Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis

by Waterfield, Robin

  This is a book about the history of hypnotism in the West. I do not cover any of the related arts of the East, such as those practised by Indian fakirs. There is plenty of material from the West, enough for a much longer book than this one. Moreover, it is not clear that many Eastern practices should be counted as hypnotism, and in some cases there has been influence from the West to the East. For instance, a booklet I once saw on Indian hypnosis contained instructions and ideas which would have been familiar to any Western practitioner; since it is clear that these methods evolved in the West, because we can trace their history, it follows that the Indian booklet was written in imitation of Western practices.

  In addition to telling the story of hypnosis and the characters who crop up along the way, there will be two main sub-themes in the book: first, what hypnosis can teach us about the powers and further reaches of the human mind; second, the degree to which hypnotic techniques have become absorbed in and reflect everyday culture. Under the latter heading I mean to include not just questions such as whether advertisers can be said to hypnotize us, but also the fact that hypnosis seems to reflect, in each era, the interests and predispositions of the era. For instance, from the time of Mesmer to the middle of the nineteenth century professional science was still young enough to be nervously aware of its limitations, and so the budding medical establishment, anxious to confirm its credentials, attacked Mesmer and his followers with particular acrimony. Or again, in periods when there is a revolt against technology (as with the early Romantics) or scientism (as today), hypnosis becomes a focus of the revolutionary party. In the middle to late nineteenth century there was a conflict between two groups of thinkers about hypnosis – the occultists and paranormalists, and the scientists and therapists. At the same time, mesmerists in general aligned themselves with Protestants against Catholics, because they tended to welcome scientific progress as a revelation of God's handiwork. And mesmerists also aligned themselves with reformers in a number of other spheres. Just as Mesmer himself was made something of an icon by partisans of the French Revolution, so in nineteenth-century England mesmerism was seen by its opponents as a working-class invasion of medicine, which was of course restricted to those with the money for education.

  I do not intend this book to be a debunking of hypnosis, but a work of reportage which will allow me to present the views both of those who do debunk hypnosis and of those who believe in its real existence. Assuming that there is such a thing, I will make a fair assessment of what it is and what it can and cannot achieve, what its medical and psychotherapeutic uses and potential are, its history and ramifications. In fact, since the impression most people have of hypnotism (either because they have been duped by popular myths, or because they are die-hard rationalists) is that it is something wacky, it will be a major part of my purpose to prove that this is not so – that hypnosis has a great deal to offer, especially in therapeutic contexts, and that its value should be more widely recognized.

  But why should people believe that there is no such thing as hypnosis? After all, we can see a hypnotized subject plunge his arm into a bucket of icy water with no discomfort, just because he has been told that it is tepid; conversely, we can see him screw up his face in pain on tentatively lowering his hand into tepid water, because he has been told that it is icy-cold. He may hallucinate that he is dancing with Marilyn Monroe, or smell the scent of a room full of imaginary flowers. He can remember events from his childhood which he had long forgotten, and even re-enact them. On the therapeutic side, hypnotherapists have achieved remarkable results in a wide range of ailments, and both major and minor surgery have been carried out on hypnotized patients.

  All these phenomena, and all the many other marvels we will come across in the book, seem to be a clear case of mind over matter. And there's the rub. There are a number of people, academics above all, who simply do not believe in the existence of mind. They think that this is a naive belief held by the rest of us, and that the phenomena attributed to our minds are best explained otherwise. In philosophy they are called ‘positivists’ and in psychology ‘behaviourists’. The mind they regard as a ‘ghost in a machine’ – the machine being the body. Where hypnosis is concerned, they might maintain, for instance, that hypnotized subjects are merely very suggestive people who are anxious to please the hypnotist, and who therefore play out the role in ways that conform to their ideas of the kind of behaviour that is expected of them and in response to often unconscious cues given them by the hypnotist.

  Part of the problem is also that ever since the early days of hypnosis its practitioners and supporters have made fanciful claims for it. In the nineteenth century it was frequently claimed that a suitably sensitive hypnotized subject could see things clairvoyantly by projecting her spirit elsewhere; in recent years there have been a number of cases of supposed recall of past lives by regressing a hypnotized subject back past his childhood, past birth, past conception … and into the wild blue yonder. These are two extreme cases, but many practitioners have been guilty of making less radical but still far-fetched claims for their favourite art. And this in turn has attracted the wrong kind of response, in which overly sceptical investigators have thrown out the baby with the bathwater – rejected hypnosis as a whole in rejecting such extreme claims. By and large science has been unfair to hypnosis: it has been dismissed to the margins, where it can safely be ignored and left in the hands of amateurs – which then, in a vicious circle, increases the scientists’ justification for dismissing it.

  One of the main reasons the story of hypnotism is important, and deserves to be told, is that it is concerned with the essential human quality of suggestibility. This word often carries negative connotations, as if it meant ‘liability to be manipulated by others’, but it is not a faculty we could do without. No one is always active; we are also acted upon. We could not sustain relationships with family and friends otherwise. And suggestibility is also closely linked to other important abilities, such as imagination, empathy and feelings in general; tests have shown that the best hypnotic subjects are often those with vivid imaginations, who can put themselves in a situation or someone else's shoes.

  There are a number of good books on hypnosis, but a lot of them are academic or partisan. Yet it is a subject that demands more accessible treatment, especially today with an audience which is likely to be open-minded and curious about such matters. The historical approach taken in this book will allow the reader a general overview of the subject in all its manifestations. In the meantime, lacking accessible treatments, the subject is surrounded by myths and misconceptions. Here are some of the most common:

  You're asleep when you're hypnotized.

  You're unconscious when you're hypnotized.

  People with strong wills can't be hypnotized, only weak-willed people.

  Hypnosis is the dominance and manipulation of gullible people by the hypnotist.

  Hypnosis is a mysterious magical power.

  A hypnotist can make people commit immoral or illegal acts when they're hypnotized.

  People can be hypnotized at long distance, or over the phone or TV.

  People can remain in trances for a long time, perhaps a lifetime.

  People can be woken up only by the person who hypnotized them. So what would happen if the person who hypnotized them were to leave or drop dead of a heart attack?

  Hypnosis can cure almost any ailment.

  Hypnosis is dangerous: it can cause after-effects ranging from headaches to psychosis.

  Hypnosis is unchristian. It is the work of the devil, and while hypnotized your soul can be possessed by the devil.

  Hypnosis, especially self-hypnosis, is the same thing as meditation.

  Under hypnosis people can accurately recall things that happened earlier in their life, or even in earlier lives.

  Under hypnosis people gain paranormal powers.

  Under hypnosis people can be made to tell the truth.

  Most of these fears and fantasies about h
ypnosis will only be dispelled once hypnosis is properly understood. Although the primary focus of this book is the history of hypnosis, an understanding of hypnosis will emerge through the pages and by the end of the book every single one of the above statements will, implicitly or explicitly, have been shown to be wrong. It is a great pity that hypnosis has become surrounded by so much fear, since in quite a wide range of ailments and problems it is actually a very safe form of therapy – far safer, for instance, than the pharmaceutical and interventionist form of medicine most commonly practised in the West today.

  We need a working definition of hypnosis. Unfortunately, no such definition can be non-controversial and agreed upon by all the experts. Here is a rapid survey of the main contenders in the bid to define hypnotism: magnetism (de Puységur, etc.), monoideism (Braid), a form of sleep (Liébeault, Vogt, etc.), nothing but a state of passive suggestibility, with selective attention and reduced planning function (Bernheim, Gauld), hysteria (Charcot), a form of dissociation ( Janet, Myers, James, Sidis, Prince, Hilgard, etc.), a loving, possibly Oedipal, relationship with the therapist (Freud, Ferenczi), a state of inhibition between sleep and wakefulness (Pavlov), nothing but task-motivation (early Barber), nothing but an imaginative response to test-suggestions (later Barber), nothing but a goal-directed, role-playing fantasy (White, Spanos, Sarbin and Coe), activation of the implicit memory system (Spiegel).

  Faced with this welter of definitions, it has to be borne in mind that nothing about hypnosis is uncontroversial, and that these various definitions depend on various theories of what is going on, psychologically and neurologically, and these in turn depend on the approach taken by the particular researcher (behaviourist, occult, etc.). In other words, no one really knows what hypnosis is; this is part of the attraction of the view that there really is no such thing. All of the current theories may be wrong, or none of them may be wrong, while all giving a partial picture.

  I am not qualified to add to the confusion by coming up with a new definition of hypnosis. In this book I will be less concerned with its definition than its phenomenology. Phenomenology is the descriptive study of some facet of human experience in order to make it intelligible. That is, from our point of view it doesn't matter whether there is such a thing as the hypnotic state, which is different from any other state of consciousness. All that matters is that something unusual is going on, that we can trace the history of this unusual something, and that as a result of this unusual something people can have all sorts of experiences, including being cured or relieved of a number of disorders. Hypnosis should still be acknowledged as a powerful therapeutic tool, since access is gained to the client's subconscious and imagination. So in this book I will begin, at any rate, by using the term ‘hypnotism’ or ‘hypnosis’ to mean precisely whatever the experts want it to mean, whether that is no more than ‘relaxation and suggestibility’, or as much as ‘a specific altered state of consciousness’.

  The phenomenological model I have adopted for this book is as follows. Hypnotism or hypnosis is the deliberate inducement or facilitation by one person in another person or a number of people of a trance state. A trance state is (briefly) one in which a person's usual means of orienting himself in reality have faded, so that the boundaries between the external world and the inner world of thoughts, feelings, memories and imagination begin to dissolve. The ensuing altered state or states involve passivity and lack of initiative, a decrease in normal critical thinking and hence a tolerance for incongruous situations (‘trance logic’). The subject is highly compliant to incoming suggestions and capable of role-playing; he has focused, selective perception; he allows his imagination greater freedom than usual, and fantasies are experienced, or memories re-experienced, with vivid intensity; he is capable of a certain range of unusual physical and mental feats, is susceptible to alterations in perception and memory, and tends to behave in a way he thinks appropriate to the role he is being asked to perform.

  All these phenomena of hypnosis can be summarized under three headings: absorption, dissociation and suggestibility. The hypnotized person tends to become highly involved in whatever he is perceiving, imagining or thinking; he separates out aspects of his experience that would normally be processed at the same time (so that, for instance, the raising of an arm can seem to be involuntary, as if the arm was controlled by something other than oneself); and his responsiveness to social cues is increased, which leads to an enhanced tendency to comply with hypnotic instructions. It is worth stating from the outset that this does not mean that the subject has given up his will to the hypnotist, but just that he has suspended his critical judgement for a while. In the hypnotic state, the subject must be capable of speech and action, which is to say that he or she must not be merely asleep or unconscious. Importantly, I would add that the participation of the subject or subjects must be by their consent (which is not quite the same as saying that the subject must be willing, because there may be no conscious act of will involved): you cannot hypnotize someone if they have not at some level agreed to be hypnotized.

  This model is simultaneously broad and narrow, in different respects. It is broad enough to include, for instance, entrancement by incantation, if it involves the direct and deliberate action of an operator on a consenting subject, and in other ways conforms to our model. But it excludes phenomena such as enchantment where the bewitched person was not aware of being deliberately worked on. It is common in ‘primitive’ societies for a person experiencing a run of bad luck to attribute this, retrospectively, to an enemy having bewitched him, but this is not hypnotism because the victim was not aware at the time of being enchanted, and there was no direct interaction between operator and subject. The model also excludes the so-called trance states involved in, for instance, watching TV or in driving a car (‘highway hypnosis’). Every driver knows the experience of looking back on a journey and saying to herself: ‘I know I passed through Newcastle, but I have no memory of having negotiated the traffic, the lights, the roundabouts and so on. How did I do it?’ Personally, I'm not sure I would identify this as a trance state at all, because otherwise it becomes all too easy to say that almost all our states of consciousness are trance states: am I in a trance state now because I am focused on writing this book? This seems a misuse of the word; and anyway these states are not hypnotism, above all because there is no operator.

  Self-hypnosis is another legitimate special case, provided the same person deliberately acts simultaneously as operator and subject. This proviso is necessary to distinguish self-hypnosis from mere daydreaming or relaxation. The important point here again is this: not all trance states are hypnotic states. But in so far as in this book I am dealing with historical cases from the past, my focus is not really on self-hypnosis. After all, how could I or anyone know whether an ancient Egyptian, say, had hypnotized himself? The subjective element of self-hypnosis will more or less rule it out of this book.

  One thing I do want to exclude from the start is animal hypnosis. People have induced hypnosis in a wide range of animals, by a wide range of methods, from repetitive stimuli (e.g. stroking, swinging the animal back and forth), to pressure on certain body parts (especially the abdominal region), to tipping the poor creature upside down. There are some impressive effects in the animal kingdom which seem to resemble hypnosis. In his book The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators, for instance, Gordon Grice vividly tells how a particular kind of wasp, called a tarantula hawk, hypnotizes its prey, a tarantula, which would otherwise make short work of it. But we have no way of knowing whether the spider is really hypnotized. Does it have the mental powers to be hypnotized in any way that makes a meaningful parallel to a human being? Does any animal have the kind of powers that can be shut down and focused, made more suggestible and so on? I doubt it. It is a common fallacy to attribute to animals human characteristics based on behavioural traits which resemble those of humans. We even do the same with plants. When you brush the leaves of Mimosa pudica it curls up in a way that ca
n only be described as shy, but it would be a bold person who said that the plant was actually shy. In the animal kingdom there are many behavioural characteristics that resemble a hypnotic state: for instance, they go rigid, pretending to be dead, to deter an enemy. But we have no need to postulate the kind of sophisticated psychological processes in animals that might lead us to say that they can be hypnotized. Any reader who wants more information about animal hypnosis should read Ferenc Völgyesi, Hypnosis of Man and Animals; he claims to have hypnotized just about every major species of creature on earth.

  In the course of this book I will touch on phenomena and practices related to hypnosis, but the focus will be on practices which satisfy the criteria of the model I have just outlined. One implication of the model needs to be brought out right from the start, since it will play a considerable part in the history of hypnosis. I have described the hypnotist as the operator, and the other party as the subject. In other words, the hypnotist is active, and the subject is passive. This is not surprising – no more surprising than the fact that we put ourselves into a passive state when we visit the doctor or go into hospital. ‘They are the experts,’ we think. ‘They'll tell us what to do.’ To this extent hypnosis involves the imposition of the will of the hypnotist on the subject, and the subject allows himself to be in a suggestible or open frame of mind. This extent is perhaps not very large – it does not license the idea of the evil, manipulative hypnotist – but it remains true that there is inequality of will between operator and subject. A hypnotized subject can snap out of his trance any time he chooses, but while he is entranced he is in a state of heightened suggestibility, more open than usual to the suggestions of the operator (within certain parameters laid down by the subject's long-term moral and social conditioning). This passive suggestibility is what I mean by the idea of inequality of will; the subject makes fewer choices than usual, leaving many such decisions up to the operator.