Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis (60 page)

A shaman is a master of spirits. He is the wounded healer, who has been threatened by chaos, insanity, death, but has mastered it, and this gives him the ability to heal or to make whole, to restore order to a body which is in the chaotic grip of disease. A shaman is possessed by a spirit (Polynesians call him a ‘god-box'), but it is a stable bond, like a marriage. When possessed, he enters a trance, which he communicates to others by rhythmic methods such as chanting, stamping, dancing and drumming. This causes an abreaction in his congregation, and therefore psychological healing.

Whatever else a shaman may possess and use – a mask, for instance – he invariably has a drum:

Its symbolism is complex, its magical functions many and various. It is indispensable in conducting the shamanic séance, whether it carries the shaman to the ‘Center of the World', or enables him to fly through the air, or summons and ‘imprisons' the spirits, or, finally, if the drumming enables the shaman to concentrate and regain contact with the spiritual world through which he is preparing to travel.

Mircea Eliade (1907–86), the Romanian-born professor of comparative religion, actually defined shamanism as a set of ecstatic techniques. Shamans go into trances to achieve their goals, whatever they may be. Obviously, these are not hypnotic trances in the narrow sense governing this book, because they are self-initiated (and often involve taking hallucinogenic drugs). But one could perhaps call them self-hypnotic trances. And the rhythm of the drum is essential to take them on their journey, just as the measured voice of the hypnotherapist takes her clients into the trance world. No other instrument is considered to have the same ability to transport its
user, and such transport is vital to his function. As a healer, he has to travel in the spirit world, recapture the fugitive soul of the sick person, and restore it to its owner. The shaman has the ability to release his soul from his body – that is his special gift – and in many cultures it is trance-induced drumming that guides this ability, so much so that the drum is often seen as the vehicle that the shaman rides on his journey.

Repetitive and monotonous songs and dances are also common elements in shamanic ritual, and it is no coincidence that a certain kind of rhythmic, prolonged dancing in youth culture today is called ‘trance dance'. Usually, it is the shaman himself who does the drumming, singing and dancing, but sometimes he has an assistant. Michael Harner, an anthropologist who gained a considerable following in the 1980s for his practical shamanic workshops, explains the rationale behind having an assistant doing the drumming:

In the SSC [shamanic state of consciousness], part of the shaman's consciousness is usually still lightly connected to the ordinary reality of the physical or material environment where he is located. The lightness of his trance is a reason that a drumbeat often must be maintained by an assistant to sustain him in the SSC. If the drumming stops, he might come back rapidly to the OSC [ordinary state of consciousness], and thus fail in his work.

There have even been attempts to explain shamanistic drumming scientifically. One suggestion is that rhythmic sound stimulates unusual areas of the brain, because a drumbeat contains more frequencies than most instruments, so that it simultaneously stimulates a number of neural pathways. Another observation is that shamanic drumming is often in the region of four to seven beats per second, which corresponds to theta brainwaves, which would be good for inducing and maintaining a trance state.

With the assistant doing the drumming, we are getting closer to hypnotism, since we can see the assistant as a kind of operator and the shaman himself as subject. Sometimes it is explicit that the trance is induced by other people. The shaman often performs his rites in the presence of others – say, the family of the sick person he is trying to heal. Their chanting induces or deepens his trance: ‘For I am a
big dancer. Yes, I am a big dancer. I teach other people to dance. When people sing, I go into a trance. I trance and put n/um into people, and I carry on my back those who want to learn n/um. Then I go! I go right up and give them to God!'

Another traditional technique of inducing ecstasy is dervish turning. Although banned by Kemal Atatürk as part of his attempt to modernize and westernize Turkey in the 1920s and 1930s, it survives as a tourist attraction in some parts of Turkey, and as a living tradition underground all over the Islamic world. The dancers whirl around, their skirts forming a perfect circle around their ankles. They either have their arms folded on their chest, in which case the heart is the focus of attention, or spread out at shoulder height, with the right hand in a receptive gesture and the left thumb pointing down to earth, in which case the tip of the left thumb is the focus of attention, just as ballet dancers ‘spot' in order to prevent getting dizzy. Since union with God is the goal of dervish turning, it is a kind of moving meditation, and the ecstatic nature of the goal, both of turning and shamanism, removes them from the sphere of hypnosis.

The brain has a triune anatomy, which recapitulates our evolution. The oldest part of the brain is sometimes called the ‘reptilian brain', since it resembles the brain of a reptile and is assumed to have developed about 500 million years ago. This part of the brain occupies the lowest part, the brain stem just above the spine. It is responsible for our most primitive and basic functions, such as the control of breathing and heart rate.

When reptiles left the water and took to the land, they faced a whole set of new challenges, and evolved a second part of the brain to cope with them. This is the ‘mammalian brain'. It occupies the part of our skulls just above and to the front of the brain stem. It consists of two structures: the limbic system which is responsible for
homeostasis – that is, for regulating things like temperature, blood pressure and the level of blood sugar – and the hypothalamus, which regulates eating and drinking, sleeping and waking, the hormonal balance of our bodies, and our emotions.

Pasted, as it were, on top of the mammalian brain is the final stage, the cerebral cortex, which developed about 50 million years ago. Its job is to look after those functions which make us peculiarly human: it thinks, plans, remembers, imagines and organizes, assesses sense data, communicates, appreciates art, constructs philosophies and so on. This is the part of the brain that is divided into two hemispheres: the right half which is characterized by holistic appreciation, and the left half which is logical, verbal and linear.

One of the things that is noticeable about all or most of the practices outlined in this chapter is that they involve rhythm. The shaman has his drumming, the dervish his whirling dance; meditators attend to their mantras and their breathing; self-hypnotizers and channellers (who also often rock back and forth) follow their breathing too. Drugs help you get into rhythm and pattern. Hypnotists employ a steady, measured tone, or ask their subject to fixate on a swinging watch; they get their subjects to move into a measured breathing.

My guess is that rhythm strikes a chord with a primitive part of the brain – more primitive than the cerebral cortex. Which part of the brain? The most rhythmical of human activities – music and dancing – are clearly emotional and sexual. These are functions of the mammalian brain, the limbic-hypothalamic system. We've briefly met the limbic-hypothalamic system before, in
Chapter 11
, since it is responsible for coordinating all the systems that go to make up mind–body interaction. We saw, following the ideas of Ernest Rossi, that hypnosis triggers the individual's own healing resources in the limbic-hypothalamic system. Since rhythm appears to be so important to inducing and maintaining trance states, I would guess that the way hypnosis triggers these resources is by means of rhythm. Even if this guess is off the mark, it serves to underscore the importance of rhythm to trance.

If this speculation were right, it would solve a major problem in hypnosis. It is clear
that
hypnosis affects the brain; if it didn't, hypnotherapy wouldn't work. But it is far from clear
how
it does so.
My suggestion is that short-term rhythm (as opposed to the longer ultradian rhythm) is, or is an important component in, the mechanism. There is certainly experimental evidence to suggest that one of the common features of ASCs is the slowing down of brainwaves in the limbic system, but there has been little research, to my knowledge, specifically on the way that rhythm affects the brain. Anthropologists, however, have long been aware that the rituals of the people they study often involve repetitive stimuli, especially through drumming and dancing (which affords the dancer a repetitive flicker effect due to shifting focus), and it is clear that these stimuli produce trances with a full range of neurophysiological indicators. I would think that further research might be interesting. Perhaps synchronizing the pulses of the brain – our brainwaves – with external pulses is fundamental to all ASCs, including hypnosis.

Hypnosis has been in and out of favour over the last 200 or so years. Sometimes external factors, such as warfare or the discovery of chemical anaesthetics, have caused it to be neglected; sometimes internal factors, such as the extravagant claims of practitioners, have dismayed more sober-minded enquirers. Even now, for all the intensity and excellence of the academic research that has gone into the subject for the last fifty years, the prevalence of New Age forms of hypnotherapy is threatening to tarnish its reputation. And hypnosis has a fragile reputation: it doesn't take a lot for the general public to remember that it used to be thought of as a load of rubbish. But it simply refuses to go away. In the history of science and medicine in particular, countless theories have run out of fuel and become stranded on the highway, but all the many attempts to drive hypnosis off the road have failed. Its staying power is telling evidence not just of its fascination, but of the fact that it is real and effective.

In the eighteenth century and for most of the nineteenth century too, from Mesmer to Elliotson, hypnosis or its precursor, animal magnetism, was a religious experience. The subject often achieved some kind of ecstasy, and the mesmerist would present himself as a ritual magician, sometimes dressing the part and invariably making mysterious gestures with his hands. Braid, Charcot, Bernheim and others fitted hypnosis into a more scientific framework, and it became an important tool in the developing field of psychology. Then Freud cursed it, and along came Ted Barber and his peers, who attempted to prove that there is no such thing as hypnosis. Hypnosis is no longer as central to psychological research as it was at the end of the nineteenth century. The main impetus for hypnosis research nowadays comes from its value in medicine, and even if Barber were correct, hypnosis will continue to be employed
by jobbing clinicians, who often have little time for the theories of experimental psychologists.

In the 1950s, both the British Medical Association and the American Medical Association at last acknowledged the efficacy of hypnosis. Here are the conclusions of the 1958 report of the Council on Mental Health of the American Medical Association:

General practitioners, medical specialists, and dentists might find hypnosis valuable as a therapeutic adjunct within the specific field of their professional competence. It should be stressed that all those who use hypnosis need to be aware of the complex nature of the phenomena involved. Teaching related to hypnosis should be under responsible medical or dental direction, and integrated teaching programs should include not only the techniques of induction but also the indications and limitations for its use within the specific area involved. Instruction limited to induction techniques alone should be discouraged. Certain aspects of hypnosis still remain unknown and controversial, as is true in many other areas of medicine and the psychological sciences. Therefore, active participation in high-level research by members of the medical and dental professions is to be encouraged. The use of hypnosis for entertainment purposes is vigorously condemned.

Tentative, perhaps, but undoubtedly a step in the right direction. But this step was taken nearly fifty years ago, and still there is resistance. Why, in Britain and all the other countries with a National Health Service, can we rarely get it for free? Why is it totally ignored in the medical schools? The answer is a combination of factors, but they all boil down to one: ignorance. Too few people know enough about hypnosis for it to be more widely available; indeed, in the medical profession there are deep-rooted prejudices against it, stemming from the nineteenth century. If you ask a doctor why she doesn't use hypnosis, she will say that she never had the opportunity to learn it, but she will also say that she's heard that it is unreliable, erratic in its results. This is true, largely because it depends on the hypnotizability of the subject. But it is far less erratic than is commonly supposed, and for most ailments a light trance, of which about 90 per cent of the population are capable, is all that is needed.

Hopefully, one result of this book will be to bring the subject to the attention of a wider audience: doctors who might gain an interest in the subject, and lay people who might start to demand it as part of their medical service. I would like to see hypnosis more widely available and used, and the time is right, because now what used to be called ‘alternative' medicine is no longer perceived as ‘alternative', but as ‘complementary', and hypnosis in particular is familiar: everyone knows someone who has had hypnotherapy for something. It goes without saying that checks and safeguards need to be put into place, so that only qualified people offer their services as hypnotherapists, but that is not hard to achieve. Hypnosis could be a great blessing to humankind. It's not the panacea that Mesmer thought his animal magnetism was, and I have certainly heard of cases of hypnotherapy failing to do what it set out to do, but it is a gentle, effective and empowering therapy for a surprisingly wide range of ailments. Instead of being a last resort, it should be used judiciously as the therapy of choice. Let's do it!

Philosophically and psychologically Cartesian thought is bankrupt. Its time has been and gone. It is time now to rediscover the holistic medicine of the ancient and medieval world, and to combine it with the genuine scientific and medical advances that have taken place in the last two centuries. Hypnosis could and should play an integral part in such a programme of reunification, because we now have enough scientific knowledge to understand, more or less, how it works, as well as a wealth of experiential and experimental evidence for its efficacy. The fields of psychosomatic medicine and psychoneuroimmunology are only going to grow over the next decades. They point the way to the medicine of the twenty-first century, and they reconnect us with practices that are as old as European history.

In Plato's
Charmides
, written probably in the 390s
BCE
, hehas Socrates say:

I learnt this charm while I was in Thrace on active service in the army from a Thracian healer, a priest of Zalmoxis. These healers are even said to make people immortal. Anyway, this Thracian told me that the Greeks were right to make the claim I mentioned a short while ago [that one should not try to cure
an eye disease without curing the head as a whole], and he said: ‘But our lord and master, the divine Zalmoxis, tells us that just as one should not undertake to cure the eyes without also curing the head, or the head without also curing the whole body, so one should not go about curing the body either, without also curing the soul. And this is exactly why most ailments are beyond the capabilities of Greek doctors, because they neglect the whole when that is what they should be paying attention to, because if it is in a bad state it is impossible for any part of it to be in a good state.' He went on to say that the soul is the origin and source of everything that happens, good or bad, to the body and to every individual, just as the head is the origin and source of the eyes, and that therefore one should take care of the soul first and foremost, if the head and every other part of the body is to be in a good condition.

In Plato's day, the idea that the soul was the personality of the individual was new and startling. He used passages like this one to introduce the idea to the reading public, and to make a plea for holistic medicine. The plea worked, because in the Middle Ages it was taken for granted that imagination, charms and so on cured physical ailments – or rather, it was taken for granted that there is no such thing as a purely physical ailment, because the soul or mind was bound to be involved as well. That is the perspective that we need to rediscover today, in our post-Cartesian world.

Just as surgical hypnotism reached its heyday because it was not at the time possible to achieve anaesthesia through conventional or comprehensible means, so now hypnotherapy could and should become an antidote to the ever-increasing dependence on toxic drugs. There is no such thing as a magic bullet, no pharmaceutical pill that goes straight to the affliction and effects a cure without any side effects. Hypnotherapy cures without any pharmaceutical intervention, and without significant side effects. We have seen how the cultural absorption of hypnotic techniques, largely through fiction and film, has been to do with the manipulative and dangerous side of hypnosis. What we need now is a greater absorption of its positive, therapeutic side.

Any such programme designed to re-integrate hypnosis into the mainstream of medical practice and psychological research needs to
be safeguarded by updated legislation. It should be made clear that there is a difference between the kind of hypnosis encountered in the theatre and the kind encountered in a doctor's surgery. This distinction can be maintained by reinforcing the current licensing strictures on stage hypnotists, while guaranteeing the accreditation of medical hypnotists. The various umbrella organizations in the European countries need to combine, and to graduate and regulate their members in accordance with guidelines laid down by legislation. The rules are simple: take a full medical and psychological history of each and every patient; make a good diagnosis of his condition; never ask him to do anything he doesn't want to do; make sure that he comes out of the trance refreshed and grounded. These are the kinds of rules that occur to me, but the professionals can add to them.

Although the therapeutic use of hypnosis is what I would most like to encourage for the future, at the same time I have no desire to restrict other forms of experimentation with it, or even stage hypnotism (though stage hypnotists should be more cautious than some of them are). I think, in fact, that it would be foolish to try to impose any such restrictions. If the history of hypnosis teaches us anything, it is that it will always attract rebels and those trying to push the envelope. There's no point in trying to outlaw lay use of hypnosis, as many medical practitioners want, because it will be an unenforceable law. And that is how it should be. Hypnosis has the ability to boggle our minds, and anything that has this ability is to be encouraged, because without new horizons we limit ourselves to little worlds, with no room for growth or expansion. It is no surprise to me that throughout its history hypnosis has attracted rebels, because they are precisely those who hate to find themselves in little boxes, and who therefore relish the expansive nature of hypnosis. If going to see a stage hypnotist can wake someone up to her own huge potential, then stage hypnotism should not be banned.

There is two-way traffic between the scientific world and the world of the general public. Ideas gradually filter through to the rest of us from high-flown scientific research, but also scientists are sometimes prompted by popular interest to take seriously a subject that would otherwise have been swept under the carpet. The history of hypnosis shows this clearly. Anyone interested in the further
reaches of the mind has a responsibility to continue to explore altered states of consciousness by whatever means he finds to his taste. Our interest will continue to prod the scientists into action, and we will retain an interest in hypnosis and allied subjects provided we remember that the world is not dull, but is infused with magic.

But the traffic from the popular mind to the ivory towers of science works at a more subtle level as well. Advances in science do not happen until or unless the general population is ready for them. It is almost as if the impulse for a new scientific discovery came from the collective unconscious. A paradigm shift simply couldn't happen unless there was room in the group mind for the new material. In this sense we are all responsible for anything any scientist discovers, however benign or potentially destructive, and we all have to accept that responsibility. The last thirty or so years have seen the Cartesian paradigm whittled away from the bottom, by you and me, not initially by the scientists and philosophers. One of the scientific responses to this has been the development of mind–body sciences such as psychoneuroimmunology. As we have seen, it is within the power of PNI and new medical technology to explain the validity of hypnosis for the first time. This is our doing: we must unconsciously want new medical techniques, or the rediscovery of old ones. We already demand hypnosis unconsciously – from our collective unconscious – and so we have every right to move that demand into full consciousness.