourself or as coming from an external source such as Seth or Ramtha.

Think of affirmations, and if you have any historical perspective on the subject, you think immediately of a man who was as famous in his time as Mesmer or Freud, but who will receive short shrift in this book, because although he was trained as a hypnotist, he gave it up. An adoring disciple left us this sketch of Emile Coué (1857–1926):

Thick-set; somewhat short. Quiet, compact strength. A remarkably high forehead; hair brushed back, a little thinned out and perfectly white for a number of years already, as also the short pointed beard. And set off by this white frame, a sturdy and youthful face, ruddy-cheeked, full of the love of life – a face that is almost jovial when the man is laughing, almost sly when he smiles. The eyes with their straight look reflect firm kindliness – small searching eyes which gaze fixedly, penetratingly, and suddenly become smaller still in a mischievous pucker, or
almost close up under concentration when the forehead tightens, and seems loftier still.