Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis

Robin Waterfield

The Story of Hypnosis

MACMILLAN

Published in 2003 by

Brunner-Routledge

29 West 35th Street

New York, NY 10001

www.brunner-routledge.com

Copyright © 2002 by Robin Waterfield

First published in the United Kingdom in hardback by Macmillan, an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd.

Cover design: Pearl Chang

Cover photo: Pendulum © Corbis

Brunner-Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Waterfield, Robin, 1952-

Hidden depths : the story of hypnosis / Robin Waterfield.

      p. cm.

Previously published: London : Macmillan, 2002.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0–415–94791–X (hb) 0–415–94792–8 (pb)

1. Hypnotism–History. I. Title.

RC495.W345 2003

154.7'09–dc21

2003011033

To my
karass

Code the world with the fugitive light

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘Animal magnetism is the most significant discovery ever made, even if, for the time being, it brings more enigmas than it solves'

Arthur Schopenhauer,
S
ä
mmtliche Werke
IV

‘Mesmerism is too gross a humbug to admit any farther serious notice. We regard its abettors as quacks and impostors. They ought to be hooted out of professional society'

Thomas Wakley, first editor of the
Lancet

‘All sciences alike have descended from magic and superstition, but none has been so slow as hypnosis in shaking off the evil associations of its origin'

Clark Hull,
Hypnosis and Suggestibility

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Preface

Introduction

1. Hypnosis in Fact and Fiction

2. In the Beginning

3. Franz Anton Mesmer

4. Magnetic Sleep and Victor's Sister

5. Crusaders and Prophets in the United States

6. ‘Mesmeric Mania' in the United Kingdom

7. Murder, Rape and Debate in the Late Nineteenth Century

8. Psychic Powers and Recovered Memories

9. Freud and Other Alienists

10. State or No State: The Modern Controversy

11. Hypnotherapy: Mind and Body

12. Mind Control

13. Self-improvement and the New Age

14. A Plea

Appendix: In Mesmer's Footsteps

References

Bibliography

Index of Names

Index of Subjects

1.   John Barrymore in the 1932 film
Svengali
. (John Kobal Foundation/Hulton Archive)

2.   Balsamo mesmerizing Lorenza, from Alexandre Dumas's
Joseph Balsamo
.

3.   The human plank. (Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis)

4.   A hypnotized man has his lips sewn together without feeling pain.

5.   A hypnotic hallucination of infancy and nursing.

6.   An American advertisement promising sexual conquest through hypnosis.

7.   Franz Anton Mesmer. (Hulton Archive)

8.   The Marquis de Puységur. (Mary Evans Picture Library)

9.   A
baquet
in a Paris mesmeric salon. (Mary Evans Picture Library)

10.   Magnetic force passing from operator to subject. (Charles Walker Photographic)

11.   Benjamin Franklin's 1784 report routs the mesmerists.

12.   A mesmeric salon. (Mary Evans Picture Library)

13.   Victorian doctors study a patient. (Bettman/Corbis)

14.   John Elliotson. (Royal College of Physicians)

15.   John Braid.

16.   Ambroise Liébeault. (Mary Evans Picture Library)

17.   Hippolyte Bernheim. (Mary Evans Picture Library)

18.   Jean-Martin Charcot. (Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis)

19.   Emile Coué. (Bettman/Corbis)

20.   Milton Erickson. (© Rene Bergermaiser)

21.   Theodore Barber.

22.   Ernest Hilgard.

Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders of pictures reproduced in this book. If any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers will be pleased to make restitution at the earliest opportunity.

As usual, I have incurred many debts in the course of writing this book. Above all, I must acknowledge Rupert Heath and Peter Marshall, who between them were the prime movers of the project. This is very much my Cornish book, mostly written during a glorious two-year sojourn on the Lizard Peninsula; but it is hard to know who or what to thank (apart from my parents for their great generosity) when love of a place has been for so long so deeply rooted in one's being. In London, Jeremy Trevathan has been a warm and encouraging editor, and Tony Bickford deserves the title ‘patron of the arts'. Tom Bell is a paradigm of the doctors of the future, who will include hypnosis in their arsenal; he was extremely generous with his time and advice. It is a pleasure to acknowledge the help of my bibliophile friend Robert Temple, who let me browse through his wonderful collection of nineteenth-century works on hypnosis. Thanks as always to Richard Leigh, for his constant willingness to share his enormous knowledge of fine literature. Simon Anderson-Jones and Charles Drazin pointed me in the direction of a number of films, and Simon lent me a whole stack of them too. Brian Lancaster was a superb professional reader and made many valuable suggestions. Melvin Gravitz and David Spiegel kindly sent me offprints of articles (accompanied by recommendations for further reading in David's case), and Megan Kerr tracked down some American court cases. My thanks to Bernard Carr for steering me towards the library of the Society for Psychical Research. Not all those I interviewed could be named, but I owe thanks for their time to Ron Alexander (‘Sleepy Sam'), Tom Bell, Sally Gilbert and Dennis Moore. Then there are debts for board and lodging during my research trips to London and in the States: here I must mention Martin Buckley and Penny Lawrence, Stela Tomasevic and Jurgen Quick, Rod Thorn, and especially Michael Brown and Sylvia Kennick Brown – not forgetting Emily Cheng Li. Family debts are of course too many to list; in this case they range from my son Julian, for his knowledge of Hebrew, to my partner Ingrid Gottschalk, for depth of emotion and breadth of physical space.

It is 1784. You are in a dimly lit salon in a mansion in a prosperous section of Paris. The room is presided over by a tall, slightly overweight man dressed in a purple cloak trimmed with lace and embroidered with occult symbols. Other sigils decorate the walls and heavy velvet curtains cover the windows, allowing just the odd ray of sunlight in to strike the thickly carpeted floor, and hardly a sound penetrates from the street outside. Melodious piano music can be heard softly from another room. You and a number of other Parisians are seated around a large, low tub, and there are other such tubs in the room, three for the rich and one for the poor. However, there are few poor people at their tub, since it is fashionable Paris that is fascinated by this new science. Movable iron rods stick out through the cover of the tub and have been bent at right angles, so that from where you sit on chairs around the tub you and the others can hold the rods, or apply them directly or by means of an attached rope to an afflicted part of the body. The other end of these rods, you have been informed, are resting in phials of magnetized water, and these phials in turn stand in a pool of water containing magnetized iron filings. The wizard, who is none other than Franz Anton Mesmer, calls this contraption a
baquet
(which just means ‘tub'), and explains that it, or the attentions of an individual healer such as himself, can restore the lost balance of the magnetic fluid which pervades the universe and animates all living creatures, and whose disturbance is ill health. The group of clients grasp the rods and wait in silence. The atmosphere in the room grows very intense. Occasionally Mesmer or one of his assistants prowls around the room. To complete his appearance as a wizard, Mesmer carries a wand, with a metal tip. He inspects the woman next to you, passes his hands behind her back without touching her, points the wand at her, and she goes into convulsions. Her body begins to jerk, and her
breathing is shallow and uneven; a flush comes over her face and neck. Finally she collapses gently to the floor, coughing up phlegm. Assistants calmly come and take her away to another room, which you can see is lined with mattresses and soft silk drapes. Mesmer follows to attend to her, now that she is on the road to health.

*

It is 1850. You are in the comfortable and cluttered drawing room of a well-to-do self-styled doctor. He sits you down in a straight-backed chair, and pulls up another chair opposite you. If you are a woman, you are chaperoned, and he delicately places your knees to one side of his; if you are a man he sits with his knees between yours. He feels rather too close for comfort, but you are here of your own free will to be mesmerized, and so you submit. He asks you gently to relax, and tells you that you have nothing to fear. Then silence falls. He makes a few sample passes over your hands, from the wrist to the fingertips, drawing his hands close to the skin, so close that you can feel the warmth of his hand, but never quite touching. To your surprise after a while you feel a faint coolness and tingling. Satisfied, he then proceeds to take your right hand in his left hand, and your left hand in his right hand, in a special grip that involves pinching the balls of your thumbs, and he asks you to stare intently at one of his eyes. He returns your gaze without blinking for some minutes; you can feel him exerting his will to some end which is mysterious to you. You begin to feel a strange sensation of heaviness and drowsiness. Without speaking a word, he begins to make passes with his hands over your forehead and eyes and down to your neck. Your eyelids begin to feel very heavy … and that is the last you remember clearly for a while.

*

It is 5 May 2000. I am in the surgery of Tom Bell, who is currently a candidate for the chair of the British Society of Medical and Dental Hypnotists. He is a general practitioner from Okehampton, who uses hypnotherapy in his practice. His office combines comfort and professionalism; there are reassuring medical tomes on the windowsill, and light prints by Gilbert Ster on the walls, along with a number of family photographs. The room is light and sunny, and the bird-song outside contrasts with the noises of a busy medical practice from the corridor. In contrast to the intense quiet of the scenarios from the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Tom talks throughout the procedure, peppering his sentences with key words and phrases which remind me that I am calm, relaxed and in control. His tone of voice is quiet but authoritative, and I notice that he rarely uses negatives such as ‘not' and ‘don't', but finds ways to express himself positively. He gets me to close my eyes and talks me through a standard relaxation exercise, familiar from yoga, drama and antenatal classes, in which I progressively relax my whole body from toes to scalp. Once I am somewhat relaxed (a state which is unusual for me at the best of times, and especially today since one part of my mind is constantly exploring, looking at Tom's technique, and placing what's happening in the context of this book), he completes this phase by suggesting that my eyelids are so comfortable and heavy that I can't open them, and then deepens the trance by having me picture a blackboard on which a hand writes the sequence of numbers from 100 downwards, with the numbers gradually getting fainter and fainter, until they fade out altogether. To my astonishment, at his suggestion that there is a helium-filled balloon attached by a string to the index finger of my right hand, I feel a distinct tug on the finger, and gradually, as Tom continues to talk me through it, my arm rises slowly and effortlessly into the air until my hand is at shoulder height. But this is all just an experiment, so the exercise ends shortly afterwards, with no therapeutic suggestions implanted, except for the idea that I will be able to feel the tug on the finger whenever I like and use it as a trigger to go to a peaceful, relaxing place in my mind. My hand is returned to my thigh, and I count myself down into wakefulness.

*

The last of these descriptions is taken from my own experience; the second is based on a practical manual published in 1851 and written by George Barth:
The Mesmerist's Manual of Phenomena and Practice, with Directions for Applying Mesmerism to the Cure of Diseases, and the Methods of Producing Mesmeric Phenomena; Intended for Domestic Use and the Instruction of Beginners
. The first is based on eyewitness accounts of Mesmer's practice. All three fall into the province of the history of hypnotism, but obviously hypnotism has not stood still since its invention or discovery at the end of the eighteenth century.

This book tells the story of hypnotism, a practice which has
attracted the most extravagant praise and the most acidic vitriol for at least 200 years. I am not a practising hypnotist or hypnotherapist, nor am I an academic psychologist or a doctor. This book is a work of reportage about something which, if even half the claims made for it are true, deserves the attention of medical science to a far greater degree than it has yet received. It appears to offer a gentle, non-invasive method of treating a wide range of ailments, and yet it has been abandoned on the margins of medicine. Indeed, in some cases it appears to deal with causes where normal medicine deals only with symptoms, to be able to go deeper and further than normal medicine. Here is a dramatic case of hypnotic healing, well documented and authenticated because it is a recent case; it hit the headlines in the early 1950s.

In 1951 a young doctor, Albert Mason, was presented with a terrible case of ichthyosis, a hereditary disease in which the patient has fewer sweat and sebaceous glands than usual, so that his skin is dry and scaly. In this case the body of the patient, a sixteen-year-old boy, was all but covered in a thick, black, smelly, hard layer of dried skin, which occasionally cracked open in places to ooze a bloody serum. The boy had had the condition since infancy, and conventional medicine was at a loss. He had endured two skin-graft operations, but in each case the new skin had soon taken on the foul appearance of the rest of his body. Dr Mason, perhaps not realizing that hypnosis was not supposed to be able to deal with congenital diseases, offered to try hypnosis. He hypnotized the boy, in front of a dozen sceptical doctors, in the hospital at East Grinstead, Sussex. He planted the suggestion that his left arm would clear. Five days later the blackened skin became crumbly and fell off to reveal reddened but otherwise normal skin underneath. Within ten days the arm was clear. Mason then worked on other parts of his body, achieving similarly astonishing results; his success rate ranged from good to remarkable. The boy was then taught self-hypnosis to maintain the improvement. The case was written up with the laconic brevity typical of many medical articles, in the bastion of traditional medicine, the
British Medical Journal
, for 1952, and three years later Mason was able to write a follow-up article reporting that the improvement seemed to be permanent.

It is in fact still a major bone of contention whether hypnosis can
treat organic or structural ailments rather than psychosomatic ones. Where psychosomatic illnesses are concerned, there are so many thousands of success stories that one can get blasé about them. So let's make a sceptical assumption. Let's assume that Mason's patient underwent spontaneous remission – that the disease would have improved of its own accord, as in fact sometimes happens in their teens to children who contract ichthyosis young. It still remains the case that Mason achieved a significantly high success rate, and with significant speed; it still remains the case that conventional medical science had tried its best and failed. It still remains the case, then, that hypnosis can be a powerful weapon in a doctor's arsenal, and that it should be brought into the mainstream as quickly as possible.

As sometimes happens, science is actually behind the times on this. A great many ordinary people – you and me – know perfectly well that hypnotherapy (and some other so-called ‘alternative' therapies) works. Nearly everyone knows someone who has been to a hypnotherapist for, perhaps, nicotine addiction. Many people have also seen, live or on TV, the astonishing effects produced by stage hypnotists such as Paul McKenna, and have little doubt that something real is going on, even if it seems inexplicable. This is the world this book explores. The past story of hypnotism is fascinating in itself, but it also may be of no little importance for us and our futures.