Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis (32 page)

Since it cannot be doubted that the soul and the body can mutually act and react upon each other, it should follow, as a natural consequence, that if we can attain to any mode of intensifying the
mental
power, we should thus realise, in a corresponding degree, greater control over physical action. Now this is precisely what my processes do – they create no new faculties; but they give us greater control over the natural functions than we possess during the ordinary waking condition.

We can therefore occupy the mind with a healing suggestion to effect cures.

Braid was not the kind of person to stand still. Having moved already from a physiological theory of blood flow to a psychological theory of monoideism, in his latest work he was also prepared to abandon or modify monoideism. He distinguished the shallow and deep phases or layers of the trance state; the first he called ‘subhypnotic' and claimed that it was this that the electro-biologists could produce; the second he called ‘double consciousness', because he found his subjects to be dissociated (as we would now say) from their normal states. For instance, he got his subjects to learn a few
sentences in a foreign language; when awake, they could no longer remember the sentences, but when hypnotized later they could again recall them.

Although some members of the medical profession found Braid's work more acceptable than they had Elliotson's, there was still far too much resistance for its importance to be widely appreciated. Animal magnetism or mesmerism had come to Britain from France and been transformed into hypnotism; but prophets are rarely welcomed or acknowledged in their home countries. In lingering dissatisfaction at the failure of his fellow physicians in Britain to recognize the importance of his discoveries, in 1860 Braid sent a paper to be read at the French Academy of Sciences. This galvanized a number of French psychologists, and it was once again France which led the field for many years.

The Victorian belief that hypnotized subjects had supernatural powers may be illustrated by an episode from the life of Sir Richard Burton, the traveller and diplomat (1821–90). Burton believed that he had a ‘gipsy' soul, and that under hypnosis he could read people's minds. He was apparently a skilled mesmerizer, and claimed that he could hypnotize even at a distance, unless there was a stretch of water in between, which would presumably serve to absorb the magnetic rays between him and his subject. In particular, he used to mesmerize his wife, the aristocratic Isabel Arundell, and consult her about the future. On one occasion, in Brazil in the later 1860s, Burton was very ill, and there were no doctors available. Burton hypnotized Isabel to get a remedy from her while she was entranced.

But instead of answering his question about his illness, she became very troubled and foretold (accurately, as it turned out) the murder by poison of their cook by a jealous rival in love, which occurred some weeks later. Then she warned him not to
trust ‘the man that you are going to take with you, because he is a scoundrel'. Since Richard intended to travel alone they could not make sense of this.

As it happened, however, Burton did end up with a companion – a man calling himself Sir Roger Tichborne – and he
was
a scoundrel! He was a common English sailor, who knew that Tichborne had been drowned at sea and was trying to cash in on Tichborne's inheritance.

This story is as intriguing as many similar stories from the time. It is hard to dismiss them all as fraudulent, but at the same time it is hard to believe them, because they threaten the comfortable world views we have constructed for ourselves. In the vast majority of cases, we would like to hear more details, to be certain that there was no possibility of cheating at the time, or of embellishment after the facts.

Alongside mesmeric performers such as Spencer Hall there were others who specialized in the so-called ‘higher' phenomena, which were supposed to be the privilege of trance subjects who could enter the deepest states. In these states, their souls were assumed to separate from their bodies, so that they could see things at a distance – at a small distance if they performed tricks such as reading a book while blindfolded, at a greater distance if they described events and people's homes elsewhere in the country, and at incredible distances if they reported on the geography and inhabitants of other planets.

The two most famous such performers in Britain in the 1840s were the French Didier brothers, Alexis and Adolphe. Alexis was already famous in France before the brothers came over to England in 1844 with their mesmerist, J.B. Marcillet. Accounts of their performances were written up in the
Zoist
(for instance, in the July 1844 and January 1845 issues). Their feats are astonishing, but it has to be said that there were never any properly controlled tests of their abilities. Here, for example, are a couple of instances where there is room for doubt. Once a sceptic in the audience in a private house produced a book and asked Alexis to tell him the title. He had covered the title page with doubled paper so that it could not be read. Nevertheless Alexis soon told him the title, after placing the book on his chest, and then on the back of his head. Could he have
surreptitiously read the title on the spine as he was moving it from his chest to his head? In another experiment, following the successful blindfolded reading of sentences from a book, the blindfold was removed. The book was opened at random, and Alexis was asked to read from ten pages further on. He did so – but he had the ‘habit' of idly flicking through the leaves of the book.

The sceptical comments on these feats by Alexis Didier are taken from an exposé by Sir John Forbes. Here, to give the other side of the picture, is an account of one of Alexis's feats from the January 1845
Zoist
:

His eyes were now open, and after a few minutes' delay a sealed envelope was given him by a gentleman who had brought it with him, and could not divulge to any one present what it contained; after examining it some time, he said there were two words, but they might also pass for one; that they were French; he said if the gentleman who wrote it, and who, he said, was so firm an unbeliever that his influence affected him, would go into the next room, and whisper it to the lady of the house, and she would come and give him her hand he would be able to write the word for her. This being done, he wrote the word
clairvoyance
; she said he was wrong. ‘True,' said he, ‘I ought to have written
clairvoyant
,' and so corrected it. On opening the envelope, the word was found to be correct, written on a sheet of note paper, folded up.

The history of parapsychology has been beset by the claim by sensitives that the ‘vibes' of sceptics in the audience put them off. This has often been used to excuse poor performance under laboratory conditions. Just as in this report Alexis asked a sceptic to leave the room, so he often failed in the company of sceptics, but he encouraged them to attend his séances and be the ones who wrote the words down.

The reading of words from inside securely sealed envelopes or packages was a special trick of Alexis's. He was also occasionally a very successful travelling clairvoyant, giving accurate descriptions of people's houses and their contents, for instance. But we hear only the conclusions to these séances: how long did he take? How many questions did he ask the house-owner? In other words, how much
opportunity did he have to witness their pupils dilating, or other involuntary gestures, which are the clues still used today by stage magicians for ‘mind-reading' tricks. Other than this hypothesis, we have to accept that Alexis and Adolphe, his younger brother, did possess remarkable paranormal abilities. There were, as even the
Zoist
admitted, a lot of frauds in the field of clairvoyance, using plainly inadequate blindfolds, for instance; but the Didier brothers do come off better than most.

As a kind of footnote, I will add that Hippolyte Bernheim and J. Milne Bramwell, two of the most prolific hypnotizers of the later nineteenth century, hypnotized literally thousands of people, and never found evidence of paranormal feats. You can make of this what you will. Sceptics will take it to be evidence that it is all fraudulent; others, more charitably, may be inclined to deny that it proves or disproves anything, except that only maybe one person in a million is truly gifted with paranormal powers. Bernheim and Bramwell just didn't come across such a person, or didn't set up their experiments in such a way as to encourage the manifestation of the higher phenomena. Braid, for his part, tried to be meticulously fair – unless it is right to detect irony in his words. In remarking that he himself had never been able to produce any of the paranormal phenomena that his predecessors had, he says:

Now, I do not consider it fair or proper to impugn the statements of others in this matter, who are known to be men of talent and observation, and of undoubted credit in
other
matters, merely because
I
have not
personally
witnessed the phenomena, or been able to produce them myself, either by my own mode or theirs. With my present means of knowledge I am willing to admit that certain phenomena to which I refer
have
been induced by others, but still I think most of them may be explained in a different and more natural way than that of the mesmerizers. When I shall have personally had evidence of the special influence and its effects to which they lay claim, I shall not be backward in bearing testimony to the fact.

The
Zoist
was not alone in reporting the marvels performed by the Didier brothers and others; the whole country was fascinated by them and by others who could carry out similar feats.
The New
Monthly Belle Assemblée
of February 1849, for example, reported a case in which a lady had lost a brooch, which she last remembered having in August, it being now November. She suspected it had been stolen by one of her servants. She consulted a mesmerist, Dr Hands, whose patient Ellen Dawson was noted for her clairvoyance. Ellen described the lady's house in detail, and the bedroom where the brooch had been kept, described the servant who had stolen it, and told where it was now to be found, despite the fact that it had been pawned. The brooch was recovered.

Clairvoyance was just one of a range of peculiar phenomena associated with mesmerism. The Victorians were amazed by the alleged phenomenon of sympathy between the operator and subject, and believed that sensations and thoughts could be transferred mysteriously between the two. The subject might be in a totally analgesic condition: you could tickle the soles of his feet and he would not respond. But tickle the soles of the operator's feet, and the subject feels it too. Then there was ‘traction', which involved the subject mirroring the operator's movements, even when they were invisible to each other, in separate rooms. Worrying as the apparent erasure of boundaries between two individuals might have been to some, far more were simply fascinated by the phenomenon.

There are plenty of unconfirmed reports of what today we might call ‘telepathic hypnotism' – that is, hypnotism at a distance, by the operator simply focusing his will on the subject. Of course, the difficulty in these cases is to be sure that the subject really had no idea that she was supposed to go into a trance at such-and-such a time. Hypnotism at a distance was tested under proper conditions at the Medical School of the University and King's College, Aberdeen. H.E. Lewis, a black American electro-biologist who was on a sell-out tour of the country in 1851, was the chosen mesmerist. Students from the university were tested by Lewis for susceptibility, and then taken to a different room, where some committee members could watch over them and assess the results, while others remained with Lewis. The experiment was a total failure: not one of the students entered into a trance state.

The whole topic of parapsychology and paranormal phenomena immediately engages one at a very personal level. Do you believe in them or not? Believers are different kinds of people from
non-believers. Most of us sit on the fence and refuse to commit ourselves either way; we like to be entertained by the phenomena, but don't go all the way into full belief. But even one's position on the fence is maintained by a kind of oscillation between inclining one way and inclining the other. Each of us will deal with this tension in his or her own way. Speaking for myself, it makes me somewhat angry that I cannot know for certain, at this distance, which, if any, of the mesmeric paranormalists of Victorian Britain were genuine.

The phrase ‘mesmeric mania' was coined (by Edinburgh academic John Hughes Bennett) to refer to the year 1851 in particular, when on top of the Elliotson–Wakley controversy, Braid's stream of publications and the itinerant lecturers, electro-biology came over from the States and the tackier side of hypnotism took the country by storm. The electro-biologists could have dozens of people in a trance at a time, and soon other mesmerists were achieving the same results without the help of the electro-biologists' bimetallic discs. Polite society was frequently entertained by the sight of half a dozen young women swooning simultaneously under the impassive and assertive gaze of a mesmerist. Electro-biology was a short-lived craze, however – not because people saw sense, but because it was overtaken by the epidemic of table-turning and spiritism. The mesmeric mania of 1851 was the last twitching of a dying art. Although the electro-biologists' methods were similar to those of Braid, Braid's work had fallen on such deaf ears that no one made the connection which would have accelerated the acceptance of hypnotism by the scientific community.

Braid died in 1860, Elliotson in 1868, but interest in mesmerism in the UK had already died before that. By the 1880s, however, respectable medical scientists in France could take up, in effect, Braidian and Elliotsonian positions, and yet retain their reputations untarnished. This is part of the story of the next chapter, but it fed
back into Britain. In 1891 the British Medical Association appointed a commission to investigate hypnotism. The subsequent report was cautiously favourable, but distanced itself from the controversy earlier in the century: