Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis (38 page)

One subject in Czechoslovakia apparently gained such telekinetic abilities that he could kill birds at a distance by focusing his will upon them. This particular story is unsubstantiated, at the level of hearsay and rumour, but personally I have no doubt that this kind
of thing can happen. Once, years ago, at the only time of my life when I was experiencing various psychic phenomena, I was distracted from deep meditation by the buzzing of a large fly. I willed it to go away – or perhaps I cursed it, though no actual words were involved, out loud or in my mind. There was a ‘plop' beside me on the cushion, and I opened my eyes to find a dead bluebottle.

Channelling is the modern term for what in the past would have been called acting as a medium, or contacting spirits. The late-Victorian craze for spiritism grew naturally out of the mid-Victorian mania for mesmerism, because so many hypnotized subjects appeared to be acting as mediums. It was only when table-rapping and other spiritist phenomena that did not require a hypnotized subject became popular that the two fields became separated, and interest in spiritism waxed and the other waned. I have to confess that this is the area about which I feel most sceptical, because I do not believe that the dead survive in a form that allows them to be contacted, because it is impossible to set up objective experiments to prove or disprove that so-and-so was in touch with Aunty Ada (deceased), and because the whole domain has been riddled by charlatanism and wishful thinking since its beginnings. By ‘wishful thinking' I mean that it is obvious to most people that most mediums are in touch with nothing more than a secondary personality of their own.

By the end of the nineteenth century, largely thanks to mesmerism and hypnotism, there was enormous interest in paranormal phenomena, the so-called ‘higher' phenomena of hypnotism. But the whole domain was, of course, saturated with cranks and charlatans. Nevertheless, a number of more respectable thinkers were interested, and wanted to put the subject on a more professional, respectable and academic footing. In Britain, in 1882, chiefly thanks to the initiative of the classicist Frederic Myers (1843–1901), the justly world-famous
Society for Psychical Research (SPR) was established. This was followed two years later by the foundation, instigated by the eminent Harvard psychologist and philosopher William James (1842–1910), of the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR).

Right from the outset hypnotism was central to their concerns, and the first twelve or so volumes of the British Society's
Proceedings
contain a number of important articles on mesmerism and hypnosis, not just as they impinge on paranormal phenomena, but in the domain of what would now be recognized as straight psychology. Myers's posthumously published enormous work
Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death
(1903) shows what the impetus was behind their research on hypnotism. More aware than most of the vast potential of the human mind, Myers argues that the subliminal mind (whose reality he was one of the first to establish) borders not only on our normal consciousness, but on a larger world where contact with other minds is possible, and where extraordinary faculties reside. The clairvoyant abilities of hypnotized subjects seemed to him to compel such a conclusion.

The SPR very soon formed a committee of highly respected and respectable academics for the ‘study of hypnotism, and the forms of so-called mesmeric trance, with its alleged insensibility to pain, clairvoyance and other allied phenomena'. The task they set themselves was to see whether the phenomena could be adequately explained in purely psychological terms (i.e. as hypnotism), or whether some physical force such as magnetism was involved. They experimented above all with a hypnotist called George Albert Smith and his subject, Fred Wells. In their initial three reports, published in the first two volumes of the Society's
Proceedings
, they came to the conclusion that it was ‘almost impossible to doubt the reality of some sort of special force or virtue, passing from one organism to the other, in the process of mesmerisation'. Braid no doubt turned in his grave, since this was a plain reversion to the old days of animal magnetism. Indeed, in their first report they stated that they had tried Braidian hypnotism, but with little success, and attributed the unfortunate contempt in which mesmerism was currently held to the ‘partial truth' discovered by Braid.

The main test they used – or at least the one they found most convincing – was the famous ‘finger experiment'. In this experiment,
the subject spread out his ten fingers on a table, with his hands projecting through a blanket or screen which stopped him seeing what was happening on the other side. He was also blindfolded, just to be sure. Smith very gently (so as to avoid air currents and contact) magnetized two fingers chosen at random by a member of the committee, so that just these two fingers became anaesthetized and rigid. ‘The points of a sharp carving fork gently applied to one of the other fingers evoked the sort of start and protest that might have been expected; the same points might be plunged deep into the chosen two without producing a sign or a murmur.' Fortunately for the peace of Braid's repose, however, the committee members soon recanted. Further tests suggested that thought-transference rather than anything material was at work. If a material force was being transferred, then the operator would not need to know which fingers he was working on, but it was found that if he didn't know which fingers he was operating on, the experiment didn't work. They concluded, therefore, that thought-transference was involved.

The sympathy between Smith and Wells seemed astonishing. When Smith pointed at the chosen finger, there were nineteen successes and six failures; when he pointed with the screen in place, there were eighteen successes and three failures; with Smith in the same room, not pointing, and standing between 2½ and 12 feet away, nineteen successes, two partial successes, sixteen failures; with Smith in another room across the passage, with both doors open, three successes, three failures; with doors closed, twelve failures, two partial successes; with Smith pointing but willing that no effect should follow, four successes and no failures.

But some doubts remain. Others could not reduplicate the success of these experiments, and Smith himself was not at all successful with other subjects: could it be because they had no opportunity to work in collusion? Smith was involved in discussions about how to set up the experiments, so could have talked in advance to Wells. These doubts resurfaced with a vengeance some years after the finger experiments. In 1908 the magazine
John Bull
published a sensational piece called ‘Confessions of a Famous Medium' by Douglas Blackburn, who had worked with Smith after Wells's death. Blackburn said that the demonstrations of thought-transference which he and Smith had performed in front of members
of the SPR (and which had been taken by the SPR to be genuine) were fraudulent and had been achieved through a series of complex codes.

Here is a simple example of the kind of code that is still used by stage performers. The supposed mind-reader turns his back to the audience, guaranteeing that he cannot see what is going on. His assistant circulates among the members of the audience. They keep up a patter between the two of them. The conjurer is to guess, let's say, the material and colour of lady's dress. The assistant's patter at that point consists of five sentences. The first starts with ‘r' (‘I see the colour red,' says the mind-reader), the next with ‘s', the next with ‘i', the next with ‘l', and the last one with ‘k'. This kind of code is impossible to detect unless you are looking out for it – and even then you have to be quick.

Blackburn went on to claim that when the test conditions set by the SPR were too stringent for success, Smith and he made excuses for their failure – there were too many sceptics around, they were too tired, whatever. At one point the SPR measured magnetic currents emanating from Smith – but he was holding a metallic nib under his tongue. In response to all these allegations, Smith simply assured the shocked SPR that Blackburn was lying. The allegations were repeated in an article by Blackburn in the London
Daily News
for 1 September 1911 (and spread across the Atlantic into a long article on the subject in the New York
Evening Sun
for 13 September). The pot was still simmering six years later, when in the
Sunday Times
for 16 September 1917 Blackburn said that the experiments only ‘worked' because certain eminent members of the SPR were so incredibly gullible. The SPR continued to support Smith and to denounce Blackburn.

But by then the SPR's focus had shifted away from hypnosis. As William James said in his retiring address (he was president of the SPR for two years from 1894 to 1896): ‘I should say first that we started with high hopes that the hypnotic field would yield an important harvest, and that these hopes have subsided with the general subsidence of what may be called the hypnotic wave.' They thought that hypnosis would reveal the whole map of the transcendent realms of the universe, but found that at best it could do no more than prove telepathy, and only then if they trusted someone
like Smith not to be cheating. Other experiments in telepathy were failures: the hypnotized subjects tried to guess cards randomly drawn from a pack, but the number of correct guesses fell below the number one would have expected just from the laws of chance. Hypnosis was perhaps not the royal road to the paranormal after all.

‘You are five years old … two years … less than one year. You are experiencing your own birth … Now you are going back, further back than your own birth and the time you spent in your mother's womb. Back, further back. Suddenly you find yourself in a particular location at a particular time. Please tell me what you see…'

It is common practice for a psychotherapist, whether or not she is using hypnosis, to regress her patient. Regression – or, in full, age-regression – is the practice of taking the patient back through the years to a period of his childhood. This is a useful tool because, given the psychoanalytic assumption that most of our psychological problems and complexes are formed in childhood, the therapist can get her patient to explore the roots of his problems. There are two forms of regression, indirect and direct. In indirect regression, the client acts like a witness of his childhood past, as if he were watching a movie or a dream; in direct regression, the client seems actually to relive the past, and speaks, writes and thinks in the manner appropriate to the age to which he has been regressed.

The extent of the genuineness of direct regression is disputed, and the evidence is ambiguous. Some researchers insist that a regressed subject can display the Babinski reflex. Up until the age of about seven months, the toes of an infant whose foot is tickled on the sole will turn upward (‘dorsiflexion'); after that, they turn downward (‘flexion'). This is a reflex, which is to say that it is an instinctive matter, not subject to conscious control. If subjects who are regressed to infancy back beyond six months or so display dorsiflexion, while those who are not regressed this far display flexion, it
would be convincing evidence of the genuineness of regression. Unfortunately, the experiment does not always work. And despite anecdotal rumours to the contrary (especially about work in the former Soviet Union), there is no evidence that subjects regressed to childhood display the brainwave patterns of a child rather than those of an adult.

Or again, psychologist Martin Orne once got hold of some pictures drawn by a student when he was six. The student had not seen them since the age of six, and Professor Orne was sent them by the student's parents. He was delighted to find that the parents had lovingly written the exact date of their son's sketches: 23 October 1937. He regressed the young man back to that exact date, and asked him to draw exactly the same objects: a house, a tree and so on. In repeated tests, the two sets of pictures showed little correlation, until after the student had been shown the original 1937 drawings. Sceptically, one might say that until then he was drawing as an adult imagined a six-year-old might draw; more charitably, that he was simply drawing like a different six-year-old. On another occasion, Orne asked someone regressed back to age six to write ‘I am conducting an experiment which will assess my psychological capabilities.' Slowly and laboriously, as a six-year-old might, the subject printed the sentence – but there was no problem with the spelling.

In any case, someone some time got the idea of regressing one of his clients back even further, back beyond birth. It is said to have been either Dr Mortis Stark in 1906 or Colonel Albert de Rochas a little earlier, though there had already been cases of spontaneous regression under hypnosis to past lives. Perhaps the most famous such medium was Mrs Smith, whose recollections were written up in 1900 by the Swiss psychiatrist Théodore Flournoy.

One of the most tireless workers in the field of past-life regression in recent years has been Helen Wambach, who has regressed thousands of subjects, often in groups. Her approach is different, because she is an academic researcher, not a therapist. So, for instance, she guides more than a therapist would, directing her subjects to particular eras in time. Early in her research she seems to have realized that it was going to be impossible to find a historically verifiable past life, uncontaminated by her subjects' buried memories from this lifetime, so instead she has focused on statistics. She finds
it significant, for instance, that the percentage of her subjects who find themselves female or male in a past life is statistically accurate; that the same goes for the percentage of upper-, middle-and lower-class lives; that the kinds of clothing, footwear, foodstuffs, etc., seem to check out. But despite her academic credentials, her work is characterized by a high degree of gullibility. If one of her groups displays the same proportion of men and women as in the century to which they were regressed, that hardly proves they were actually remembering events from that century.