The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

Later, Walter made her prostitute herself to various men, telling her clients the hypnotic word of command that would make her unable to move. And when she married, he made her attempt to kill her husband by various means. The latter became suspicious after her sixth attempt at murder – when his motor cycle brake cable snapped, causing a crash – and when he learned that she had parted with three thousand marks to some unknown doctor. The police came to suspect that she had been hypnotised, and a psychiatrist, Dr Ludwig Mayer, succeeded in releasing the suppressed memories of the hypnotic sessions. In due course, Walter received ten years in prison.

How did Walter bring her under his control so quickly and easily? Clearly, she was a woman of low vitality, highly ‘suggestible’. Yet holding her hand hardly seems to be a normal means of inducing hypnosis. In fact, there is a certain amount of evidence to suggest that hypnosis can be induced through a purely mental force. In 1885, the French psychologist Pierre Janet was invited to Le Havre by a doctor named Gibert to observe his experiments with a patient called Léonie. Léonie was an exceptionally good hypnotic subject, and would obey Gibert’s mental suggestions at a distance. Gibert usually induced a trance by touching Léonie’s hand, but Janet confirmed that he could induce a trance by merely thinking about it. On another occasion he ‘summoned’ Léonie from a distance by a mental command. Gibert discovered that he had to concentrate hard to do these things; if his mind was partly on something else, it failed in work – which suggests that he was directing some kind of mental ‘beam’ at her. In the 1920s, the Russian scientist L. L. Vasiliev carried out similar experiments with a patient suffering from hysterical paralysis of the left side. She was placed under hypnosis and then mentally ordered by Vasiliev to make various movements, including movements of the paralysed arm; she obeyed all these orders. (In the 1890s, Dr Paul Joire had conducted similar experiments in which the patients were not hypnotised but only blindfolded, and again he discovered that the mental ‘orders’ would only be obeyed if he concentrated very hard.) J. B. Priestley has described how, at a literary dinner, he told his neighbour that he proposed to make someone wink at him; he then chose a sombre-looking woman and concentrated on her until suddenly she winked at him. Later she explained to him that she had experienced a ‘sudden silly impulse’ to wink.

Whether or not we accept the notion that hypnosis is, to some degree, ‘telepathic’, there can be no doubt about the baffling nature of the phenomenon. Animals are particularly easy to hypnotise, a fact that first seems to have been recorded by a mathematician named Daniel Schwenter in 1636. Schwenter noted that if a small bent piece of wood is fastened on a hen’s beak, the hen fixes its eyes on it and goes into a trance. Similarly, if the hen’s beak is held against the ground and a chalk line is drawn away from the point of its beak, it lies immobilised. Ten years later, a Jesuit priest, Fr Athanasius Kircher, described similar experiments on hens. All that is necessary is to tuck the hen’s head under its wing and then give it a few gentle swings through the air; it will then lie still. (French peasants still use this method when they buy live hens in the market.) A doctor named Golsch discovered that frogs can be hypnotised by turning them on their backs and lightly tapping the stomach with the finger. Snapping the fingers above the frog is just as effective. Crabs can be hypnotised by gently stroking the shell from head to tail and un-hypnotised by reversing the motion. In Hypnosis of Men and Animals (published in 1963), Ferenc Andrä Völgyesi describes how Africans hypnotise wild elephants. The elephant is chained to a tree, where it thrashes about savagely. The natives then wave leafy boughs to and fro in front of it and chant monotonously; eventually, its eyes blink, close, and the elephant becomes docile. It can then be teamed with a trained elephant and worked into various tasks. If it becomes unmanageable, the treatment is repeated, and usually works almost immediately.

Völgyesi also discusses the way that snakes ‘fascinate’ their victims. Far from being an old wives’ tale, this has been observed by many scientists. Toads, frogs, rabbits and other creatures can be ‘transfixed’ by the snake’s gaze – which involves expansion of its pupils – and by its hiss. But Völgyesi observed – and photographed – a large toad winning a ‘battle of hypnosis’ with a snake. Völgyesi observed two lizards confronting each other for about ten minutes, both quite quite rigid; then one slowly and deliberately ate the other, starting at the head. It was again, apparently, a battle of hypnosis. What seems to happen in such cases is that one creature subdues the will of the other. Völgyesi observed that hypnosis can also be effected by a sudden shock – by grabbing a bird violently, or making a loud noise. He observes penetratingly that hypnosis seems to have something in common with stage fright – that is, so much adrenalin is released into the bloodstream that, instead of stimulating the creature, it virtually paralyses it. (We have all had the experience of feeling weakened by fear.)

How can hypnosis be explained? We know that we are, to a large extent, machines; but the will drives the machine. In hypnosis, the machine is taken over by the will of another. When I am determined and full of purpose, I raise my vitality and focus it. In hypnosis, the reverse happens; the vitality is suddenly reduced, and the attention is ‘unfocused’. The ‘machine’ obeys the will of the hypnotist just as a car will obey the will of another driver.

There is another part of the mechanism that should be mentioned here. If I am concentrating on some important task, I direct my full a attention towards it like a fireman pointing his hosepipe at the blaze. I permit no self-doubt, no relaxation, no retreat into my inner world; these would only weaken the force of the ‘jet’. If we imagine the snake confronted by the toad, or the two lizards, we can see that they are like two firemen directing their jets at each other. The first to experience doubt, to retreat into his inner world, is the victim. Another authority on hypnosis, Bernard Hollander, remarks in his hook Hypnosis and Self-Hypnosis (published in London in 1928), that ‘the hypnotic state … is largely a condition of more or less profound abstraction.’ So when a bored schoolboy stares blankly out of the window, thinking of nothing in particular, he is in a mildly hypnotic state, and the schoolmaster is quite correct to shout: ‘Wake up, Jones!’ The boy has retreated into his subjective world, yet without focusing his attention, as he would if he were trying to remember something. Hypnosis seems to be a state when the mind is ‘elsewhere’, and yet nowhere in particular.

Völgyesi’s book brings out with great clarity that there is something very strange about the mind. A wild elephant trumpeting and rearing – that seems natural. The same elephant becoming completely docile after branches have been waved in front of its eyes seems highly unnatural. And the notion that lizards – or even crocodiles – can be reduced to immobility by a gentle pressure on the neck seems somehow all wrong. What on earth is nature doing, making them so vulnerable?

The answer would seem to be that the vulnerability is not ‘intentional’. Like crime itself, it is a mistake, a disadvantage that has emerged in the process of developing other advantages. In order to build up a certain complexity – which seems to be its basic aim – life had to create certain mechanisms. The more complex the ‘works’, the easier it is to throw a spanner in them. A big car uses a lot of fuel; a big biological mechanism uses a lot of vitality. If this vitality can suddenly be checked or diminished, the creature ceases to have free will.

Human beings, as Völgyesi points out, are far more complex than birds and animals. Yet the same principles apply. He noticed that the easiest people to hypnotise were those of a ‘nervous constitution’. Clever, sensitive people are far more easily hypnotised than stupid, insensitive ones. He noticed that these highly sensitive people usually had damp hands, so that he could tell by shaking hands whether a person would be a good hypnotic subject. He refers to such people as ‘psycho-passive’. People with dry handshakes are ‘psycho-active’. They can still be hypnotised, but far more co-operation is needed from the patient, and sometimes the use of mild electric currents.

This is an observation of central importance. It means that clever, sensitive people are usually under-vitalised. They allow themselves to sink into boredom or gloom more easily than others. There is not enough water to drive the watermill, so to speak. Because their vitality is a few notches lower than it should be, it is easy to reduce it still lower by suggestion, and plunge them into a hypnotised state. In Hypnotism and Crime, Heinz Hammerschlag quotes a psychotherapist who got into a discussion about hypnotism in a hotel. He turned to glance casually at a young man sitting beside him on the couch; the young man said, ‘Don’t look at me like that – I can’t move my arms any more’, and sank with closed eyes sideways. This was pure auto-suggestion. Hammerschlag also has an amusing story of some practical joker – probably a medical student – who hypnotised a hysterical girl named Pauline in a hospital ward and ordered her to go and embrace the Abbé in charge of the hospital at four that afternoon. When the girl tried to leave the ward at four o’clock, nurses restrained her and she fought frenziedly. A doctor who suspected that the trouble was hypnotic suggestion placed her in a trance and got the story out of her. The original hypnotist was sent for to remove the suggestion. And even then she continued to have relapses until she was allowed to embrace the Abbé.