Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis

by Waterfield, Robin

  From our birth to our death we are all the slaves of suggestion. Our destinies are decided by suggestion. It is an all-powerful tyrant of which, unless we take heed, we are the blind instruments. Now, it is in our power to turn the tables and to discipline suggestion, and direct it in the way we ourselves wish; then it becomes auto-suggestion: we have taken the reins into our own hands, and have become masters of the most marvellous instrument conceivable. Nothing is impossible to us, except, of course, that which is contrary to the laws of Nature and the Universe.

  He claims that even organic disorders can be cured, or certainly helped, by autosuggestion, let alone functional ones. We now know this to be true, thanks to the insights of psychosomatic medicine and psychoneuroimmunology. This was not a scientific study, but one woman in a long-term workshop run by George Leonard and Michael Murphy, co-founder of the famous California institute Esalen, cleared her eyes of incipient cataracts as a result of affirmations. It took two years, but it is a remarkable result.

  But some of Coué’s claims border on the extravagant – for instance, that a pregnant woman can determine the gender and characteristics of her unborn child by autosuggestion. And it has to be said that in his treatment of patients he displays an alarming rapidity and superficiality.

  Coué had two great insights, which he expressed as follows: ‘Firstly, that every idea that we put into the mind becomes a reality (within the limit of possibility, be it understood). Secondly, that contrary to what is generally believed, it is not the will which is the first faculty of man, but the imagination.’

  The first insight he often expressed, in the context of health and healing, by showing that the mind and body are inextricably linked: imagine sucking a lemon and your mouth reacts. But the mind rules the body, so we actually cause our own health or illness by factors at work in the subconscious. As for the second, he said that whenever imagination and will come into conflict, imagination always wins. One of his stock examples was the old game of how easy it is to walk along a 6-inch plank which is lying on the ground, as opposed to how difficult it would be were the plank lying 1,000 feet over a gorge. The only difference between the two cases is that in the latter the imagination plays a decisive part, as you imagine yourself plummeting to your death. Or again, what came to be called the ‘law of reversed effort’ is the principle that an effort of conscious will has the opposite result to what it wants, as long as the imagination does not agree. For instance, you cannot force yourself, by mere exercise of will, to go to sleep. Therefore, he said, just be quiet and let your imagination go about its business unhindered. In order to get something done, seed it in your subconscious and let it grow by itself: the ‘law of subconscious teleology’ is the principle that when the end has been suggested, the subconscious finds means for its realization. The subconscious is a marvellous instrument that we have at our command. And the way to seed things in the subconscious is to use affirmations.

  This is how he introduces the affirmation for which he is most famous:

  Every night, when you have comfortably settled yourself in bed and are on the point of dropping off to sleep, murmur in a low but clear voice, just loud enough to be heard by yourself, this little formula: ‘Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.’ Recite the phrase like a litany, twenty times or more: and in order to avoid distracting your attention by the effort of counting, it is an excellent idea to tick the number off on a piece of string tied in twenty knots.

  The affirmation is deliberately vague, so that it encompasses all ills, physical or mental. But he recommended using affirmations tailored for specific ailments as well.

  Although he gave up hypnosis in favour of teaching people autosuggestion, there is something hypnotic about the way he treated people in his free clinics in Nancy. After explaining to them the general principles of autosuggestion, he got them to close their eyes and went through each of their worries and ailments, offering advice and encouragement. There is no doubt that his patients went into a light trance, and that Coué recognized it, because at the end of the talk he would say: ‘I am going to count to three, and when I say “three” you will come out of the state in which you are, you will come out of it very quietly, you will be perfectly wide awake, not dazed at all, nor tired, but will feel full of life and health.’

  Coué called his work, or allowed his follower, Professor Charles Baudouin, to call his work, the ‘New Nancy School’, after Liébeault and Bernheim. They, and especially Bernheim, had taught the importance of suggestion, even in the waking state; Coué taught the importance of autosuggestion in the waking state. Coué was not a sophisticated psychologist, but a pioneer and a lecturer who travelled around the world explaining his two insights. It was left to Baudouin to put his work on a more psychological basis, in Suggestion and Autosuggestion, which was hailed on its publication in 1920 as the most exciting book since The Origin of the Species.

  Baudouin's theories are no more than an extended justification of the ideas of Coué we have already looked at. He spells out, at length, how many aspects of life are naturally governed by autosuggestion, and deduces four laws (two of which have just been mentioned) which guarantee that such suggestions will be realized in the external world. At times he gets close to the mind-curists we looked at in Chapter 5: if autosuggestion produces an illness in the first place, then of course autosuggestion can remove it. His book provided, and still provides more thoroughly than any other, the psychological justification for the use of affirmations. He stresses the role of attention and emotion (as in faith healing) in effecting cures, and the importance of relaxation in releasing the subconscious to do its own work. Though the comparison with Darwin seems excessive, the importance of the book was that it emphasized, exhaustively, the importance of the subconscious in life. It rode on the wave of Freudian thought which was sweeping the Western world, especially America, and helped to disseminate and popularize the existence and nature of the subconscious.

  As with self-hypnosis, so the practice of affirmations has been taken up and watered down by New Agers. A common form of affirmation practice today is known as ‘prosperity consciousness’, the idea being that the universe is a generous place, and so if you open yourself up to its generosity, a lot of money and material wealth will come your way. The kinds of affirmations you make, then, are: ‘I am a good, healthy person, and I am open to whatever gifts the universe chooses to give me.’ The Japanese Buddhist sect Nichiren Shoshu teaches its members a mantra which is also supposed to have the same effect. Although the mantra is supposed to be one's vehicle to take one to enlightenment, the sect encourages its use to gain prosperity for oneself and one's family along the way to enlightenment. The mantra, by the way, is ‘Nam-myoho-renge-kyo’, which roughly means ‘Fusion with the ineffable source of all phenomena’.

  Affirmations work by reframing. A bad self-image is self-fulfilling: it gives out bad vibes to others, making them dislike you, which increases your negative self-image and so on and on. This produces stress, and hence ill health. But affirmations can be criticized as too bland and Pollyanna-ish. They ignore all the difficulties of life, when it is arguably precisely these difficulties that put us on a learning curve. I stumble and fall, pick myself up, and learn to watch where I'm going in the future. Sitting in on a session of New Age affirmations is somewhat like having warm marshmallow poured over your mind and body.

  The difference between affirmations and self-hypnosis is often slight. But in hypnosis (including self-hypnosis) a suggestion should be seeded once or twice, and then left alone: the subconscious mind will do the rest. Affirmations, however, are to be repeated over and over again. Affirmations should always be spoken in the present tense, not the future, as if whatever is being affirmed was already present to you. Keep them short, keep them positive (e.g. not ‘I will no longer oversleep in the morning’, but ‘I awaken at seven every morning’).

  After Emile Coué, the most famous prophet of affirmations is surely Norman Vincent Pea
le, whose book The Power of Positive Thinking has sold over 15 million copies since its publication in 1953. It is a wholesome, all-American book; every chapter would fit well in Reader's Digest. Describing the book as ‘applied Christianity’, Peale recommends a variety of practices for improving your life, gaining energy, dissolving anxieties and so on. One of these practices is the making of affirmations. As a Christian, Peale tends to use lines from the Bible as his affirmations, and recommends accompanying them with peaceful pictures formulated in the mind. One of the main affirmations is ‘I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me’, and this sums up the quality of the book: it is a combination of self-reliance and self-responsibility (‘Who decides whether you shall be happy or unhappy? The answer – you do!’), and submission to God.

  Affirmations require the kind of focused attention that you get in the hypnotic state, but otherwise there is little similarity between the two practices. Hence affirmations are often used along with hypnosis or self-hypnosis, as a route towards whatever goal you want the hypnosis to achieve.

  Visualizations

  There was a saying in the Middle Ages: ‘A strong imagination begets the event itself.’ As we have seen, Coué made the same claim for autosuggestion, while sensibly adding that there are natural limits to what kinds of events can be realized. I doubt, for instance, that through imagery or affirmation one could demolish a mountain or mend a broken leg (though one might accelerate the healing). Imagery is often used alongside hypnosis (and/or affirmations, and/ or biofeedback) in therapeutic or New Age contexts.

  Visualizations can be put to all sorts of uses. Shakti Gawain's rather glib bestselling book Creative Visualization teaches a method of achieving what you want by means of the imagination: you imagine that you have it, you invest that image with power, and you get it. This is also the kind of goal for which affirmations are commonly used, and indeed Gawain recommends using affirmations in conjunction with visualizations, literally to ‘firm up’ whatever it is that you are imagining. It is obvious that if you have a cheerful outlook, better things happen to you than if you are gloomy. So the idea behind visualization is that if you imagine good things, good things will happen to you. You picture something good happening to you, but the picturing alone is not enough. You have to want the event to happen and believe that it can happen.

  The use of the imagination to accelerate or bring about healing has been known in the West since medieval times. In a psychotherapeutic context, it was revived in the modern era by Janet and others, but especially by Jung, the Swiss psychologist and philosopher. As he tells in his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung found visualizations extraordinarily revealing in his own life, and so he developed the technique of ‘active imagination’ as an intrinsic part of his therapy. In active imagination a patient allows her mind to float, without putting any preconceptions on what images may arise. When images do arise, she watches them without interfering with them, although she is allowed to interact with them: if she sees a person, for instance, she might offer him something or have him offer her something. Afterwards, the whole daydream is discussed with the therapist.

  Visualization has a proven track record in psychotherapeutic contexts, and too many psychiatrists and psychologists have made use of it to list here. Techniques such as Guided Affective Imagery (GAI), which uses a series of ten imaginary situations, reach the parts other therapies find hard to reach. They allow the patient to daydream in a constructive fashion that quickly reveals layers of the subconscious to the therapist in a gentle, non-obtrusive way. Some techniques work with obviously symbolic images rather than normal pictures. In psychosynthesis, for instance, founded by Freud's associate Roberto Assagioli (1888–1974), one visualizes things like crosses, two hands clasping each other, a sword and a cup.

  Visualizations are often used to help someone cope with anxiety, phobias, depression, insomnia, self-confidence and so on. The client is asked to visualize a scene in which whatever it is that is causing the anxiety is resolved or dissolved. Behaviourists use visualizations to acclimatize a person to something about which he is phobic. Suppose he is terrified of spiders; he is asked to visualize spiders in gradually closer proximity – starting out in the garden shed and ending crawling on his shoulder, perhaps – until the fear has been removed or reduced. Each image is introduced only once the previous one can be watched without fear. The opposite technique, designed to put someone off something rather than get them used to it, is aversion therapy. What strikes me about these kinds of therapies is that they empower the patient: she is doing the visualizing, and so it is self-help rather than imposed from outside.

  The connection between emotion and image is familiar: stand in front of a great painting or watch a sentimental movie. So images arise, guided to a certain extent by the therapist, and emotional issues are worked through. Freud maintained that images were more primitive than verbal thought, and therefore reached layers of the mind that words gloss over. Psychotherapy is still biased towards verbal communication, but is increasingly having to recognize the value of imagery.

  Visualization also helps physical healing. If you don't think that your imagination can have physical results, just imagine a beautiful woman (or man, according to preference) doing unmentionably sexy things to you, and see what happens! As with all psychosomatic techniques, visualization works because the CNS affects the ANS. The simplest experiment which has demonstrated this is one conducted by American scientist Edmund Jacobson: he found that when a person imagines himself running, the muscles used for running contract a little. In other words, the same neurological pathways are stimulated by imagining running as actually by running.

  Perhaps the most striking use of visualizations for physical healing is the Simonton method of treating cancer. Physicians Carl and Stephanie Simonton noticed that spontaneous remission occurred far more frequently in people whose outlook was positive and life-affirming. They enhanced this attitude with a five-step programme. The patient is first taught to relax, and then to imagine a tranquil scene. She then pictures the cancer and visualizes the radiation treatment as bullets striking all the cells in her body, cancerous and healthy, with the cancer cells significantly weaker, so that they are killed by the radiation. Next she is to imagine her white blood cells carrying the dead cancer cells away through the kidney and liver. Finally, she imagines her body as healthy, with the tumors decreasing in size. The Simontons achieved some notable successes: even apart from downright remission, a good proportion of their patients with terminal cancer lived far longer than medical science could have expected. The same technique can be adapted to any part of the body and any illness.

  Recreational Drugs

  Recreational drugs such as alcohol, marijuana, ecstasy (methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or MDMA for short) and LSD produce almost archetypal ASCs. On the face of it, drug-induced ASCs resemble the hypnotic trance, and certainly a number of writers have assimilated these trances to one another. Also, for over 100 years, various drugs largely considered recreational (especially nitrous oxide, alcohol, LSD, hashish) have been used to deepen the hypnotic trance. But there are certain differences in the subjective experiences involved, and some drugs involve a wider range of experiences than hypnosis.

  Let's deal with the major differences first. I discount physiological details, such as LSD's dilation of your pupils, or the need to snack which is stimulated by marijuana and hashish. Recreational drugs may involve unsolicited hallucinations (as opposed to hypnotic hallucinations, which are the product of the operator's suggestions), synesthesia (so that sound, say, is perceived in visual terms) and strong emotional changes from euphoria to anxiety. None of these are features of the hypnotic trance. While drug trances involve time-distortion, as hypnosis does, the results are different. On drugs, time goes slowly enough for you easily to observe your thoughts, which leads to increased creativity, as new and unusual connections are made in your mind. In the hypnotic trance, however, time just passes
quickly, with no increased creativity as a side effect (unless you are involved in a creativity-enhancing hypnotic experiment).

  The three chief features of the hypnotic trance are suggestibility, dissociation and a narrow field of attention. Tests have shown that all the usual recreational drugs involve an increase in suggestibility. If losing inhibitions is a sign of suggestibility, this is within everyone's experience. One only has to compare the behaviour of a hypnotized subject in a stage show with the outspokenness of a drunk or the love-making of a couple stoned on grass. Moreover, drugs certainly induce dissociation; the most familiar aspect of this is the ability to observe oneself and one's functions as if they belonged to someone else, and even to do so on several levels at once. But drugs open up, rather than concentrate, the field of attention. It is of course possible when stoned or drunk or high to become absorbed in some task or sensation, but the main subjective experience is one of heightened not dampened sensation. The hypnotic trance, if I can put it this way, is designed so that the only meaningful input is the operator's voice; the drug trance is such that everything has increased significance. You can be very sensitive to others’ emotional states, and hallucinations start from heightened perceptions too: you pick out patterns in the carpet or the clouds that would not usually be perceived.