Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis (36 page)

In
Chapter 1
I spoke of the double-edged feeling most subjects of hypnosis experience. One part of you knows you need not go along
with the hypnotist's suggestions, and another part of you simply can't be bothered to resist. It seems clear that this woman was in exactly that state. But you
can
snap out of it if you want to; your will to do so may be lowered, but it is not removed.

Let's look at things from another angle too. The hypnotherapists presumably knew enough about hypnosis to know that it doesn't cause oblivion, and so that their patients would know they were being sexually interfered with. In that case, for the hypnotherapists to proceed with rape, they must be deeply stupid people, although some of them do rather ineptly try to induce post-hypnotic amnesia. No doubt some are that stupid, or desperate, but again it does look as though there might have been a degree of consent given by the victim. I'm not trying to justify these cases of rape, but to understand them. And the whole emotive issue needs to be put in the context of some impersonal statistics. In anonymous surveys, up to 5 per cent of all doctors admit to having had sex with a patient, and up to 10 per cent to having got as far as kissing and cuddling. There is something about the doctor–patient relationship which makes a patient vulnerable to her doctor's charms. Suppose, then, that roughly the same number of sexual acts go on in a hypnotherapist's office as in a regular doctor's office. A proportion of these cases are then reported to the police because, looking back, the victim felt abused because of her lethargy. Because of the reputation of hypnosis, she probably expected her will to be undermined, and it is clear that the therapists involved encouraged that belief.

The notion that the victim is not always as unwilling as she later makes out is borne out by the best-documented cases. There is invariably a high degree of ambiguity about the reports alleged hypnotic rape victims give. Why did she go back for a second or third session? Why did she say no but do nothing about it? Why did she take so long before going to the police? Real-life situations are emotionally complex, and this makes it extremely difficult to come to any conclusions about coercion (sexual or otherwise) under hypnotism from experimental evidence, because it is virtually impossible to reproduce real-life conditions in the laboratory. But the majority of the evidence accumulated by recent researchers suggests that the only sensible conclusion to draw is that while it is impossible to get an innocent person to commit murder or submit to sex, it is
possible to lower someone's inhibitions, so that if she was inclined towards murder or sex anyway, she might go along with it. Like any doctors who have had sex with their patients, the hypnotherapists involved in these cases are guilty of abuse of trust and abuse of authority; but it is not clear that they are guilty of rape, if that means forcibly having sex with an entirely unwilling victim.

This conclusion is in line not just with contemporary research, but with an important study published in the
Archiv für CriminalAnthropologie und Criminalistik
for 1900 by von Schrenck-Notzing. As well as discounting the possibility of hypnotic murder, he found the same ambiguities in the grey area of hypnotic rape. To cite just one of his cases:

A certain patient writes in his autobiography that he rendered a young woman, who was tied to a decrepit old man, deeply somnambulic, and commanded her during this condition to perform certain onaninstic manipulations with his genital organs. This she did, but did not remember anything about it after awakening. The sexual intercourse was continued for three months, and was not discovered. The lady, however, possessed a passionate disposition, and loved her seducer. He would in all probability have been able to possess her in the waking condition as well. He chose this peculiar hypnotic way, as he feared detection.

Contemporary arguments about whether it is possible to get a hypnotized subject to commit antisocial acts under coercion echo nineteenth-century debate, though generally with more sophistication and the backing of more experimental data. Bernheim and other members of the Nancy school – notably Liégeois and Forel – conducted numerous experiments designed to show that a hypnotized subject could commit crimes. With the sense of melodrama that seems to characterize the reports of many such researchers, including Watkins, Liégeois once began one of his reports: ‘I am to blame for having tried to have my friend, M.P., killed – and as if that was not serious enough, I did so in front of the commissary general of Nancy.' But whether old or new, the discussion can only reach an impasse, since how you read the evidence depends on your predisposition. If a hypnotized subject commits an antisocial act, this may
be taken only to prove that he was the kind of person to do so anyway; if a hypnotized subject fails to commit an antisocial act, this may be taken only to prove that he was a poor hypnotic subject, or that the hypnotist was incompetent. In other words, whichever position you want to argue for, you can come up with a conclusive argument.

Although I am inclined, then, to dismiss such fears about hypnotism, they do raise a particularly interesting issue. It is a frightening fact that most of us are prepared to go considerably further than we would like to think in obedience to an authority figure – as the German people discovered in the Second World War. In his famous, disturbing book
Obedience to Authority
Stanley Milgram describes a series of experiments he conducted in the psychology department of Yale University in the 1960s. Of two people, one plays the role of ‘teacher', the other of ‘learner'; they have been told that they are taking part in a study of memory and learning. The teacher asks the learner questions, and is told by the psychologist, an authority figure, to administer an electric shock when the learner gets an answer wrong. The voltage is increased every time a wrong answer is given. The teacher is encouraged to believe that this will help the learner correct his mistakes, and the psychologist gradually becomes more insistent that the punishment is applied. In actual fact, though, the learner is an actor, and the impressive electrical machine, with complex dials and switches, delivers no shocks. But the teacher doesn't know this, and Milgram found that many people – over 60 per cent – were quite prepared to administer dangerous doses of electricity in obedience to the psychologist's demands, and so to ignore their own conflict at the belief that the learner was suffering. Milgram played with variables, such as the visibility or invisibility (and inaudibility) of the learner and his increasingly agonized shrieks and pleas for the experiment to stop. An even higher proportion,
about 90 per cent, were prepared to go all the way when it was not they themselves, but a third party who was manipulating the dial that was supposed to administer the shocks: they could more easily console themselves that they were not responsible. About 65 per cent went all the way even when they believed that the learner had a weak heart. When the authority figure of the experimenter was removed, or two experimenters gave contradictory orders, no subject administered a potentially dangerous level of shock, even if the learner insisted on it. The subjects of these experiments were not monsters; they were ordinary people, you and me.

But even this should not raise the hopes of a would-be hypnotizing criminal. Note, first, that it ruins a great many fictional scenes – the kind in which a stranger on a train hypnotizes an innocent young woman and … just then the train enters a tunnel and draws a discreet veil of darkness over what happens next. This kind of instantaneous overcoming of moral barriers just cannot happen. It takes time and patience, or at least conformity with established patterns, even to try to establish oneself as a valid authority figure. In the second place, it is not at all likely that the criminal would succeed in investing himself with the right kind of authority.

There are a number of variables, above all the following: how suggestible the subject is; how deeply hypnotizable the subject is; how good a hypnotist the operator is; how deeply embedded the criminal suggestions are; the usual character and tendencies of the subject (that is, does she already have criminal tendencies?); the temporary condition of the subject. Only if all these variables fell into line would hypnotized crime be possible – and note that even then it would not be involuntary criminal action, since by one of the conditions the subject must already have criminal tendencies.

In short, hypnosis would be a very erratic tool of crime. There is no guarantee of success. The same goes, by the way, for hypnotic amnesia, which one could imagine might also be useful in criminal circumstances. It is true that a hypnotist can plant a suggestion that his subject will not remember something later, but success is not assured, and in any case another hypnotist (working for the police, perhaps) could come along and recover the memory.

Not all thrillers, simply
qua
thrillers, make sensationalist and inaccurate use of hypnosis. Ian Rankin's
Knots and Crosses
breaks the
mould by simply having a hypnotist unlock the suppressed memories of a traumatized policeman, enabling him to solve the case. But
The Mesmerist
, by Felice Picano, is a thriller which exploits every single cliché about hypnotism. Set in the early years of this century in a small town in Nebraska, the mesmerist of the title, Dinsmore, has the ability to make men and women his puppets for life. He uses his skills for the purposes of sexual domination and to gain political control; he can drive people to suicide and murder; he can hypnotize them in an instant merely by reflecting the sun off his cufflinks into their eyes. They often suffer from negative after-effects. At one point, towards the end of the book, he hypnotizes a whole crowd of 300 people, including a man previously found to be unhypnotizable, by glinting the sun off the manacles binding his hands. Such clichés are finally condemned by their own unreality, for if there ever had been a Dinsmore, he would by now control the whole world.

In addition to the question whether a hypnotized person could be made to commit a crime, there is also the question whether a hypnotist could use his powers to commit a crime against the subject, for instance by getting him to commit suicide. This is more plausible. A hypnotist could tell a subject to drink a glass of water which was really poison (but he could do that anyway, without hypnosis), and in a more extreme scenario might even be able to get him to self-induce a heart attack. This, as far as I can see, is the only possible criminal use of hypnosis – but it is pretty implausible. The hypnotist would have to have taken time to build up a relationship of trust with his subject, which would involve either disguising his hostility (even against hyper-sensitivity) or being a supposed friend in the first place. I know of no such cases ever having come to light.

In the nineteenth century, fears about hypnotism were such that it was occasionally invoked successfully as a defence in court cases. In 1879, for instance, a young man, who was a patient of a hypnotherapist,
exposed himself in a public lavatory. When his case came to court, in France in the early 1880s, he was held to have suffered an attack of spontaneous somnambulism and amnesia, and was acquitted. Times have changed.

Two of the most notorious serial killers of recent times, Kenny Bianchi and Angelo Buono, worked as a pair and were known as the Hillside Stranglers. In the late 1970s they terrorized Los Angeles, until their capture in 1979. Now, the late 1970s were also characterized by a higher degree of sympathy towards alleged ‘multiples' (people with MPD, multiple personality disorder), and this had even been successfully used as a defence, as a form of insanity. Bianchi and his lawyers seized on this. Bianchi did his homework by reading
The Three Faces of Eve
and seeing the movie
Sybil
. He was examined by a psychologist who was professionally sympathetic towards the genuineness of MPD, and hypnotized. Under hypnosis he duly produced an alternate personality. The prosecution lawyers, however, were convinced that Bianchi was faking. They brought in Dr Martin Orne, director of the Unit for Experimental Psychiatry in Philadelphia, a world-renowned expert on hypnosis. He watched the videotape and decided Bianchi did not know enough about hypnosis to fake it successfully. He tested Bianchi under hypnosis – and Bianchi failed the tests. For instance, when asked to hallucinate his lawyer sitting in the chair next to him, he loudly expressed surprise when it was pointed out to him that his lawyer was actually standing at the back of the room. Hypnotized people do not do this; one of the standard features of the hypnotic trance is what is called ‘trance logic', the ability to accept anomalous situations. In another test, Bianchi was hypnotized and told that a particular area of his hand, within a drawn circle, was anaesthetized, while the rest of the hand was not. With eyes closed, he was asked to say ‘Yes' when he was touched outside the circle, and ‘No' when he was touched within the circle. This was a trap, because anyone who was genuinely anaesthetized would say nothing when he was touched in the numb area, since he couldn't feel it. But Bianchi duly said ‘No'. He failed other tests too – and both he and his cousin Buono were subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Courts are no longer quite so gullible about hypnosis as they were in the nineteenth century.

In the 1966 trial of Dr Carmelo Coppolino in New Jersey on the
charge of murdering Colonel Farber, his lover, the colonel's wife, claimed to have been hypnotized by the good doctor and instructed to kill her husband. The court rejected this argument on the grounds that she could not be made to kill her husband against her will, and in any case what she was calling hypnotism was probably no more than strong sexual attraction. Coppolino was acquitted, by the way – but later found guilty in Florida of killing his own wife.