Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis (50 page)

Close to the beginning of this book I said that ‘highs' are those who are good at deploying attention. This is important because it means that they are also good at deploying
dis
attention. Suppose you have a young child who is screaming at the prospect of having a splinter of wood removed from his hand. There are two ways you might go about a painless removal of the splinter. First, you could have someone create a diversion, and while the child's attention is distracted you try to remove the splinter. Second, if the child was amenable to reason, you could ask him to turn away and think of something pleasant instead. The first method is distraction, the second is disattention – the deliberate deployment of attention away from something, in this case pain. There is evidence that disattention from pain stimulates the neural pathways that block pain, and so this
would explain why ‘highs' are instinctively good at overcoming pain in hypnosis.

But whatever explanation scientists eventually come up with for the effectiveness of hypnosis in lowering pain, the empirical fact remains that it works. The alleviation of pain is the single most important product of hypnosis in a therapeutic context.

Hypnosis is particularly good at treating problems stemming from or involving anxiety – and there are a lot of these. Not a lot of people know that asthma and over-eating, for instance, are anxiety-related problems: they are at least aggravated by anxiety. Let's take a look at asthma, since it's so widespread these days. An asthmatic attack may be precipitated by taking exercise, by an infection, by an allergy, or by emotions. Studies have found that many emotions can precipitate an attack of asthma: anxiety, the anticipation of pleasure, frustration, anger, resentment, humiliation, depression, laughter, feelings of guilt, and joy. Hypnosis can help with the allergic aspect of asthma, and with the emotions. It cannot cure an attack, but it can prevent one; the patient is taught self-hypnosis to practise at the onset of an attack.

Tinnitus – which is far more widely spread than many people imagine – is another disorder which, like asthma, may have a physiological basis, but is certainly aggravated by psychological factors such as anxiety. Obviously, phobias, psychosexual difficulties, stammering and so on are psychological problems, and so are a range of childhood problems such as bed-wetting, shyness and learning difficulties. Anxiety is also a factor before and after operations, during cancer treatment, when someone has heart disease and so on. Hypnosis can help with all of these, because hypnosis can manage stress.

I am told that King George VI of Great Britain used to suffer from terrible stage fright and stammering – a distinct drawback in a
king and emperor who had to make a lot of public speeches and appearances – and that he was cured by hypnotism. The same therapist treated the writer W. Somerset Maugham for his terrible stammer. The treatment would probably have focused first on getting them to relax at a muscular level, to decrease their fear at the prospect of speaking. Once that was well established, they might have been given a visualization of a calming scene, to induce feelings of inner tranquillity. The hypnotist would have given them suggestions and post-hypnotic suggestions to help remove the anxiety. They would have been taught self-hypnosis, so that they could call up the calming visualization whenever they needed it, and relaxation techniques. Finally, if necessary, the therapist might have used visualizations to boost their self-image. Royalty and bestselling authors aside, just to bring matters down to a homely level, on 29 April 1999
The Times
reported, under the headline ‘Hypnosis Beats Exam Stress', how a school in Cheshire had brought in a hypnotherapist to help students to relax and improve their revision before exams.

Sergei Rachmaninoff, the brilliant Russian composer, suffered from total composer's block after the failure of his First Symphony in 1897. He continued to find acclaim as a concert pianist, but he could not write a note. He sought out the hypnotist Nikolai Dahl, who taught him, in three months of daily sessions, to relax, and instilled in him the suggestion that he would be able to continue composing. The immediate result was Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto, reckoned to be one of his best pieces, which was first performed in Moscow on 9 November 1901. In gratitude, Rachmaninoff dedicated the concerto to Dahl.

It is odd that the reputation hypnotherapy has for the public is that it is good with addictions. Overall, tests have shown that it is
less
effective for self-initiated behaviours (e.g. obesity, addictions) than for other kinds of disorders. Quite a large proportion of smokers treated by hypnosis do not permanently give up. The method adopted by therapists with addictions is usually a form of aversion, to put the smoker off cigarettes (or whatever it may be) in the future. But an 88 per cent success rate (higher than usual) was achieved by a radical alternative therapy, in which smokers were brought to a state of appreciating the kind of gratification they got
from cigarettes, and then hypnosis and follow-up self-hypnosis were used to induce precisely the same gratification in the subjects. They had found an alternative way to gain the same gratification.

Although the use of hypnotherapy as a cure for addictions is well known, hypnotist Frank Genco puts it to the opposite use. Rather than cure people of their addiction to gambling, the one-legged marathon-runner Genco teaches self-hypnosis as a means for people to shed their ‘loser's image' and win. Everyone who has played poker knows how mood seems to have an effect on the run of the cards.

Genco's use of hypnosis is a small example of its ability to uncover or unlock potential, which is one of its most familiar aspects – familiar from its use in fiction, since it is the basic role that hypnotism plays in, say, both George du Maurier's
Trilby
(where Trilby's talent as a singer is revealed by Svengali) and Henry James's
The Bostonians
(where Verena's talent as an inspirational lecturer is unlocked by her father). We've all heard stories of people who have performed a physical feat well beyond their usual capabilities – a mother, perhaps, whose child is trapped under a car and who has lifted the car on her own to free the child. These stories show that our unused physical potential can be unlocked by the right motivation.

Sports hypnosis is a way to unlock that potential for athletes, and to deal with other problems that can slow them down that vital fraction of a second, such as pre-competition nerves, lack of self-esteem, or some more general anxiety. A surprising number of athletes have used hypnosis or similar techniques (especially visualizations) to improve their performance. It was used to instil the ‘killer instinct' in Ingmar Johansson in 1959 so that he could win the world heavyweight boxing championship against the formidable Floyd Patterson by a knockout in the third round. Fourteen years later Ken Norton used self-hypnosis before the astonishing match in which he beat Mohammed Ali, and broke his jaw in the process. Mike Brearley, England's cricket captain in the late 1970s, was plagued (as many England captains have been) by low scores; he attributes an improvement to his consultation of a hypnotherapist. Early isolated uses such as these paved the way. In 1962 the Olympic Committee considered that hypnosis should be banned, along with a range of drugs, as
giving athletes an unfair advantage. They soon changed their mind, obviously because they realized that hypnosis cannot make a sportsman gain powers he would not otherwise have, just unlock his abilities. Only one motivational psychologist accompanied the US Olympic team in 1988, but a mere eight years later there were 100. Nowadays, it is perfectly normal for top athletes, whether their sport is tennis or sumo wrestling, to have their own motivational psychologist on their staff, or to check in from time to time at a centre offering to fine-tune skills through such means. Hypnosis works brilliantly with motivational encouragement – as long as nothing goes wrong. In an episode of the popular satirical cartoon
The Simpsons
a sports hypnotist who, in a monotonous voice, is encouraging his team to ‘give 110 per cent' accidentally makes a member of the team behave like a chicken and gets out of trouble in the end only by hypnotizing the boss into thinking he did a good job.

Sports psychologists use hypnosis along with affirmations and visualizations to encourage the sportsmen and women under their charge. As I write, the Oxford University boat crew has just beaten Cambridge for the first time in many years, and against the odds. Before the race it was reported on the front page of
The Times
for 25 March 2000 that Oxford had employed a motivational psychologist, a former rower herself, Dr Kirsten Barnes, whose methods of visualization and affirmation she herself describes as ‘verging on hypnosis'.

In short, hypnosis can change the way you feel about yourself, and apart from the obvious psychological benefits of that, there are physical results as well. We will soon see why.

Hypnosis has a good track record with the cure of warts. Sceptics often point out that warts come and go rather mysteriously on their own, as a result of psychological conditions that are still obscure to medical science, and so that the hypnotic cure of warts really proves
nothing. But this leaves them rather stuck to explain the following test. A group of wart-infested patients were hypnotized and told that the warts on one side of their bodies alone would clear up. And that is exactly what happened. But since warts are also commonly treated by placebos and various forms of faith healing (in remote parts of Britain, one can still come across ‘wise women' who can cure warts), it seems that hypnosis itself is not a necessary factor. Suggestion alone will get rid of the nasty little things. Hypnosis is good in situations like this because it increases our responsiveness to suggestions.

In the 1932 film
Rasputin and the Empress
, the Mad Monk of Russia hypnotizes the czar's haemophiliac son in order to stop his bleeding. This is not too far removed from the truth: hypnosis has been shown to be good at controlling blood flow, and to do so even in haemophiliacs. In fact, it is possible that this is how hypnosis gets rid of warts, since starving them of blood seems to do the trick. Somerset Maugham's 1944 novel
The Razor's Edge
contains one of the few sensible fictional treatments of hypnosis. In one episode Larry cures someone's migraine after a straightforward induction. Maugham was probably unaware of the mechanism, which again has to do with blood flow, since migraines are accompanied or caused by dilation of blood vessels in the head. Perhaps we could also use the success of hypnosis with blood flow to explain how quite a few women have been able through a combination of hypnosis and visualizations to enlarge their breasts by up to 1½ inches. The visualizations, by the way, were along the following lines: ‘Imagine that the sun is shining on your breasts and feel the heat flowing through them. Imagine your breasts growing as they did in puberty, and feel the tenderness and tautness of the skin over the breasts. Imagine that your breasts are becoming warm, tingling, pulsating and sensitive, and that they are growing.'

Who can doubt that hypnotherapy can be effective for things like rashes when there is good evidence that through suggestion or autosuggestion alone inflammation, blisters and bleeding can be produced? A hypnotist called H. Bourru in nineteenth-century France traced a patient's name on his arms with a blunt instrument and told him, when he was deeply entranced, that in the afternoon his arms would bleed along the lines he had traced. They did just that,
showing red and oozing drops of blood. A number of similar cases were reported in the nineteenth century, until scientists felt the need to give a name to the phenomenon: rather cutely, they called it ‘autographic skin'. The willed production of blisters has been tested in modern laboratories; it is a genuinely recognized phenomenon of hypnotism.

One of the most extraordinary products of mind–body interaction is the appearance of stigmata, the apparently miraculous manifestation of bleeding wounds corresponding to Christ's wounds on the cross. Since scientists have been able to cause spontaneous bleeding in certain subjects by suggestion alone, we can be pretty sure now that this phenomenon is not miraculous but comprehensible – in so far as the powerful effect the mind can exert on the body is yet comprehensible. Nor is this a new-fangled theory; the psychosomatic origin of stigmata was first proposed in 1855 by the French physician Alfred Maury. More recently, researchers have found a background of psychological trauma; stigmatists are often hysterical, masochistic, depressive, frigid and dependent, and suffer from nervous anxiety. Add a good pinch of religious fervour to such a personality, and you may well get a stigmatic, someone who by autosuggestion can produce all or some of the marks on her skin. But I must immediately add that not all stigmatics fit this profile: Padre Pio (1887–1968), whose stigmata made him an international celebrity and his monastery in Italy a place of pilgrimage, seems to have been a hearty and robust person, fond of his beer and wine.

I sincerely hope that this paragraph will not offend some people. In the first place, I hope they can accept that at least some ‘miracles' (even those of Jesus) may become explicable as time goes on; clinging to an explanation in terms of divine miracles in such cases is not religion but superstition, and the distinction some writers make between hysterical and religious stigmata is hard to maintain. In the second place, one of the main points I am trying to make in this book, and especially in this chapter, is that however close science might come to explaining mind–body interaction, some of the phenomena and abilities of the mind are truly remarkable. It is astonishing – perhaps even miraculous – how much bigger we are than we think we are. If we could realize and remember that, each of us would live in a larger, more meaningful world, which it is one
of the purposes of religion to promote. As Jesus said: ‘That they might have life and have it more abundantly' (John 10:10).