Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis (51 page)

The most famous stigmatist was St Francis of Assisi, who developed the marks on 14 September 1213, and kept them until his death in 1215. He was the first, and since then there have been several hundred cases, mostly women. In a typical case of mass suggestion, another thirty cases were known by the end of the thirteenth century. Other famous stigmatics are Anne Catherine Emmerich (born 1774), Gemma Galgani (1878–1903) and Marie-July Jahenny (late nineteenth century). But scientists and medical men were able to study two in particular: Louise Lateau and Therese Neumann. Louise Lateau was a Belgian peasant girl, born in 1850, who showed more than 800 stigmata in her short lifetime (she died in 1883), which started when she was eighteen. She would go into a trance state after receiving Communion in church, and then start bleeding, typically from her hands, feet and under her left breast (where, remember, Christ was wounded by the Roman soldier's spear). Generally, the appearance of the stigmata was preceded by headaches; she was anorexic and often bedridden. Therese Neumann was a very similar case – a peasant girl filled with religious fervour. Born in 1898, she suffered from hysterical paralysis, blindness and false appendicitis, until in 1926 she began to show stigmata, which bled very freely. She too would go into a kind of trance before the bleeding started. Her stigmata continued until her death in 1962.

There is a very good reason why I have concluded this survey with the effect of hypnosis on blood flow, and have lingered a little over the phenomenon of stigmata. It is common knowledge that hypnosis is a mental treatment which can have only mental or psychological effects, or at any rate deal with only mentally caused illnesses.
But this common knowledge is wrong!
The remarkable truth is that hypnosis and autosuggestion can have organic, physiological effects. Just ask the women who have increased their breast sizes. This is not to say that hypnosis can cure cancer (though as we have seen it can help in certain respects), but it is the case that it is not limited to the mind, but works on the body via the mind. Research in the last forty years has demonstrated beyond the slightest doubt that the mind can bring about organic changes in the body. I will go into this in more depth shortly.

While we're on the subject of hypnotherapy, I should lay to rest the idea that hypnosis has harmful after-effects (or ‘sequelae', as doctors will insist on calling them).

In 1897 in New York State a seventeen-year-old boy called Spurgeon Young died. For six months prior to his death he had been a practising hypnotic clairvoyant. The court investigating his death asked a panel of medical experts whether the fact that he had been repeatedly hypnotized contributed to his death, since it was widely believed at the time that hypnosis had a deleterious effect on the nervous system. The experts concluded that his ‘nervous organism' had been ‘shattered', and that, if he had not died, he would have at least been driven insane or imbecilic.

Times have changed. Nowadays, everyone is agreed that the after-effects of being hypnotized are minimal and are classifiable as complications rather than as dangers. The trance
per se
is benign, and any complications that arise come from the induction procedure or something other than the trance itself. There is certainly no evidence that you will fail to wake fully from the trance, or that you will be liable to unwanted trance flashbacks later, or that your will is weakened. As for waking up, it is true that a very few individuals are hard to dehypnotize, but if they were left alone they would either gently wake up of their own accord, or would fall asleep.

Some irresponsible or thoughtless commentators have occasionally accused hypnosis of bringing on severe disorders such as schizophrenia, but this is rubbish; there is no evidence that the subject would not have suffered from schizophrenia anyway. Being hypnotized can be a significant event in someone's life, and that significance can shift the person towards a potential so far dormant, but it is not the hypnosis in itself that causes the shift. In other words, what dangers there are are
coincidental
dangers.

Complications are likely to arise more from stage shows than hypnotherapy, basically because some showmen are less responsible.
Imagine a performer suggesting to a person that she is walking on a tightrope, without first checking whether she has a fear of heights. This sort of thing has actually happened. In September 1993 a twentyfour year-old woman, Sharron Tabarn, died hours after taking part in a show at a Lancashire pub. The hypnotist concluded his show by suggesting that the audience would feel a 10,000-volt electric shock in their seats, and that this would wake them up from the trance. Sharron felt dizzy, went home, vomited in her sleep, and choked to death. It was later discovered that she had a fear of electricity. In Israel in the 1970s a particularly dim-witted hypnotist regressed a middle-aged member of the audience back to her childhood – back to the time when she and her sister had been hidden in a house in Paris for the duration of the Nazi occupation, and triggered a psychosis that lasted for many years before being resolved. The Tabarn case received a good deal of attention, and a British government committee was convened to investigate the death; they concluded that hypnosis was not responsible.

These are very rare occurrences. The vast majority of people who go to see a stage hypnotist experience nothing but pleasure. In Britain these days no one under the age of sixteen is allowed on stage to take part in a hypnotic show, and certain tricks are banned, such as eating an onion as if it were an apple, and smelling ammonia as if it were the sweetest perfume. But the point is that not being in a one-to-one situation, the stage hypnotist may not have taken the time and trouble to screen his subjects and build up a psychological profile, as of course any reputable therapist would have. And since they generally pack up their bags and leave town for their next gig elsewhere, they are not available for consultation afterwards should they be needed. It follows from all this that stage performers should err on the side of extreme caution. A well-meaning Federation of Ethical Stage Hypnotists was set up in Britain in the early 1980s, but it had no means of seeing that the code of practice it drew up reached the statute books. Among its conclusions were that stage hypnotists should never be allowed to induce catalepsy or rigidity in subjects, or put them through age-regression, or suggest that they have eaten or drunk anything unpleasant; and that all post-hypnotic suggestions should be removed not only from the people who had actually been hypnotized up on stage, but also from all members of
the audience. Stage hypnotism is now banned in several states of the USA, in parts of Australia and Canada, and in Norway, Sweden and Israel. In many other countries, as in Britain, performers have to be granted a licence by the local authority before they can put on a show. It would be a shame if the irresponsibility of some stage hypnotists deprived the rest of a good living and the audience of a lot of fun.

Hypnotic induction is hard to direct. A hypnotist might be carrying out an induction on Miss Smith, only to find that Mr Jones, an innocent member of the audience, has gone under, as well as or even instead of Miss Smith. In 1946 the BBC prohibited any experiments in mass hypnosis over television, because a discreet experiment in their studios showed that it worked. This is of course not the same as banning the screening of stage hypnotism; but the televising of a hypnotic induction is still banned, in case an irresponsible person hypnotizes the viewing population of Britain. Myself, I doubt there's too much danger, because the TV is a distancing device; otherwise we'd get frightened watching the violence of the lions on nature programmes.

The only consequence of hypnotherapy that can be severe is symptom substitution. This is when an apparent cure has dealt only with a symptom of an underlying disorder, which then makes its presence felt in some other way. For instance, a man comes for treatment for alcoholism. After a course of treatment he no longer drinks – but whatever it was that made him drink in the first place has not been cured, and may manifest as another addiction, or in some other way. I know this from my own experience: a long time ago I tried self-hypnosis to quit smoking. It worked: I didn't smoke for nine months. But I suffered from recurrent bouts of increasingly violent flu for the whole of those nine months, and they went away only when I took up smoking again. It was only many years later that I was able to give up smoking without suffering any side effects. Once in a blue moon, removing a symptom can have more disastrous consequences. Physician Bernard Raginsky tells a harrowing tale of a man in a psychiatric ward who was suffering from hysterical paralysis of the arm. A doctor hypnotized him and easily freed up the arm, much to the amusement of the other patients in the ward – but that night the patient committed suicide, arguably because ‘his method of
defense against some inner conflict had been taken away and he was left vulnerable and exposed to the ridicule of the patients about him'.

A very few people complain of headaches after hypnosis, but these were probably brought on by the focused concentration required, rather than from anything intrinsic to hypnotism. Another occasional complaint is a stiff neck or shoulder, but that too is almost certainly a result of sitting in one position for a long time rather than of hypnotism itself. Insomnia, a feeling of being ‘spaced out', and other such after-effects are of equally short duration. Since college students are generally the guinea pigs for experiments in hypnosis, someone once had the bright idea of assessing the after-effects of hypnosis against the after-effects of college life in general. Hypnosis came out as rather more benign.

In fact, the main dangers are to the hypnotist rather than his subject, since there is a possibility of the hypnotist being accused of all kinds of things after the event. That is why these days responsible stage hypnotists tape all their shows and tell their subjects afterwards what they had them do. Otherwise, a patient may suffer from partial amnesia, and accuse the hypnotist of indecent assault during the amnesic period, for instance. A few years ago the most famous stage hypnotist in the world, Paul McKenna, was sued by a man who claimed that he developed schizophrenia as a result of being hypnotized by him. McKenna won the case, but it was a Pyrrhic victory, in that (I have been told) he had to pay out-of-court costs rumoured to be as high as a million pounds.

Studies have shown that adverse effects of hypnosis in a clinical setting generally occur only as a result of inadequate dehypnosis, debriefing or follow-up, and that these become problems chiefly when the hypnotist has departed from his usual area of competence. So, for instance, a dental hypnotist who then agrees to help a patient with her nicotine addiction is more likely to see negative after-effects than if he had stuck to dental analgesia. He might find his patient experiencing unexpected amnesia, and not know how to cope with it. He might find that his patient has transferred affection or hostility towards him, or that she was a dependent type who develops over-dependency on hypnosis. If the hypnotist has adequately screened his subject, ensures that she has been fully disengaged from the trance, and throughout the procedure respects his client's integrity, there is
no more need to worry about hypnotherapy than there is about any other psychotherapeutic relationship.

In short, the advantages of hypnotherapy hugely outweigh the disadvantages. Speaking for myself, I would far rather face the minimal disadvantages of hypnotherapy than the unpleasant side effects of a lot of drugs. The dangers can be reduced even further by improved and expanded programmes of research and education, greater clarification of standards for the clinical employment of hypnosis and legal sanctions against quacks.

It's obvious that in thinking about how hypnotherapy works, we need to understand more about the relation between the mind and the body.

Genetic, environmental, social and other factors are increasingly recognized as having roles in the history of illnesses. Therefore it is no longer acceptable to ascribe a single cause to an illness and the term ‘psychosomatic', intended to be helpful in healing the rift between mind and body of Cartesian dualism, now seems almost derogatory when used in the causative sense, ‘It's all in your mind.' What is acceptable to the hypnotherapist is the psychosomatic approach, the assumption that amongst the many factors influencing the efficiency of a person's response to the situation in which he finds himself are his level of arousal, his thoughts about the situation, and his assumptions about himself. These assumptions include his level of self-esteem, his degree of trust in his conscious and unconscious mechanisms to see him through to a perceived, optimistic outcome. The modification of all these responses is within the scope of hypnosis.

In order to see how something as immaterial as your self-esteem can have a physical effect, we should look, first, at the various
nervous systems of the body. The most important nervous system is the central nervous system (CNS), located chiefly in the brain and spinal column. Every part of the body is connected directly or indirectly to the CNS, and the psychological aspect of the CNS is an individual's personality, emotional life and so on. It is easy to see that emotions affect bodily functions: I weep in grief or joy, laugh with pleasure, blush in pride or embarrassment, find that my heart rate and breathing change with anger. In most of us, these emotions and the physical changes come and go. But what about neurotic patients, whose whole lives are given over to emotions? It was found that they developed chronic physical responses – say, paralysis of an arm. The idea that all illnesses had an organic cause had to go, and the concept of a ‘functional' disturbance, one in which the mind as well as the body was involved, began to creep into medicine.

It is also easy to see that a functional disorder can lead to an organic disorder. Here is a simple example. Suppose someone is suffering from neurotic paralysis of his arm. This is a functional disorder, but it will soon cause an organic problem, as the arm's muscles and joints begin to degenerate. But appreciating
that
there was such a thing as psychosomatic illness was one thing; understanding
how
it happened was another. The picture is still far from complete, but scientists now understand that the CNS (especially the limbic-hypothalamic part of the brain) has an effect not only on the nerve impulses, but on the endocrine glands (which govern health by regulating the transportation of chemicals all around the body in the bloodstream), and on the immune system (which governs our susceptibility to and speed of recovery from illnesses).