In France the mystical mesmerists added to the German repertoire a variety of parlour tricks, including playing card games while blindfolded, and reporting on the personal history of the owner of a random object handed to them. But French somnambulists had their more serious side too, and there are reports of dramatic clairvoyant solutions to crimes. Madame Morel was a famous hypnotic clairvoyant in the 1910s. She helped police locate missing persons, sometimes describing their whereabouts in minute detail. Once, on being given a book by a third party, she gave an accurate account of the owner, and how he had died in battle. The French could also on occasion rise to the spiritist and bizarre heights of their German counterparts. The closest parallel to the Seeress of Prevorst is the remarkable Adèle Maginot, who on one occasion ‘travelled’ to Mexico, complained how hot the sun was, and was found on her ‘return’ to have one side of her face tanned as if by the sun. Never mind the uncritical researchers of the Puységurian era – even sober academics later in the century were not immune to the lure of clairvoyance. Pierre Janet hypnotized a supposedly clairvoyant subject, Léonie B., and asked her to travel from Le Havre, where they were, to Paris, and to visit the laboratories of his friend Charles Richet. She cried out: ‘It's burning. It's burning.’ This was true: there had been a fire in Richet's laboratory on that very day.
Psychometry is the psychic reading of the ‘vibrations’ or whatever given off by objects. The word was coined by the American writer on mesmerism Joseph Rodes Buchanan (1814–99), the founder of the remarkable-sounding Eclectic Medical Institute of Covington, Kentucky. The Mexican seeress known in the annals of the American Society for Psychical Research only as Señora Reyes de Z. was one of the most famous psychometrists. Once, in a controlled experiment, she was hypnotized and handed four pieces of pumice stone, cut from the same lump, which had been subjected to different treatments in the prior weeks. The first had been soaked in a tincture of gentian and asafoetida; the second had been put inside a clock; the third had been rolled in sugar and saccharine; the fourth had been heated by burning sulphur. When presented with these four pieces of pumice, she reported that the first gave her an impression of taste, the second of rhythmic sounds, the third of sweetness, and the fourth of heat and sulphur dioxide. She was just as accurate with objects which were inside closed boxes.
It's often hard to distinguish telepathy – the inexplicable communication of two minds – from clairvoyance or psychometry. Consider again the case of Señora Reyes de Z. Was she ‘reading’ the stones, or picking up from the minds of those around her what they knew of the recent history of the stones? What we would now call ‘telepathy’ (the word was coined in the late nineteenth century by Frederic Myers) is part of what was in earlier times called ‘sympathy’. Sympathy was one of the most popular phenomena of Victorian times, as we have seen. It is the phenomenon whereby, even though the subject may be desensitized himself, he still responds to stimuli applied to the operator: if the operator's arm is raised, the subject's arm is raised; if the operator's sole is tickled, the subject giggles. All this, of course, goes on behind the subject's back.
In his book Psychical Research, published in 1911, Sir William Barrett reports an experiment in which he played a part in 1870. A child was hypnotized and given instructions to respond to no one else who was in the room other than Barrett. Once this rapport was established between Barrett and the child, Barrett took a number of different substances and put them in his mouth – salt, sugar, ginger, pepper and so on. The child accurately sensed each of the tastes in her own mouth. Perhaps the child could see what was going on; we have no record of how far apart the two of them were. But in later experiments Barrett tested other subjects’ ability to ‘see’ playing cards that he was seeing. One subject had a 100 per cent success rate even when the two of them were in different rooms. In another experiment, a blindfolded hypnotized boy could tell which parts of Barrett's body were being pricked by a pin, to an astonishingly high degree of accuracy. In France Pierre Janet was conducting similar experiments, and in Germany Dr Albert von Notzing (later von Schrenk-Notzing) conducted experiments for paranormal faculties in a hypnotized subject, Lina, which caused such controversy that the police threatened to dissolve the Society for Scientific Psychology (Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Psychologie) under whose auspices he was working. Von Notzing's experiments were truly remarkable: Lina felt the pain of others being pricked behind her back with a pin, in the exact places where they were being pricked; she reproduced drawings made behind her back; she received precise telepathic communications, such as the instruction to go to the bookshelves and open a particular book at a particular page.
Peculiarly, much the same sympathy sometimes obtained between a hypnotized subject and an inanimate object. The subject held a glass of water (or an apple or something) and was told to drain all the feeling from her arm into the water. When the water was pierced by a needle, she reacted, but when her own arm was pricked by the needle she felt no pain. In this experiment, good results were obtained even when the glass was taken into another room, out of sight of the subject, in case she could see through or around her blindfold.
Telepathic hypnotism – the ability to hypnotize someone from a distance, even when she doesn't know that the experiment is taking place – was taken very seriously in the nineteenth century, though far less work was done on it in the last century. At the end of the nineteenth century, in the era of more reliable experiments, even mainstream scientists such as Janet and Bernheim were doing research into this area. Janet claimed that it had worked for him, though not with perfect consistency, while Bernheim regretted that it hadn't for him. Janet experimented with telepathic hypnotism over various distances, from near by to a mile away, and achieved a high degree of success.
Ostrander and Schroeder report that certain Russian and Bulgarian scientists were experimenting with telepathic hypnotism from the 1920s to the 1960s, and achieved successes at distances of up to 1,000 miles. It's hard to know what controls there were on these experiments. For instance, in one experiment, the subject was lowered into a kind of lead casket, and the experimenter, Professor Leonid Vasiliev, found that he could still entrance him; but with all this elaborate preparation, the subject must have known what was going on, and have been prepared to go under. More impressive – astonishing, in fact – are reports of telepathic hypnotism where the subject was completely unaware that she was the subject of any such experiment, but still fell into a trance. But (even assuming these reports are valid) the scientists acknowledge that very few of us are susceptible to telepathic hypnotism, so there is little cause for alarm: you are not going to be prevailed upon in this way by an unknown assailant!
One subject in Czechoslovakia apparently gained such telekinetic abilities that he could kill birds at a distance by focusing his will upon them. This particular story is unsubstantiated, at the level of hearsay and rumour, but personally I have no doubt that this kind of thing can happen. Once, years ago, at the only time of my life when I was experiencing various psychic phenomena, I was distracted from deep meditation by the buzzing of a large fly. I willed it to go away – or perhaps I cursed it, though no actual words were involved, out loud or in my mind. There was a ‘plop’ beside me on the cushion, and I opened my eyes to find a dead bluebottle.
Channelling is the modern term for what in the past would have been called acting as a medium, or contacting spirits. The late-Victorian craze for spiritism grew naturally out of the mid-Victorian mania for mesmerism, because so many hypnotized subjects appeared to be acting as mediums. It was only when table-rapping and other spiritist phenomena that did not require a hypnotized subject became popular that the two fields became separated, and interest in spiritism waxed and the other waned. I have to confess that this is the area about which I feel most sceptical, because I do not believe that the dead survive in a form that allows them to be contacted, because it is impossible to set up objective experiments to prove or disprove that so-and-so was in
touch with Aunty Ada (deceased), and because the whole domain has been riddled by charlatanism and wishful thinking since its beginnings. By ‘wishful thinking’ I mean that it is obvious to most people that most mediums are in touch with nothing more than a secondary personality of their own.
The Society for Psychical Research
By the end of the nineteenth century, largely thanks to mesmerism and hypnotism, there was enormous interest in paranormal phenomena, the so-called ‘higher’ phenomena of hypnotism. But the whole domain was, of course, saturated with cranks and charlatans. Nevertheless, a number of more respectable thinkers were interested, and wanted to put the subject on a more professional, respectable and academic footing. In Britain, in 1882, chiefly thanks to the initiative of the classicist Frederic Myers (1843–1901), the justly world-famous Society for Psychical Research (SPR) was established. This was followed two years later by the foundation, instigated by the eminent Harvard psychologist and philosopher William James (1842–1910), of the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR).
Right from the outset hypnotism was central to their concerns, and the first twelve or so volumes of the British Society's Proceedings contain a number of important articles on mesmerism and hypnosis, not just as they impinge on paranormal phenomena, but in the domain of what would now be recognized as straight psychology. Myers's posthumously published enormous work Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (1903) shows what the impetus was behind their research on hypnotism. More aware than most of the vast potential of the human mind, Myers argues that the subliminal mind (whose reality he was one of the first to establish) borders not only on our normal consciousness, but on a larger world where contact with other minds is possible, and where extraordinary faculties reside. The clairvoyant abilities of hypnotized subjects seemed to him to compel such a conclusion.
The SPR very soon formed a committee of highly respected and respectable academics for the ‘study of hypnotism, and the forms of so-called mesmeric trance, with its alleged insensibility to pain, clairvoyance and other allied phenomena’. The task they set themselves was to see whether the phenomena could be adequately explained in purely psychological terms (i.e. as hypnotism), or whether some physical force such as magnetism was involved. They experimented above all with a hypnotist called George Albert Smith and his subject, Fred Wells. In their initial three reports, published in the first two volumes of the Society's Proceedings, they came to the conclusion that it was ‘almost impossible to doubt the reality of some sort of special force or virtue, passing from one organism to the other, in the process of mesmerisation’. Braid no doubt turned in his grave, since this was a plain reversion to the old days of animal magnetism. Indeed, in their first report they stated that they had tried Braidian hypnotism, but with little success, and attributed the unfortunate contempt in which mesmerism was currently held to the ‘partial truth’ discovered by Braid.
The main test they used – or at least the one they found most convincing – was the famous ‘finger experiment’. In this experiment, the subject spread out his ten fingers on a table, with his hands projecting through a blanket or screen which stopped him seeing what was happening on the other side. He was also blindfolded, just to be sure. Smith very gently (so as to avoid air currents and contact) magnetized two fingers chosen at random by a member of the committee, so that just these two fingers became anaesthetized and rigid. ‘The points of a sharp carving fork gently applied to one of the other fingers evoked the sort of start and protest that might have been expected; the same points might be plunged deep into the chosen two without producing a sign or a murmur.’ Fortunately for the peace of Braid's repose, however, the committee members soon recanted. Further tests suggested that thought-transference rather than anything material was at work. If a material force was being transferred, then the operator would not need to know which fingers he was working on, but it was found that if he didn't know which fingers he was operating on, the experiment didn't work. They concluded, therefore, that thought-transference was involved.
The sympathy between Smith and Wells seemed astonishing. When Smith pointed at the chosen finger, there were nineteen successes and six failures; when he pointed with the screen in place, there were eighteen successes and three failures; with Smith in the same room, not pointing, and standing between 2½ and 12 feet away, nineteen successes, two partial successes, sixteen failures; with Smith in another room across the passage, with both doors open, three successes, three failures; with doors closed, twelve failures, two partial successes; with Smith pointing but willing that no effect should follow, four successes and no failures.
But some doubts remain. Others could not reduplicate the success of these experiments, and Smith himself was not at all successful with other subjects: could it be because they had no opportunity to work in collusion? Smith was involved in discussions about how to set up the experiments, so could have talked in advance to Wells. These doubts resurfaced with a vengeance some years after the finger experiments. In 1908 the magazine John Bull published a sensational piece called ‘Confessions of a Famous Medium’ by Douglas Blackburn, who had worked with Smith after Wells's death. Blackburn said that the demonstrations of thought-transference which he and Smith had performed in front of members of the SPR (and which had been taken by the SPR to be genuine) were fraudulent and had been achieved through a series of complex codes.
Here is a simple example of the kind of code that is still used by stage performers. The supposed mind-reader turns his back to the audience, guaranteeing that he cannot see what is going on. His assistant circulates among the members of the audience. They keep up a patter between the two of them. The conjurer is to guess, let's say, the material and colour of lady's dress. The assistant's patter at that point consists of five sentences. The first starts with ‘r’ (‘I see the colour red,’ says the mind-reader), the next with ‘s’, the next with ‘i’, the next with ‘l’, and the last one with ‘k’. This kind of code is impossible to detect unless you are looking out for it – and even then you have to be quick.
Blackburn went on to claim that when the test conditions set by the SPR were too stringent for success, Smith and he made excuses for their failure – there were too many sceptics around, they were too tired, whatever. At one point the SPR measured magnetic currents emanating from Smith – but he was holding a metallic nib under his tongue. In response to all these allegations, Smith simply assured the shocked SPR that Blackburn was lying. The allegations were repeated in an article by Blackburn in the London Daily News for 1 September 1911 (and spread across the Atlantic into a long article on the subject in the New York Evening Sun for 13 September). The pot was still simmering six years later, when in the Sunday Times for 16 September 1917 Blackburn said that the experiments only ‘worked’ because certain eminent members of the SPR were so incredibly gullible. The SPR continued to support Smith and to denounce Blackburn.
But by then the SPR's focus had shifted away from hypnosis. As William James said in his retiring address (he was president of the SPR for two years from 1894 to 1896): ‘I should say first that we started with high hopes that the hypnotic field would yield an important harvest, and that these hopes have subsided with the general subsidence of what may be called the hypnotic wave.’ They thought that hypnosis would reveal the whole map of the transcendent realms of the universe, but found that at best it could do no more than prove telepathy, and only then if they trusted someone like Smith not to be cheating. Other experiments in telepathy were failures: the hypnotized subjects tried to guess cards randomly drawn from a pack, but the number of correct guesses fell below the number one would have expected just from the laws of chance. Hypnosis was perhaps not the royal road to the paranormal after all.
Past-life Regression
‘You are five years old … two years … less than one year. You are experiencing your own birth … Now you are going back, further back than your own birth and the time you spent in your mother's womb.
Back, further back. Suddenly you find yourself in a particular location at a particular time. Please tell me what you see…’
It is common practice for a psychotherapist, whether or not she is using hypnosis, to regress her patient. Regression – or, in full, age-regression – is the practice of taking the patient back through the years to a period of his childhood. This is a useful tool because, given the psychoanalytic assumption that most of our psychological problems and complexes are formed in childhood, the therapist can get her patient to explore the roots of his problems. There are two forms of regression, indirect and direct. In indirect regression, the client acts like a witness of his childhood past, as if he were watching a movie or a dream; in direct regression, the client seems actually to relive the past, and speaks, writes and thinks in the manner appropriate to the age to which he has been regressed.
The extent of the genuineness of direct regression is disputed, and the evidence is ambiguous. Some researchers insist that a regressed subject can display the Babinski reflex. Up until the age of about seven months, the toes of an infant whose foot is tickled on the sole will turn upward (‘dorsiflexion’); after that, they turn downward (‘flexion’). This is a reflex, which is to say that it is an instinctive matter, not subject to conscious control. If subjects who are regressed to infancy back beyond six months or so display dorsiflexion, while those who are not regressed this far display flexion, it would be convincing evidence of the genuineness of regression. Unfortunately, the experiment does not always work. And despite anecdotal rumours to the contrary (especially about work in the former Soviet Union), there is no evidence that subjects regressed to childhood display the brainwave patterns of a child rather than those of an adult.
Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis Page 31
