Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis

by Waterfield, Robin

  If this speculation were right, it would solve a major problem in hypnosis. It is clear that hypnosis affects the brain; if it didn't, hypnotherapy wouldn't work. But it is far from clear how it does so. My suggestion is that short-term rhythm (as opposed to the longer ultradian rhythm) is, or is an important component in, the mechanism. There is certainly experimental evidence to suggest that one of the common features of ASCs is the slowing down of brainwaves in the limbic system, but there has been little research, to my knowledge, specifically on the way that rhythm affects the brain. Anthropologists, however, have long been aware that the rituals of the people they study often involve repetitive stimuli, especially through drumming and dancing (which affords the dancer a repetitive flicker effect due to shifting focus), and it is clear that these stimuli produce trances with a full range of neurophysiological indicators. I would think that further research might be interesting. Perhaps synchronizing the pulses of the brain – our brainwaves – with external pulses is fundamental to all ASCs, including hypnosis.

  14

  A Plea

  Hypnosis has been in and out of favour over the last 200 or so years. Sometimes external factors, such as warfare or the discovery of chemical anaesthetics, have caused it to be neglected; sometimes internal factors, such as the extravagant claims of practitioners, have dismayed more sober-minded enquirers. Even now, for all the intensity and excellence of the academic research that has gone into the subject for the last fifty years, the prevalence of New Age forms of hypnotherapy is threatening to tarnish its reputation. And hypnosis has a fragile reputation: it doesn't take a lot for the general public to remember that it used to be thought of as a load of rubbish. But it simply refuses to go away. In the history of science and medicine in particular, countless theories have run out of fuel and become stranded on the highway, but all the many attempts to drive hypnosis off the road have failed. Its staying power is telling evidence not just of its fascination, but of the fact that it is real and effective.

  In the eighteenth century and for most of the nineteenth century too, from Mesmer to Elliotson, hypnosis or its precursor, animal magnetism, was a religious experience. The subject often achieved some kind of ecstasy, and the mesmerist would present himself as a ritual magician, sometimes dressing the part and invariably making mysterious gestures with his hands. Braid, Charcot, Bernheim and others fitted hypnosis into a more scientific framework, and it became an important tool in the developing field of psychology. Then Freud cursed it, and along came Ted Barber and his peers, who attempted to prove that there is no such thing as hypnosis. Hypnosis is no longer as central to psychological research as it was at the end of the nineteenth century. The main impetus for hypnosis research nowadays comes from its value in medicine, and even if Barber were correct, hypnosis will continue to be employed by jobbing clinicians, who often have little time for the theories of experimental psychologists.

  In the 1950s, both the British Medical Association and the American Medical Association at last acknowledged the efficacy of hypnosis. Here are the conclusions of the 1958 report of the Council on Mental Health of the American Medical Association:

  General practitioners, medical specialists, and dentists might find hypnosis valuable as a therapeutic adjunct within the specific field of their professional competence. It should be stressed that all those who use hypnosis need to be aware of the complex nature of the phenomena involved. Teaching related to hypnosis should be under responsible medical or dental direction, and integrated teaching programs should include not only the techniques of induction but also the indications and limitations for its use within the specific area involved. Instruction limited to induction techniques alone should be discouraged. Certain aspects of hypnosis still remain unknown and controversial, as is true in many other areas of medicine and the psychological sciences. Therefore, active participation in high-level research by members of the medical and dental professions is to be encouraged. The use of hypnosis for entertainment purposes is vigorously condemned.

  Tentative, perhaps, but undoubtedly a step in the right direction. But this step was taken nearly fifty years ago, and still there is resistance. Why, in Britain and all the other countries with a National Health Service, can we rarely get it for free? Why is it totally ignored in the medical schools? The answer is a combination of factors, but they all boil down to one: ignorance. Too few people know enough about hypnosis for it to be more widely available; indeed, in the medical profession there are deep-rooted prejudices against it, stemming from the nineteenth century. If you ask a doctor why she doesn't use hypnosis, she will say that she never had the opportunity to learn it, but she will also say that she's heard that it is unreliable, erratic in its results. This is true, largely because it depends on the hypnotizability of the subject. But it is far less erratic than is commonly supposed, and for most ailments a light trance, of which about 90 per cent of the population are capable, is all that is needed.

  Hopefully, one result of this book will be to bring the subject to the attention of a wider audience: doctors who might gain an interest in the subject, and lay people who might start to demand it as part of their medical service. I would like to see hypnosis more widely available and used, and the time is right, because now what used to be called ‘alternative’ medicine is no longer perceived as ‘alternative’, but as ‘complementary’, and hypnosis in particular is familiar: everyone knows someone who has had hypnotherapy for something. It goes without saying that checks and safeguards need to be put into place, so that only qualified people offer their services as hypnotherapists, but that is not hard to achieve. Hypnosis could be a great blessing to humankind. It's not the panacea that Mesmer thought his animal magnetism was, and I have certainly heard of cases of hypnotherapy failing to do what it set out to do, but it is a gentle, effective and empowering therapy for a surprisingly wide range of ailments. Instead of being a last resort, it should be used judiciously as the therapy of choice. Let's do it!

  Philosophically and psychologically Cartesian thought is bankrupt. Its time has been and gone. It is time now to rediscover the holistic medicine of the ancient and medieval world, and to combine it with the genuine scientific and medical advances that have taken place in the last two centuries. Hypnosis could and should play an integral part in such a programme of reunification, because we now have enough scientific knowledge to understand, more or less, how it works, as well as a wealth of experiential and experimental evidence for its efficacy. The fields of psychosomatic medicine and psychoneuroimmunology are only going to grow over the next decades. They point the way to the medicine of the twenty-first century, and they reconnect us with practices that are as old as European history.

  In Plato's Charmides, written probably in the 390s BCE, hehas Socrates say:

  I learnt this charm while I was in Thrace on active service in the army from a Thracian healer, a priest of Zalmoxis. These healers are even said to make people immortal. Anyway, this Thracian told me that the Greeks were right to make the claim I mentioned a short while ago [that one should not try to cure an eye disease without curing the head as a whole], and he said: ‘But our lord and master, the divine Zalmoxis, tells us that just as one should not undertake to cure the eyes without also curing the head, or the head without also curing the whole body, so one should not go about curing the body either, without also curing the soul. And this is exactly why most ailments are beyond the capabilities of Greek doctors, because they neglect the whole when that is what they should be paying attention to, because if it is in a bad state it is impossible for any part of it to be in a good state.’ He went on to say that the soul is the origin and source of everything that happens, good or bad, to the body and to every individual, just as the head is the origin and source of the eyes, and that therefore one should take care of the soul first and foremost, if the head and every other part of the body is to be in a good condition.

  In Plato's day, the idea that the soul was the personality of the individu
al was new and startling. He used passages like this one to introduce the idea to the reading public, and to make a plea for holistic medicine. The plea worked, because in the Middle Ages it was taken for granted that imagination, charms and so on cured physical ailments – or rather, it was taken for granted that there is no such thing as a purely physical ailment, because the soul or mind was bound to be involved as well. That is the perspective that we need to rediscover today, in our post-Cartesian world.

  Just as surgical hypnotism reached its heyday because it was not at the time possible to achieve anaesthesia through conventional or comprehensible means, so now hypnotherapy could and should become an antidote to the ever-increasing dependence on toxic drugs. There is no such thing as a magic bullet, no pharmaceutical pill that goes straight to the affliction and effects a cure without any side effects. Hypnotherapy cures without any pharmaceutical intervention, and without significant side effects. We have seen how the cultural absorption of hypnotic techniques, largely through fiction and film, has been to do with the manipulative and dangerous side of hypnosis. What we need now is a greater absorption of its positive, therapeutic side.

  Any such programme designed to re-integrate hypnosis into the mainstream of medical practice and psychological research needs to be safeguarded by updated legislation. It should be made clear that there is a difference between the kind of hypnosis encountered in the theatre and the kind encountered in a doctor's surgery. This distinction can be maintained by reinforcing the current licensing strictures on stage hypnotists, while guaranteeing the accreditation of medical hypnotists. The various umbrella organizations in the European countries need to combine, and to graduate and regulate their members in accordance with guidelines laid down by legislation. The rules are simple: take a full medical and psychological history of each and every patient; make a good diagnosis of his condition; never ask him to do anything he doesn't want to do; make sure that he comes out of the trance refreshed and grounded. These are the kinds of rules that occur to me, but the professionals can add to them.

  Although the therapeutic use of hypnosis is what I would most like to encourage for the future, at the same time I have no desire to restrict other forms of experimentation with it, or even stage hypnotism (though stage hypnotists should be more cautious than some of them are). I think, in fact, that it would be foolish to try to impose any such restrictions. If the history of hypnosis teaches us anything, it is that it will always attract rebels and those trying to push the envelope. There's no point in trying to outlaw lay use of hypnosis, as many medical practitioners want, because it will be an unenforceable law. And that is how it should be. Hypnosis has the ability to boggle our minds, and anything that has this ability is to be encouraged, because without new horizons we limit ourselves to little worlds, with no room for growth or expansion. It is no surprise to me that throughout its history hypnosis has attracted rebels, because they are precisely those who hate to find themselves in little boxes, and who therefore relish the expansive nature of hypnosis. If going to see a stage hypnotist can wake someone up to her own huge potential, then stage hypnotism should not be banned.

  There is two-way traffic between the scientific world and the world of the general public. Ideas gradually filter through to the rest of us from high-flown scientific research, but also scientists are sometimes prompted by popular interest to take seriously a subject that would otherwise have been swept under the carpet. The history of hypnosis shows this clearly. Anyone interested in the further reaches of the mind has a responsibility to continue to explore altered states of consciousness by whatever means he finds to his taste. Our interest will continue to prod the scientists into action, and we will retain an interest in hypnosis and allied subjects provided we remember that the world is not dull, but is infused with magic.

  But the traffic from the popular mind to the ivory towers of science works at a more subtle level as well. Advances in science do not happen until or unless the general population is ready for them. It is almost as if the impulse for a new scientific discovery came from the collective unconscious. A paradigm shift simply couldn't happen unless there was room in the group mind for the new material. In this sense we are all responsible for anything any scientist discovers, however benign or potentially destructive, and we all have to accept that responsibility. The last thirty or so years have seen the Cartesian paradigm whittled away from the bottom, by you and me, not initially by the scientists and philosophers. One of the scientific responses to this has been the development of mind–body sciences such as psychoneuroimmunology. As we have seen, it is within the power of PNI and new medical technology to explain the validity of hypnosis for the first time. This is our doing: we must unconsciously want new medical techniques, or the rediscovery of old ones. We already demand hypnosis unconsciously – from our collective unconscious – and so we have every right to move that demand into full consciousness.

  Appendix: In Mesmer's Footsteps

  There are a few alternative therapies around today which, consciously or unconsciously, imitate or echo mesmeric technique. Here is a rapid survey of four of them.

  page(s) Bioplasma

  In a brief essay in The ESP Papers, a collection of articles by Russian and other pre-glasnost Iron Curtain scientists on their researches into psychic and other fringe phenomena, Vladimir Masopust of Prague uses the term ‘bioplasma’ or ‘biological plasma’ for exactly what Mesmer used to call animal magnetism. By the use of hand passes, he claims to have evidence that something – bioplasma – is passed from the experimenter to the subject. He also claims to be able to use his own powers to draw the magnetic powers off a subject, leaving the subject weak and headachy, and causing in himself ‘an indefinable emotion of superiority over the subject’. When the flow of energy is the other way round, from him to the subject, he often finds himself weakened – something which few of the early mesmerists found, to my knowledge. Masopust is clearly, like Mesmer, identifying ‘bioplasma’ with the vital force in humans, and regards it as a material substance, since he reports that in this experiment he loses over 300 grams of weight while the subject gains roughly the same amount. One subject gained clairvoyant abilities. But Masopust's experiments have not proved repeatable, and nothing significant has come of bioplasma.

  page(s) Magnotherapy

  Magnetic healing is especially popular in France, although it has invaded Britain too, especially in the form of little magnets worn on the wrist like watches (or as collars on pets). These are supposed to counter the harmful electromagnetic fields of overhead power lines and electricity in the home, and restore the natural healing effect of the earth's magnetic field, which has, according to one piece of publicity I've read, been depleted by up to 5 per cent in recent years.

  Mesmer was of course working with fixed, solid magnets, but these days most magnotherapists work with devices that emit electromagnetic pulses. Nowadays, the kind of grandiose claims that Mesmer made for magnotherapy would not be tolerated, and so modern therapists are more modest. However, they do maintain that magnets are good for relieving pain and accelerating healing, and can reduce inflammation, ward off viruses, reduce stress and enhance athletic performance. More specifically, they are claimed to help with a range of ailments, but especially arthritis. There has been a surprising amount of respectable medical research on the subject, especially in Russia.

  page(s) Orgone Therapy

  Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) was one of Freud's most talented pupils, but disagreed with the master in fundamental ways. Reich held, for instance, that psychoanalysis had a material and even organic basis, and also that it could be used to improve social conditions. Freud was uncertain about Reich's materialism, and did not believe that psychoanalysis could or should be used to cure society's ills. After splitting from Freud, Reich settled in the States in 1934 and established his own laboratories to research his ideas. In the medical field, he believed, just like Mesmer, that he had discovered a new form of material energy, b
asic to the universe and especially to living creatures, which he called ‘orgone’. Every living creature is maintained by orgone and gives a certain amount off as surplus to its own requirements. Orgone travels at the speed of light, in wave pulses, and usually from east to west.

  Since he believed that orgone bounces off metal and is attracted by vegetable matter, Reich built a kind of accumulator – a modern baquet, as it were – consisting of layers of alternating metal and wood, which would concentrate orgone. An ill person sitting inside such an accumulator would be benefited, and in a number of trials some quite remarkable results were achieved. Details remain obscure, because in an act of extraordinary and shameful totalitarianism, reminiscent of the Nazism against which Reich had fought vehemently, his books and records were destroyed by US court order, but followers continue to report cures and alleviations. This act by a branch of the US government is unfortunately not unparalleled. At much the same time as its persecution of Reich, they were also hounding Ruth Drown, a pioneer of the alternative medical practice of radionics. Her equipment was destroyed as well, and she died shortly after being released from prison.

  Towards the end of his life Reich seems to have become paranoid. He believed that radiation and orgone reacted together to create something called ‘deadly orgone’ and that this was building up in the atmosphere, especially around the sites of US nuclear weapons tests. He visited the Arizona desert to conduct experiments in rain-making, and to try to disperse these supposed clouds of deadly orgone. He also came to believe that UFOs were visiting the planet from elsewhere in the galaxy and poisoning the air. Subsequently, following an investigation that had been going on since 1947, he was forbidden by the Federal Food and Drugs Administration from selling orgone accumulators and ordered to destroy them – for no very good reason, it has to be said, since at their worst these accumulators are merely harmless. But Reich had received a great deal of bad press as a promoter of sexual freedom. Reich refused to destroy his life's work and was imprisoned in 1956 for two years. While in prison he died of a heart attack, increasing his followers’ belief in a massive conspiracy against him and his work.