Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis

by Waterfield, Robin

  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’.

  Freud and Hypnosis

  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 hypnos
is 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.

  These are respects in which Freud personally found hypnosis unsatisfactory, but he also sometimes stated more objective, clinical grounds. First, he found that suggestion fails to produce lasting therapeutic results: ‘I gave up the suggestion technique, and with it hypnosis, so early in my practice because I despaired of making suggestion powerful and enduring enough to effect permanent cures. In all severe cases I saw the suggestions which had been applied crumble away again, and then the disease or some substitute for it returned.’ Others too have complained about the erratic nature of hypnosis: it is not always possible to induce trance in a patient or to guarantee that a cure induced by post-hypnotic suggestion will last. Freud's most famous pupil, Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961), also gave it up before long, although it had been a book by Janet on hypnotism which got him interested in psychology in the first place. But, as he recalls in his famous autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections, as well as finding it unreliable, Jung was frightened when one of his subjects proved difficult to wake up, and he found it too authoritarian (as indeed it was, as invariably practised in those days); he was more interested in listening to his patients than in telling them what to do.

  Freud's second clinical reason for giving up hypnosis was that it can obscure what he called the patient's ‘resistance’. This needs a word or two of explanation. Resistance is when, in the course of analysis, a patient determinedly ignores certain memories and ideas. Having noticed how regularly this happens, Freud was led to further insights into repression. He saw that its function was to weaken emotionally powerful ideas, in order to protect the patient from the painful experience of the emotion. However, despite the fact that hypnosis had led Janet to discover the fact that patients tend to suppress certain memories, Freud came to believe that hypnosis masked the patient's resistance.

  Third, he found there was too great a contrast between the grim truth of patients’ problems and the rosy-tinted suggestions he felt as a hypnotherapist that he had to make.

  Before discussing these objections, another Freudian concept which needs mentioning is that of ‘transference’. This is the evocation by the analyst from the patient, during analysis, of an intense emotional attitude, which could be either sexual, affectionate or hostile in form, and the attachment of these feelings to the analyst. The whole theory of psychoanalysis, according to Freud, was no more than an attempt to explain the two observed facts of resistance and transference, which occur whenever an attempt is made to trace the symptoms of a neurosis back to their source in the past. Freud's mature thoughts on hypnosis led him to define it in terms of transference, as a kind of loving relationship between patient and therapist. It was precisely this that led, at a theoretical level, to his dissatisfaction with hypnotism as a therapeutic technique. It carried with it the danger that its benefits would end as soon as the patient's emotional ties to the therapist ended. Nevertheless, despite his abandonment of hypnosis as a therapeutic technique, throughout his life Freud continued to recommend it as a short-cut procedure in some cases, especially to enable the benefits of analysis to reach the more general lay public.

  The first point to notice about these objections by Freud is that he seems to be assuming that hypnosis is the only method a therapist would use. On that basis, few psychotherapists would disagree with him – but why make that assumption? Hypnosis may be just one weapon in the therapist's arsenal, in which case Freud's reasons for abandoning it evaporate into mist. Moreover, and more specifically, research since Freud's time has undermined all his reasons for being wary of hypnosis: suggestion can bring about permanent cures, and it has proved a very useful tool in the exploration of mental forces, including resistance. It is also worth remembering that the patient can become very attuned to the hypnotist's mind; if Freud was uncertain about hypnosis, that may have communicated itself to the patient, locking Freud into a self-fulfilling cycle within which hypnosis was not as productive as it might have been. The only conclusion possible, considering both Freud's personal and impersonal reasons for abandoning hypnosis, is that he simply wasn't very good at it: his interests lay elsewhere, so he never explored its potential to its fullest.

  Freud's dissatisfaction with hypnosis is not unrelated to the fact that he was employing a nineteenth-century authoritarian approach: ‘I held my finger before her and called out “Sleep!”, and she sank down with an expression of stuporification and confusion.’ Elsewhere, in his 1921 book Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, he talks about the ‘humble subjection’ of the subject before the operator, winning compliance from him, but not consensual compliance. Because he was looking for this abject compliance, and because hypnosis fails reliably to produce it, his dissatisfaction increased. But it is precisely when the hypnotist takes on this role, denying the creative participation of the patient in the remedial process, that hypnotherapy is least effective. As a simple example, if a subject is told in a commanding fashion that his body temperature will fall, he may experience the subjective sensations of cold, but nothing objective happens; but if he is allowed to participate – perhaps to create a fantasy of rolling in a snow drift – his body temperature may actually fall.

  Freud's reasons for abandoning hypnosis were limited both by his own personality and by the kind of hypnosis that was practised at the time. They do not constitute good reasons for contemporary Freudians and post-Freudians to despise hypnosis and condemn it to the margins of psychotherapeutic techniques. Some Freudians do now combine hypnosis and psychoanalysis as ‘hypnoanalysis’, having also found that Freud's original objections are no longer valid. One of the earliest to do so was Lewis Wolberg, whose 1945 book Hypnoanalysis is still worth reading. The basic point is this: hypnoanalysis is essentially the same process as psychoanalysis, but hypnosis enables aspects of the unconscious to be expressed and seen by both patient and analyst more quickly than in regular analysis.

  Hypnosis in Decline

  There was a sharp decline in interest in hypnotism, in the circles of experimental psychology, at any rate, after the First World War. Freud must take some of the credit (or blame) for this, as his psychoanalytic methods and theories swept the world clear of everything that had gone before it, and seemed to herald not just a fresh start for psychology, but a fresh impetus for the whole of humanity. Many of the lay hypnotherapists who continued working felt rather out of harmony with the prevalent Freudianism anyway, because whereas Freud stressed the negative aspects of the unconscious, such therapists tended to get their patients to heal themselves out of t
he great positive power of the unconscious. They held that the patient wanted to be cured, and had the internal resources to cure himself, and that their job was simply to bring their patients to the point where they could harness those resources.

  There were other factors causing the decline of hypnosis as well. In the first place, there was the great influence of those, like Bernheim in his later years, who said that there was nothing special about hypnosis – that most of the so-called phenomena of hypnosis, and many of its therapeutic benefits, could be gained through suggestion alone, in subjects who are in a state of ordinary wakefulness and have not been put through a hypnotic induction procedure. The obvious response, that even if this is the case, still the state of hypnotic somnambulism is more effective than the waking state, since it is characterized by an increase in suggestibility, was not enough to convince pragmatic working clinicians: suggestion could be used on a wakeful or at least hypnoidal patient without all the bother of trying to see whether she was susceptible to hypnotism, and without all the induction procedures.

  In the second place, the supposed dangers of hypnotism were much in the air. The focus in the 1900s and 1910s was less on the question of its possible use for criminal ends, as on whether hypnosis weakened the will of the subject, and made her a kind of slave to the hypnotist. Despite the obvious falsity of this notion, and the fact that any attempt to prove it met with swift rebuttal, the idea did attain a certain popular credence, as in the fictional version of hypnotism in which the hypnotist intones: ‘You are my slave. You will obey my every whim.’

  And finally, these were the years when, while Freud was king in the offices of American psychotherapists, behaviourism ruled the roost in the universities. Behaviourism reduces everything to stimulus and response: a poem is merely a patterned set of words, designed to achieve the goal of a lover's kiss; the mind is no more than a series of programmed reactions. There was no room here for hypnosis, which seemed to show that the mind had a will of its own.