Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis (54 page)

In the 1950s, as we will see before long, fear of brainwashing was in everyone's minds. This fear became attached to subliminal messaging, as if we could be compelled to act on a subliminally received suggestion without knowing why and even against our wills. But there is no evidence that we are
compelled
to act on a subliminal suggestion. It may, of course, incline us in a certain direction, as all advertising does; but it doesn't compel. And that, essentially, is why the advertising industry stopped making use of subliminal messaging: the public found it offensive, and it was no more effective than other, less offensive methods. A lot of people think that subliminal messaging was banned by legislation, but that is not true. The advertising industry made a decision not to use such crude forms of subliminal messaging. It hasn't stopped them using more subtle methods, however.

A good example of subliminal perception is body language. You can meet a man, and on the surface he might be perfectly polite and charming, yet you come away from the meeting certain that he doesn't like you. In all probability you unconsciously or subliminally (below the threshold of consciousness) took in the message his body language was giving you. He may have tilted his body slightly away from you, crossed his legs with the upper foot pointing away from you – that kind of thing. Instinctively, you picked up his aversion.

In other words, there is more to subliminal perception than receiving messages flashed on to a screen. Most of it is obvious and well known: a glamorous couple use a product in an advertisement, suggesting that we will be invested with glamour if we use the product, or that we will find love, sex and other forms of fulfilment. But the fact that it is obvious doesn't make it any the less effective. And in any case, not all of it is obvious: the next time you watch TV adverts, try not to focus on the main characters and the action, which is where the director wants you to direct your conscious attention. Try to see what is happening in the background, which is what we take in unconsciously. Where is that character's gaze directed? (At her breasts.) Why is the scene set in a party? (Because the advertiser wants to appeal to your desire to belong.) Wilson Bryan Key makes the basic point:

In advertising recall studies, for example, advertisements are rarely or never recalled by the conscious mind. Any ad that can be recalled by a significant number of readers is of doubtful value. The conscious mind values, differentiates, and makes judgements. Conscious ad recall can subject an ad to critical judgement – the last thing to which any advertiser wants to expose his product. Ads are designed to implant themselves within the unconscious where they will lie dormant uncriticized, unevaluated, and unknown to the individual until the time a purchase decision is required. The buried information then surfaces as a favorable attitudinal predisposition.

As long as the snobbery and feelings of inferiority to which advertisers appeal are unconscious (as of course they are, until pointed out),
advertising is working subliminally. Magazine ads and roadside hoardings (except those at busy crossroads) are designed to make an impact in no more than one or two seconds, as you flick idly through the pages or roar past at speed, probably in a hypnoidal state; there is no time for conscious evaluation.

Advertising is clearly not the same as hypnosis, but it works on some of the same features of the human constitution as hypnosis, above all our suggestibility. ‘Media has the proven, completely established ability to program human behavior much in the same way as hypnosis,' says Key. Many writers on the subject use hypnosis as their model to express their fears about how subliminal manipulation might work: it is like someone who has been hypnotized acting on a post-hypnotic suggestion. And to a certain extent the analogy is true: advertising is a form of mind control. As with hypnosis, you can resist it, but since you are passive, in a state of mental lethargy, you are less inclined to resist it. Advertising is in a sense more pernicious than hypnosis because we choose to enter a hypnotic situation, but we have little choice in the advertisements we see and hear.

If you're worried about hypnosis, here is something that will make you pause before letting a salesman get his foot in your door. In
Chapter 10
I outlined some of the hypnotic methods of Milton Erickson. They are subtle; they find ways around people's resistance. They have been a boon to salespeople.

There are books which claim that all successful salespeople use ‘gentle forms of conversational hypnosis'. Since everyone agrees that a hypnotized person is in an increased state of suggestibility, the idea is that through ‘conversational hypnosis' – talking to the target person in a particular way – you play on his suggestibility. The technique is roughly as follows. You set up expectations (‘You're going to love what this washing powder can do!'); enthusiasm and
genuine sincerity are helpful at this stage. It's not just mechanical: you are establishing what in the nineteenth century used to be called rapport or trust with your ‘prospect' (as salespeople call a potential customer). Mirroring his body language is said to help at this stage. Discreetly emphasizing certain words (e.g. ‘love' in the example above) embeds them in the customer's unconscious and guides his thinking. Indirect suggestions help: rather than suggesting straight out that he buy the product, you ask him whether he's satisfied with the whiteness of his current wash. The result is that the customer ends up thinking: ‘I wasn't sold this product. It was my idea.'

Other selling techniques are also closely related to hypnosis. They include visualization (getting the customer to picture himself at the wheel of that new car, perhaps with a beautiful blonde sitting next to him), suggesting that he cannot remember details of the opposition's product and so inducing a kind of amnesia, and manipulating his emotions, for example by making him feel guilt for missed opportunities in the past so that he doesn't want to miss this golden opportunity you're offering him. They even go so far as to plant the equivalent of post-hypnotic suggestions: ‘I'm sure that tonight, as you lie in bed, you're going to think about how nice it would be to have a new BMW.'

All these techniques and more are claimed to be effective and probably are. Nor does there seem to be any good reason to deny them the name of hypnosis. It is just an application of Ericksonian techniques to selling. Salespeople learn the techniques and sprinkle key words and tones of voice and body language into their pitch, until the ‘prospect' is effectively in a light trance. They use stories to win the customer's confidence, name-dropping like mad because famous names help to win confidence. They ask all the right questions, direct the conversations with hidden commands and so on – whatever it takes to sell the product and pocket the commission. They find the indirect, Ericksonian approach far better than hard selling: ‘Most people find that our product is the best … Have you ever wanted freedom from annoying paperwork? Now is the time to improve your working life.' Keep it vague, leave it up to the prospect to imagine exactly how his life will improve.

Ericksonian hypnotherapy empowers the patient by making the choice to get well effectively up to him. Pseudo-Ericksonian selling
parodies this by having the customer think the choice is up to him. But don't worry. One of the themes of this book is that even in full-fledged hypnosis you can't be made to do anything you don't really want to do. So no salesman using quasi-hypnotic techniques is going to dupe you into spending vast amounts of money when you don't want to. The choice really is up to you.

One of the less tangible results of the Second World War was a widespread fear of charisma. Hitler had entranced an entire nation. This fear lasted a long time. I have long held a private theory that John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the two most charismatic speakers of the post-war decades, were assassinated, in the broad view, because the American people were not yet ready for the re-emergence of charisma. And one of the rebellions of the next generation of young people was to attach themselves in large quantities to charismatic icons, and ultimately to gurus wielding mystical power and often leading new cults.

How do such leaders entrance us? One of the best analyses of tyrannical power came from the pen of Austrian novelist Hermann Broch (1886–1951), who was imprisoned by the Nazis until influential friends such as James Joyce and Thomas Mann obtained his release. For all the brilliance of his work, he died in poverty. In his book
The Spell
Marius Tatti is a true tyrant – that is, he is convinced he knows what's best for others. Marius is a Luddite, opposed to radios, threshing machines and so on; he is also a fake earth and nature-mother mystic, as opposed in the book to the true mysticism and insight of Mother Gisson. The village in which he arrives as a crippled Italian vagabond is a microcosm of Germany in the 1930s under Hitler. He gradually convinces the villagers, or a large proportion of them, that he has come to redeem them. Wentzel, another wanderer who becomes his chief sidekick, says at one point: ‘He only speaks out loud what the others are thinking.' That is the secret
of his success: he makes it seem as though he is not imposing anything on anyone, but only allowing them to express their essential selves and beliefs. His power comes from his eloquence and from the fact that, although he is crazy, he believes totally in himself and his insane ideas. His power is expressly likened to mesmerism: there is a scene in which Irmgard, an innocent village girl, is so entranced by Marius (with whom she believes herself to be in love) that she allows herself to be set up by him as a sacrifice to the earth spirits of the mountain which looms over the village and colours all their thinking. Tragically, this sacrifice later literally takes place, once Marius has whipped up the villagers by the power of dance and ritual theatre into a state of mass hypnosis.

One of the clever aspects of Broch's portrait of Marius Tatti is the idea that he allows people to think he is only expressing their own convictions. Similarly, as we have just seen in the section on hypnotic sales techniques, a clever salesman makes it seem as though his customers are doing the choosing, with no compulsion from him. If, as I suggested in
Chapter 1
, all hypnosis can really be seen as self-hypnosis, because you choose at some point to go along with it, so all entrancement is self-entrancement. As well as being one of the outstanding orators of the twentieth century, Hitler was a cynical exploiter of the power of rhetoric. He once said to one of his sidekicks: ‘What you say to the people collectively in that receptive state of fanatical abandonment remains in their mind like an order given to someone under hypnosis, which cannot be wiped out and resists all logical argument.' Since rhetoric is not irresistible, even when combined with the suggestibility of crowds, it is clear that Hitler received the consent of the mass of the German people. Even crowds and nations cannot be hypnotized against their will.

Hitler is an interesting case in relation to hypnosis. Many of the reports of people who actually met him face to face, when asked what their chief memory is of the man, mention the power of his eyes. He seemed to look right inside them, to be focused entirely on them to the exclusion of everyone else. This is certainly part of the technique of hypnotism. In his classic book
The Mass Psychology of Fascism
, maverick psychologist Wilhelm Reich attributes the attraction of fascism to middle-class Germans to the sexual repression found in their authoritarian, patriarchal family structure. Hitler's
rhetoric appealed to their sense of sin and salvation, with his pseudo-mystical emphases on the holy trinity of blood, soil and state, on the racial soul, mother Germany, the will of the people, national history and honour, discipline and so on. Such slogans bypass the rational mind and stir the emotions. As we have seen in the context of advertising, this is exactly the way to get people to do something you want them to do.

Part of Hitler's charisma was undoubtedly his identification of himself with the German nation. For instance, in his famous speech delivered at the Berlin Sportspalast on 26 September 1938, in which he attempted to justify on historical grounds the imminent invasion of Czechoslovakia, he portrayed the coming conflict as a personal confrontation between himself and Eduard Beneš, the Czech leader, and famously said: ‘My patience is now at an end!' This was more than a monstrous piece of personal vanity; it was as if Hitler felt that he had transcended his individuality – that his soul was the soul of the nation. This seeming transcendence, this identification with something larger than themselves, is an important element in the attraction of leaders, both secular and religious.

I once saw a TV documentary about the notorious guru Bhagwan Rajneesh. He had a marvellous speaking voice, and was incredibly erudite, but that was only part of his charm. He would hold out a piece of fruit and say: ‘You see, truth is like an orange.' What on earth is that supposed to mean? If Rajneesh spelled it out at all, it was only in the vaguest terms. In other words, he gave his followers a lot of space for personal commitment or surrender to himself and his views – a lot of rope to hang themselves with. As we have seen in other instances of mind control, from selling to political tyranny, you have to allow the ‘prospect' to convince himself.

Paradoxically, though, at other times Rajneesh and all other gurus and tyrants come up with well-defined views. If a tyrant is by
definition someone who thinks he knows better than you what is good for you, and seeks to impose this good on you, to convince you of the correctness of his views, then this definition also fits gurus. Are all gurus tyrants, then? There must be a borderline, which some cross and deserve to be called tyrants, while others remain safely on the near side. Perhaps the border is the degree to which they try to impose their views on you, and the amount of repayment they require in terms of either money or devotion. A tyrant in any sphere – political, religious or domestic – manipulates a system of rewards and punishments, dispensing guilt, shame and forgiveness. By these means, he demands and gains surrender of the will. The deeper the surrender, the greater the emotional investment in seeing the guru or tyrant as perfect, whatever the indications to the contrary.