In the last fifty years or so, there have been consistent and well-argued attempts to prove that these supernormal phenomena are not necessarily the product of hypnosis – that there is no special state, the hypnotic trance, which enables us to perform these super-feats. This debate will be the subject of a later chapter. At present all I need to point out is that even if these feats are achievable by other means, nevertheless they can be economically and easily achieved by hypnosis; and the fact remains that, however they are produced, they teach us an awful lot about what we are capable of, and point the way forward for future research.
Let's focus on the case of a hypnotized subject anomalously either producing or failing to produce blisters. I've seen this on TV, and just in case anyone thinks that might have been faked, let me add that scientists just take the phenomenon for granted. Milton Kline, for instance, in cataloguing the subjective experiences of a hypnotized person, wrote: ‘Similarly, if the hypnotist says, “I am going to touch you with a hot branding iron,” and then touches the subject with a piece of simple cloth, the subject will experience pain, will feel burned, and will develop a real blister from this burn.’ Now, Kline casually tries to assimilate this to a case where a subject blunders about in a well-lit room because he has been told that it is dark. But are the two cases really the same? Blundering about a lighted room as if it were dark is a purely mental phenomenon, but the case of producing or not producing blisters on a false stimulus involves the interaction of mind and body.
The point I'm getting at is this. Blistering from a burn, one would naturally suppose, is a purely automatic phenomenon. The hand is burnt; the spot reacts with a blister. But now it turns out that either it is not a purely automatic phenomenon – that we also have to believe that the spot will blister in order for it to blister – or at any rate that the mind is so powerful that it can override the purely instinctive functions of the body. This is quite astonishing. And anyone can do it. We all have supernormal powers locked up inside our minds; we are all capable of miracles.
9
Freud and Other Alienists
Oddly enough, a considerable boost was given to the scientific study of hypnotism by the rash of stage hypnotists who trekked around Europe in the later nineteenth century. Two in particular were contacted and studied by academic psychologists – a Dane from Odense called Carl Hansen (1833–97) and a Belgian who called himself Donato (real name A.E. d'Hont, 1845–1900). Their shows reveal all the stock-in-trade of the modern TV hypnotist: the human plank, inability to move or speak, acting (often in a demeaning manner) under the influence of hallucinations and so on. Donato would ask his subjects to place their hands, stretched out, on his, which were resting flat on a table, and then to press down as hard as they could. By these simple means he could induce a trance state – remember that focused attention and the exclusion of distracting data are essential to trance induction. Followers of the Nancy school, especially Enrico Morselli in Italy, were certainly influenced by Donato's methods. Meanwhile, Liégeois himself took lessons from Hansen, who was one of the greatest evangelists for hypnotism. Hansen travelled to Sweden, Finland, Germany, Austria, France, Britain and Russia, and received good press coverage wherever he went. He asked his subjects to focus their attention on a shiny piece of glass, while he made a few passes over their faces, lightly closed their eyes and mouth, and gently stroked their cheeks.
Not that the mesmeric performances which swept Europe in the 1880s and 1890s were without their detractors. Rumours spread of how a stage hypnotist had induced his whole audience to believe that the theatre was on fire, causing a panic in which several women and children were trampled underfoot. Another story had a mesmerized young woman walk into the lions’ cage at a circus where she was savaged. Professors and medical men argued that hypnotism was like poison, and should be restricted to respectable and capable hands. Shows, they said, which degraded both their subjects and the powerful tool of hypnotism should be banned. Donato responded with equal rhetoric, arguing that freedom of thought and democratic concern for patients whatever the weight of their purses existed in the lay hypnotherapeutic community rather than the professional medical community. The same argument resonates in America and Europe today.
The very success of reputable stage hypnotists like Donato and Hansen led to intense study in Europe, by academics such as Rudolf Heidenhain, the Professor of Physiology at the University of Breslau. How, scientists wanted to know, could subjects be made to drink ink in the belief that it was beer? Inhale ammonia fumes with smiles on their faces? Imagine they were singing like the most glorious diva? Research, especially in German universities, led to a refinement of hypnotic techniques and a variety of sensible theories about what was going on.
The last twenty or so years of the nineteenth century were the high point for hypnosis – not in terms of the number of people practising it and its prevalence on the streets: we would have to go back to the middle of the century for that. But the researches of Charcot and Bernheim and their respective schools had brought hypnosis into the centre of psychology, which was at that time a booming and exciting field of study. Genuine new ground was being broken, and the stage was set for hypnosis to occupy a central position in the discovery of the deep operations of the mind. But in our day hypnosis is again a marginalized subject. What went wrong? In this chapter I will show how hypnosis assisted in the discovery of some fundamental psychological concepts and therapies, and explain how the heyday of academic hypnosis was brought to an end largely by the influence of a single man – by far the most important figure in modern psychology, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939).
The Discovery of Double Consciousness
It was a natural assumption that if through hypnotism or animal magnetism a person reached the deepest somnambulic state, this was only an artificial way of inducing what occasionally happened naturally. Researchers adduced sleepwalking, sleep-talking and other related naturally occurring phenomena to show that the two states of ‘sleep’ were essentially the same. Psychologists tended to recognize only two states of consciousness: sleep and waking, off and on. But in many of these cases, both spontaneous and artificial, it was as though the person had two consciousnesses – his normal one and a somnambulistic one. It was soon discovered that when hypnotized a person would invariably switch to his alternate personality, with its set of characteristics and memories, and be amnesic for his normal self. The link between memory-set and personality was such that psychologists could trigger the alternate personality just by plugging it into the appropriate memory-set. In other words, memory is (as we would say today) ‘state-dependent’: we all remember certain things only when we are in the same or a similar state to when the event to be remembered was first experienced. So hypnotized subjects might, when awoken, be completely unaware of anything they had said or done while hypnotized, but when hypnotized again be capable of remembering it all. This, of course, immediately tended to undermine the simple on–off theory of consciousness, because there seemed to be an extra state which was brought about in hypnosis. Then it was found that this extra state can also happen naturally, not just in somnambulism, but in the strange condition known to psychologists as ‘fugue’.
Although by this stage of the book the reader may have become inured to weird events and states of mind, fugue is really pretty strange. The Latin root of the word implies ‘running away’ – fleeing from reality – and the running in most cases is a real occurrence. In Principles of Psychology (1890) William James made famous the case of Ansel Bourne, an elderly itinerant preacher, who disappeared from Rhode Island and reappeared as A. J. Brown, running a store in Norristown, Pennsylvania, with no memory of his previous life until he came to himself after six weeks. Having come to, he could not figure out what he was doing in Pennsylvania rather than Rhode Island: Brown had no memory of being Bourne, nor did Bourne of Brown. Only under hypnosis was he able to remember what he had done as A. J. Brown. Quite a few similar cases have been documented. One man
lived an alternate life for almost two years; another turned up in Switzerland after disappearing from Australia.
Fugue is puzzling. If you think of consciousness as either on (waking) or off (sleeping), what is happening in fugue? On the one hand, consciousness is clearly not off, because A. J. Brown can function perfectly well in the world; on the other hand, it is not quite on, either, since Ansel Bourne is unconscious throughout the whole period.
But fugue is just an extreme form of what became known as ‘double consciousness’ – the fact that in either the natural or the artificial state a subject might display different characteristics from those he showed when awake, as de Puységur's Victor did. In extreme cases the characteristics displayed might be so radically different that the single person might appear to be in effect two or more different people. Nowadays, in its pathological manifestations, we call this multiple personality disorder, or MPD. But the notoriety of the extreme manifestation conceals a very simple psychological truth: that two (or more) streams of consciousness can take place within a single individual at the same time, and that this is not a phenomenon merely of abnormal psychology.
Here is what John Elliotson had to say about his famous subjects, the O'Key sisters:
These sisters exhibit perfect specimens of double consciousness; the most remarkable perhaps on record. In their ecstatic delirium, they know nothing of what has occurred in their natural state: they know not who they are, nor their ages, nor any thing which they learnt in their healthy state: and in their natural state they are perfectly ignorant of all that has passed in their delirium. Their memory in their delirium reaches back only to the moment when each first woke from mesmeric sleep into the delirium. They would then, indeed, speak: but their minds were nearly blank: they knew nobody, nor the names, nature, nor use of any thing: they had to learn everything afresh.
Double consciousness was also used in some quarters as an explanation of table-tipping, the spiritist fad of the 1850s. If this was not to be dismissed as fraud or delusion, and if one was disinclined to accept the spiritist interpretation, another view had to be found, and some psychologists speculated that the unconscious mental activity of the participants in the séance was producing the phenomena. It was pointed out that the temperament or beliefs of the sitters were invariably reflected in the messages received. Personally, I find this idea attractive. Once, many years ago now, two friends and I decided to hold a séance. We used the technique of an upturned wine glass on a table with the letters of the alphabet around the perimeter of the table, and at one point – the only coherent message we received – the glass was flashing around the letters ‘s’, ‘e’ and ‘x’. This is perhaps not surprising for three teenage boys! What was surprising, however, was the speed with which the glass moved, which was far too fast for our conscious control.
The Unconscious
Many people think that Freud ‘discovered’ the unconscious. This is not so. He was simply the first to chart the region systematically, and so to confirm the idea, which had already occurred to others, that it is a feature of normal human beings, not a pathological state. He proved that we have only one consciousness, and that everything else is unconscious, as opposed to the earlier view that we have different centres of consciousness – as it were, different minds within us. What consciousness does, in the Freudian view, is cast light on different areas of the unconscious at different times.
People have always been aware of the unconscious, as long as they have been aware of dreaming, of alternate personalities, of trance and psychosis. Apart from dreaming, consider Shakespeare's portrait of Lady Macbeth reliving her crime while sleepwalking at night, and the phenomenon of lucid possession, in which one is aware of the struggle within oneself of a good spirit and a bad spirit. In the thirteenth century Thomas Aquinas said that there were processes going on in the soul of which we are not immediately aware. In the eighteenth, Rousseau recognized that the true motivations for his actions were often unclear to himself. Early in the nineteenth century the German philosopher Johann Herbart said: ‘Arrested ideas are obscured and disappear from consciousness, and these unconscious ideas continue to exert their pressures against consciousness.’
Then along came hypnosis, an excellent tool for the exploration of the mind. One of the most important aspects of the history of hypnosis is that it allowed a new paradigm for unconscious activities to emerge. Instead of attributing all these phenomena to the intrusion of gods or demons, or to some organic disturbance, thinkers in the nineteenth century began to think in terms of an alternate stream of consciousness, below the threshold of normal consciousness. And it was this new paradigm that led to Freud's great enterprise. In other words, the background of the man who has revolutionized the way we think about ourselves more than anyone else in recent times was formed by hypnosis.
The recognition of double consciousness led directly to the modern psychological theory of the unconscious. It was already known that the secondary personality was co-conscious – that it existed alongside our normal consciousness. All that remained was to see that the second personality had a purposeful, intelligent agenda of its own, and that it lasted longer than the period of hypnosis. For, logically, the second self that researchers were noticing might have been a phenomenon specifically associated with hypnotism: it might appear in a hypnotized subject, and then disappear afterwards. But evidence was being amassed that, to the contrary, the second self persisted, even when it was not apparent and the first self was not aware of it. One of the most important pieces of evidence came from posthypnotic suggestion. If I can plant a suggestion in your hypnotized self which you then carry out afterwards by means of your normal self, that shows that the alternate self persists at a subliminal level and can influence your conscious actions and behaviour.
Nowadays, this is scarcely a startling truth; but when it was first studied in a scientific manner, and documented, by Pierre Janet (1859–1947), a shy, bespectacled academic, it took the medical world by storm. Particularly through inducing automatic writing in his Salpêtrière subjects, Janet demonstrated the constant presence of what he called the subconscious. He then proposed that in hypnosis there occurred a dissociation, or splitting of the conscious from the subconscious parts of the psyche. As the conscious mind was gradually suppressed through the phases of the hypnotic induction, so the unconscious mind gradually surfaced until in deep hypnosis it took over completely, so that, in effect, the subconscious became the conscious. He also held that much the same process went on in hysterical and nervous disorders (in fact, like Charcot, he believed that the hypnotic state was a form of hysteria), and therefore anticipated Freud in developing a theory not just of the unconscious, but also of repression and of the therapeutic effects of abreaction (the discharge – e.g. by weeping or screaming or vomiting – of the energy bound up in childhood traumas). Because the true meaning of our nervous problems was often too painful to be faced, it was pushed back into the subconscious where it festered, formed what he called ‘a subconscious fixed idea’, and became responsible for all sorts of problems.
Other experimental psychologists were also working at much the same time along similar lines. All of them drew on the findings of hypnosis to support their theories. For Max Dessoir (1867–1947) the ‘underconsciousness’ was not, as it was for Janet, merely a pathological entity, but a feature of the mental structure of all ordinary human beings. Then there was the indefatigable work of early members of the SPR and ASPR, especially Frederic Myers and Edmund Gurney. Myers even went so far as to suggest that ‘storms’ or disturbances in the subliminal self were responsible for disturbances in the supraliminal or everyday self. The main contribution of hypnotism to psychology in this context is admirably explained by some comments of William James on the researches of Edmund Gurney:
Gurney's most important contribution to our knowledge of hypnotism was his series of experiments on the automatic writing of subjects who had received post-hypnotic suggestions. For example, a subje
ct during trance is told that he will poke the fire in six minutes after waking. On being waked he has no memory of the order, but while he is engaged in conversation his hand is placed on a planchette, which immediately writes the sentence, ‘P., you will poke the fire in six minutes.’ Experiments like this, which were repeated in great variety, seem to prove that below the upper consciousness the hypnotic consciousness persists, engrossed with the suggestion and able to express itself through the involuntarily moving hand.
Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis Page 35
