Hypnosis

In all these actions, there is one common denominator:

A conservative, well-to-do gentleman in his fifties, a deacon in his church, suddenly stands up before a group of friends, begins to jitterbug like a teenager, stands on his head, crows like a rooster, strips to the waist, runs around on all fours barking like a dog and in general makes a fool of himself.

A young woman who has just had a thyroidectomy without chemical anesthesia sits up on the operating table and asks for a glass of orange juice. Medical men in the surgical theatre, knowing the terrible post-operative throat pain characteristic of the so-called goiter operation, stare with incredulity as the girl drinks ten ounces of orange juice with obvious enjoyment. She then hops off the table and walks to the door.

Sitting in a bar on a Saturday night around midnight, smoking a cigarette, a man of thirty-two laughs merrily, explaining that it's his best friend's sixth birthday party and that he's amused because Tommy Martindale has just let a ball of ice-cream slide off his plate into his lap. Asked what day it is, he says it's August 7,1934, a Tuesday, and that the time is 4:25 in the afternoon. If he were asked to sign his name he would put it down in the scrawl of a child. If he were given psychological tests, his score would be approximately that of a six-year-old.

The attractive young hostess of a weekend house party comes into the living room, where her guests have gathered for cocktails. Completely naked, she asks for a drink, and asks her friends how they like her new dress.

An obviously intelligent gentleman of sixty is seated on a couch in the lounge of his club. A friend asks if he would like to have lunch. "I can't just now, I'm afraid," he says. "They won't allow polar bears in the dining room, you know." He makes stroking and petting motions in the air beside him. "You needn't be afraid," he says to his friend. "This is the only really tame polar bear in the world."

The common denominator? Hypnosis. In each case the person cited was in hypnotic trance.

What is hypnosis? No one knows.

What can it do? Says J.B.S. Haldane, famous British scientist: "Anyone who has seen even a single example of the power of hypnosis and suggestion must realize that the face of the world and the possibilities of existence will be totally altered when we can control their effects and standardize their application . . ."

Who can be hypnotized? Something between eighty and ninety-five percent of the population, excluding the very young, the feeble-minded, and some – but by no means all – of the insane.

There has been, of late, a great stir about hypnosis. One might think that the phenomenon had been discovered yesterday, instead of two or three thousand years ago. A year ago the American Medical Association solemnly announced that hypnosis was a legitimate aid in certain aspects of medical practice, childbirth, for example. The A.M.A. was about three years behind the British Medical Association, and their common position was amusing, considering the fact that an ordinary newspaper cliche of the middle and late 1800s in England was this, added to the announcement that Mrs. So-and-So had been delivered of a child: "Painlessly, in Mesmeric trance."

Hypnosis was important in medicine long before the birth of Christ, which means that hypnosis is older than chemical anesthesia, older than asepsis; it is older than the bacterial theory of disease, vaccines, viruses, vitamins, older than psychoanalysis and such chemical agents as the tranquilizers. Ancient Egypt had "sleep-temples" to which the ill repaired, to be put into trance and visited by "gods" who cured. The temples later spread to Greece and to Asia Minor.

Hypnosis did not thrive under the Christians, except as a means, self-induced, by which some of the martyrs endured the torments inflicted by their enemies. During the Dark Ages anyone known to be capable of entering a trance state was in danger of being burned as a witch. Science began to revive in the middle of the Eighteenth Century (the last witch-burning of record was in Scotland in 1727) and renewed interest in the phenomenon we now know as hypnosis inevitably accompanied the revival.

Friedrich Anton Mesmer, who lived from 1734 to 1815, and who made his name a root-word synonymous with hypnotic effect, was roughly treated by the medically orthodox of his day. He was formally condemned, and his judges included Benjamin Franklin. Mesmer believed that the human body was a living magnet, and threw off gaseous or fluid magnetism in waves. He believed that disruption of the orderly flow of these waves caused disease, and he tried, by sweeping manual "passes" to redirect this flow. By bringing the subject to concentrate on him (his appearance and manner were dramatic and compelling), Mesmer induced hypnosis. Many of his patients claimed to have been cured of illness and some of them no doubt were right. Dr. Mesmer Hypnosis (continued) became popular. He could not handle individually all the cases that came to him, and so he developed a mode of treatment common among psychotherapists today: group therapy. Mesmer gathered his clients around tubs filled with iron filings, or around trees which he said he had caused to sop up the vital magnetism. The French Academy of Medicine found this startling and investigation was ordered, with the United States Ambassador, Mr. Franklin, included in the panel which ultimately denounced Mesmer and drove him from Paris.

In addition to his name and the institution of group therapy, Mesmer bequeathed something else: the hand-wavings, passes, finger-snappings of the stage hypnotist. These dramatic trappings derive straight from Mesmer's magnetic wave theory; they are not necessary or even useful in hypnosis, but their dramatic value has endeared them to the stage performer, and they'll be used as long as the stage hypnotist is with us. That may not be a long time. In England stage hypnosis has been illegal since 1952. Similar laws will probably be enacted here once the phenomenon and its powers are more clearly understood.

Mesmer didn't call it hypnosis, and he didn't know how to isolate the phenomenon from what he conceived to be the magnetic principle in which he believed so strongly. (Some of his patients could "see" the waves. We know now that they could also have been made to "see" Hannibal or Caesar, and to discuss the use of infantry with them.) In 1784 a pupil of Mesmer, the Marquis de Puysegur, accidentally induced a hypnotic somnambulism in a shepherd boy. That is to say, he put the boy into so deep a trance that he behaved as a sleep-walker. He could move about, answer questions, obey instructions, but retained no recollection of events after he had been brought out of the trance. The phenomenon was still not known as hypnosis. That name, from the Greek "hypnos" or sleep, was first used by the English physician James Braid, who worked in the middle of the Nineteenth Century. Braid also originated the "fascination" technique of hypnotic induction, the use of a glittering or whirling object to hold the subject's attention. The spirally-marked spinning disks currently available from mail-order houses had their origin with James Braid, who was banned from British medical practice for his pains.

Hypnosis is full of paradox, and so it is hardly curious that although the word means "sleep" and although the person in hypnotic trance appears to be asleep (he often "wakes up" yawning, stretching and refreshed), the state actually has nothing whatever to do with sleep. The standard induction formula used by nearly all hypnotists involves the repeated suggestion, "You are very sleepy, you are very tired, you are going into a deep, deep sleep . . ." When the subject responds by closing his eyes, nodding, allowing his head to fall loosely forward, he is not asleep, however. He is wide awake. But he has accepted as fact the suggestion that he is asleep. He believes that he is asleep. In a deeper trance, he would accept the suggestion that he was Khrushchev. He would believe that he was Khrushchev and would try to act like Khrushchev. But he is not Khrushchev. Nor is he asleep.

If hypnosis isn't related to sleep, what is it? No one knows exactly. Warren's Dictionary of Psychology defines hypnosis as "An artificially induced state . . . which is characterized by heightened suggestibility, as a result of which certain sensory, motor and memory abnormalities may be induced more readily than in the normal state." Clark L. Hull, in 1933, linked hypnotism with the phenomenon of habit formation. Andrew Salter, a New York psychologist, in What Is Hypnosis? (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1955), suggested that hypnosis is a form of reflex conditioning (the phenomenon demonstrated by Pavlov in which a dog, fed when a bell rings, will later salivate without seeing food, when the bell is rung). Bernard Gindes, author of New Concepts of Hypnosis (Julian Press, Inc., 1952), says, "A subject will only enact a suggestion which has been enforced by actual previous experience, either in reality, imagination, dream or fantasy. Events in his life prior to the hypnotic sessions have conditioned him to react according to a certain pattern."

Whatever hypnosis is, it works. Its value in medicine and in psychotherapy is only now, for the first time, truly being appreciated. Its power, for good or evil, in the influencing of men's minds, in advertising, in politics, in the execution of criminal acts, in the avoidance of detection of those acts, in warfare, and in the continuing struggle for men's minds, the world over, is now only vaguely understood or guessed at.

In grandfather's day, when the Svengali-Trilby story was so popular, it was widely believed that a hypnotist could seize control of an innocent's "will" and thrust her under his domination without her knowledge or consent; and that under the hypnotic spell she would do as he wished her to do, no matter what the moral or ethical barriers in the way.

When scientific interest in hypnosis increased in the 1930s, the reverse rule was laid down: No one could be hypnotized against his will. A hypnotic subject could not be made to do anything counter to his moral or ethical principles.

Grandpa was more nearly right. These are the facts: (1) If you can be hypnotized at all, you can be hypnotized without your consent, without your cooperation, and in some cases despite your strongest efforts to prevent it; (2) Under hypnosis, you can be made to take actions that are violations of your moral and ethical principles.

The question of violating one's moral or ethical principles under hypnosis is a complex one, as we shall see. For example, most nineteen-year-old girls would be unwilling to undress before an audience of fifty men. The society in which we live teaches that to do so would be to behave immorally and unethically. Asked to undress thus publicly, a girl under hypnosis will almost always react typically: she will either spontaneously come out of the hypnotic trance, or she will go into hysteria. Thus she appears to demonstrate the thesis that a hypnotic subject will not violate his moral concepts.

However, if the hypnotist's purpose is merely to cause the girl to disrobe, and never mind the psychological niceties, he can do so easily. He has only to suggest to her that she is alone; that the month is July and the day unbearably warm; that there is a cool shower running in a corner of the room; that she wishes to undress so as to stand under this shower. She will promptly do so, whether there are fifty men in the audience or five thousand. As George H. Estabrooks put the matter: "There are two ways to kill a cat. One is to mess him up with a club. The other is to persuade him that chloroform is good for fleas."

Incidentally, the girl may know that she is undressing against her will, but be unable to stop doing so. She may be very angry, but impotent. Afterward, when she has been "awakened," she may vividly express her anger. The church deacon earlier referred to, who was made to stand on his head, run around on all fours barking like a dog, and generally make an ass of himself, knew everything that he was doing, but was powerless to stop himself; however, when he was brought out of the trance, he promptly punched the hypnotist in the mouth. The clever hypnotist need run no such risk, however, since any really good subject can be told to forget everything that has happened during the hypnotic trance, and afterward he will remember nothing of what occurred.

Most commonly recognized hypnosis takes place with the subject's consent. Certainly in the medical and psychotherapeutic use of hypnosis, it is a cooperative enterprise between the operator and the subject. However, a subject need not be cooperative in order to be put into a hypnotic trance; indeed, a trance can be induced without the subject's even being aware that he is being hypnotized. A good subject can be hypnotized in a split second, with nothing more than the snap of the fingers and the suggestion, "Sleep!" A subject who has never been hypnotized before may be put into a trance through any number of disguised techniques. He can be lulled into a trance through the use of a monotonous sleep-inducing tone of voice, without ever realizing what is going on. He can be invited to watch someone else hypnotized, unaware that he himself is the operator's intended subject. Subtle or disguised forms of hypnotic induction exist in everyday life, in persuasion and salesmanship, advertising, politics, crime, its prosecution and defense, and the power that dictators hold over the masses.

There are many techniques for inducing hypnosis. Perhaps the commonest is the "fascination" technique, in which the subject is asked to concentrate on a bright coin, a mote of sunshine on the wall, the corner of a picture-frame. A pendulum may be used, or a mechanically spun object. (The Russians, who have shown great interest in hypnosis since World War II, have achieved hypnosis by spinning the subject, as in a dentist's chair.) F. L. Marcuse of Washington State University cites the fact that some churches offer a hypnotic environment, with set ritual, darkness, somber music, an eye-fixation point aloft, monotonous and repetitious chanting, meditation, restrictions of movement.

Purpose of the fascination technique is not to "tire the senses," which would be impossible in the few minutes that is usual, but to misdirect the subject's attention, as a mother misdirects her child's by showing him a toy and simultaneously pushing a spoonful of cereal into his mouth. The hypnotist, by inducing the subject to concentrate upon one object, simply removes extraneous and diverting material from his mind and clears the way for the suggestion: "You are tired. Your eyelids are heavy and they will close. They will close and you will be unable to prevent them from closing . . ." And so on. If the subject accepts the suggestion that he is tired, and it is easy for him to do so if he is stretched out on a couch or relaxed in a soft chair, it will be easier for him to accept the suggestion that his eyelids are heavy. It will then be even easier for him to believe that they are closing, and so on until, after a time, he may be convinced that he has spent the morning with his Cabinet in the White House as President of the United States, or in some distant eastern castle as a sultan surrounded by his harem of one hundred beautiful slave girls. He will believe this absolutely, and it is one of the minor dangers of "party" hypnosis that few amateur operators understand that the subject is often fanatic in his hypnotically induced beliefs, and may go into uncontrolled violence if they are challenged.

Almost anyone can hypnotize and it takes no more than half an hour to learn how. However, hypnotism can definitely be dangerous in the hands of an unqualified amateur, and while some of the dangers are obvious, some are quite subtle. The widely-held belief that a hypnotist may be unable to awaken a subject from to prevent it; (2) Under hypnosis, you can be made to take actions that are violations of your moral and ethical principles.

The question of violating one's moral or ethical principles under hypnosis is a complex one, as we shall see. For example, most nineteen-year-old girls would be unwilling to undress before an audience of fifty men. The society in which we live teaches that to do so would be to behave immorally and unethically. Asked to undress thus publicly, a girl under hypnosis will almost always react typically: she will either spontaneously come out of the hypnotic trance, or she will go into hysteria. Thus she appears to demonstrate the thesis that a hypnotic subject will not violate his moral concepts.

However, if the hypnotist's purpose is merely to cause the girl to disrobe, and never mind the psychological niceties, he can do so easily. He has only to suggest to her that she is alone; that the month is July and the day unbearably warm; that there is a cool shower running in a corner of the room; that she wishes to undress so as to stand under this shower. She will promptly do so, whether there are fifty men in the audience or five thousand. As George H. Estabrooks put the matter: "There are two ways to kill a cat. One is to mess him up with a club. The other is to persuade him that chloroform is good for fleas."

Incidentally, the girl may know that she is undressing against her will, but be unable to stop doing so. She may be very angry, but impotent. Afterward, when she has been "awakened," she may vividly express her anger. The church deacon earlier referred to, who was made to stand on his head, run around on all fours barking like a dog, and generally make an ass of himself, knew everything that he was doing, but was powerless to stop himself; however, when he was brought out of the trance, he promptly punched the hypnotist in the mouth. The clever hypnotist need run no such risk, however, since any really good subject can be told to forget everything that has happened during the hypnotic trance, and afterward he will remember nothing of what occurred.

Most commonly recognized hypnosis takes place with the subject's consent. Certainly in the medical and psychotherapeutic use of hypnosis, it is a cooperative enterprise between the operator and the subject. However, a subject need not be cooperative in order to be put into a hypnotic trance; indeed, a trance can be induced without the subject's even being aware that he is being hypnotized. A good subject can be hypnotized in a split second, with nothing more than the snap of the fingers and the suggestion, "Sleep!" A subject who has never been hypnotized before may be put into a trance through any number of disguised techniques. He can be lulled into a trance through the use of a monotonous sleep-inducing tone of voice, without ever realizing what is going on. He can be invited to watch someone else hypnotized, unaware that he himself is the operator's intended subject. Subtle or disguised forms of hypnotic induction exist in everyday life, in persuasion and salesmanship, advertising, politics, crime, its prosecution and defense, and the power that dictators hold over the masses.

There are many techniques for inducing hypnosis. Perhaps the commonest is the "fascination" technique, in which the subject is asked to concentrate on a bright coin, a mote of sunshine on the wall, the corner of a picture-frame. A pendulum may be used, or a mechanically spun object. (The Russians, who have shown great interest in hypnosis since World War II, have achieved hypnosis by spinning the subject, as in a dentist's chair.) F. L. Marcuse of Washington State University cites the fact that some churches offer a hypnotic environment, with set ritual, darkness, somber music, an eye-fixation point aloft, monotonous and repetitious chanting, meditation, restrictions of movement.

Purpose of the fascination technique is not to "tire the senses," which would be impossible in the few minutes that is usual, but to misdirect the subject's attention, as a mother misdirects her child's by showing him a toy and simultaneously pushing a spoonful of cereal into his mouth. The hypnotist, by inducing the subject to concentrate upon one object, simply removes extraneous and diverting material from his mind and clears the way for the suggestion: "You are tired. Your eyelids are heavy and they will close. They will close and you will be unable to prevent them from closing . . ." And so on. If the subject accepts the suggestion that he is tired, and it is easy for him to do so if he is stretched out on a couch or relaxed in a soft chair, it will be easier for him to accept the suggestion that his eyelids are heavy. It will then be even easier for him to believe that they are closing, and so on until, after a time, he may be convinced that he has spent the morning with his Cabinet in the White House as President of the United States, or in some distant eastern castle as a sultan surrounded by his harem of one hundred beautiful slave girls. He will believe this absolutely, and it is one of the minor dangers of "party" hypnosis that few amateur operators understand that the subject is often fanatic in his hypnotically induced beliefs, and may go into uncontrolled violence if they are challenged.

Almost anyone can hypnotize and it takes no more than half an hour to learn how. However, hypnotism can definitely be dangerous in the hands of an unqualified amateur, and while some of the dangers are obvious, some are quite subtle. The widely-held belief that a hypnotist may be unable to awaken a subject from trance is without validity. If a subject is left in a hypnotic trance, he will eventually fall into a normal sleep and awaken naturally. This process may require a few minutes or several hours, depending on the individual. However, a hypnotic subject may seriously injure himself or those around him, if he is given improper suggestions by an amateur hypnotist. There is real danger of harm caused by great physical exertion suggested by the hypnotist; a part of the body can be injured without the subject's realizing it, if hypnotically-induced anesthesia has been used. There have been fatal and near-fatal heart attacks caused by hypnotically induced hallucination, and in the hands of the unscrupulous, hypnosis can be truly insidious.

The greatest danger that the amateur hypnotist must guard against is the tendency to think of hypnosis as a game in which the subject is only "playing along." This tendency to underestimate the power of the hypnotic suggestion can often have disastrous results. An amateur hypnotist of our acquaintance, who had learned how to hypnotize just the week before, told a good subject that when she awoke she would be a vampire. He imagined that she would flap her arms and imitate one of Bela Lugosi's girlfriends. Instead the pretty little thing looked calmly around the room and then without a word sprang savagely at the hypnotist and bit him severely on the face, trying very earnestly to get at his throat.

In another case, a good subject was given an imaginary, or hallucinated, dog on a hallucinated leash and told that the dog, a Great Dane, was pulling too hard to be held. The people who were watching the amateur performance laughed as the man was pulled helplessly out of the house and into the street. Before he could be stopped, he had been struck and killed by a passing automobile.

Almost everyone can be hypnotized, but only one person in five is a natural somnambulist, a subject who can be taken into a deep trance, a trance in which hallucination, regression, anesthesia and other extreme hypnotic phenomena can be developed. However, with practice, about sixty-five percent of those who can be hypnotized at all can reach the deep-trance state.

There is a marked tendency for a subject to wish to please an operator, and it is sometimes difficult to judge whether a subject is in as deep a trance as he appears, or is simulating in order to satisfy his wish to please. This rapport, as it is called, between hypnotist and subject is also apparent in the acceptance of suggestion. The subject may hear many voices in the room, while in trance, and be aware of everything that is going on around him, but he pays attention only to the operator and responds only to his suggestions. It is also difficult even for a skilled operator to bring a subject out of a trance induced by someone else, though as we mentioned earlier, a subject left in a trance will eventually fall into a normal sleep, from which he will awaken normally.

Because of this rapport, this strong tendency to please the operator, and the really remarkable ability of some subjects to sense what the operator wants of them, many carefully controlled experiments in hypnosis have produced conflicting results. Because the subject senses what the operator expects, and tries his best to give it to him, many of the early experiments on the question of whether or not a subject would go against his moral convictions suggested that he would not, simply because that was the result the operator was seeking.

Professor Estabrooks, in his book Hypnotism (Dutton, 1957), pointed out this problem in a series of experiments on the question of muscular strength in hypnosis, conducted first by M.C. Nicholson at Johns Hopkins and later by P.C. Young at Harvard, with completely conflicting results. Estabrooks notes that the contradiction in results "was undoubtedly due to the attitude of the hypnotists. The good subject cooperates in wonderful fashion. Nicholson's subjects realized that they were supposed to show an increase in muscular strength and did so. The opposite applied to Young's experiments. Our work in hypnotism must always be carried out with this fact in mind, that the subject tends to give what is expected." These conflicts are especially true in the experimentation with moral and ethical judgments under hypnosis. Here, more than anywhere else, the operator has strong prejudices, which the subject is able to sense to a really remarkable degree.

While almost everyone can be hypnotized, people vary markedly in the depth of the trance that can be easily induced. Why? No one really knows. Being a good or bad hypnotic subject has nothing to do with "will-power" except in the very broadest sense, and very little to do with intelligence, although persons of extremely low I.Q. are most difficult to hypnotize. It is a matter of being able to clear one's mind, concentrate and accept suggestion at the subconscious level, and some people are much better at this than others. Some are so good, in fact, that they can be put into a trance with or without their permission, on the subtlest of cues, by the hypnotist's clearing his throat, touching his ear, or by a key word, by any particular sight, sound, smell or other stimulus that has been given as a cue beforehand.

Some hypnotists have made recordings of their voices for clients. Typically, a patient is upset because his doctor has gone to Europe for a month. The patient is afraid that he will not be able to control a certain pain or habit without help. Under such circumstances, the doctor might give the man a recording. It will be almost as efficacious as his presence would be. If the man's wife, curious, puts the record on a player, she may involuntarily go into a trance, and if the record automatically repeats, she may go into a still deeper trance.

Since people vary so greatly in their ability to be hypnotized, is there any way of telling a good subject from a bad one? Not by appearance or casual conversation, no. The good hypnotic subject does not fall into any particular category of physique or personality. However, there are simple tests which will reveal those individuals who make the best hypnotic subjects. In the most common of these, the prospective subject is asked to stand upright and the operator stands behind him, then slowly draws his hands back past the subject, saying, "As I draw my hands back past you, you will feel a strange force pulling you backward toward me. You are going to fall back into my arms, but I will be here to catch you. You feel this strange force pulling you backward. You are falling, falling, falling. Falling back, back, back, back ..." After this has been repeated several times, the subject, if he is a good one, will accept the suggestion and fall backward. In a similar test of susceptibility, the fingers are interlaced and squeezed tightly together. The operator then informs the subject that his hands are locked so tightly together that he will be unable to pull them apart. A good subject will be unable to separate the fingers.

The facts of greatest interest about hypnosis are the ease with which it can be induced in a large part of our population, for one. Two, the fact that almost anyone can hypnotize after only a few minutes of instruction and, three, the fact that we know almost nothing about the potential – for good and evil – of this strange phenomenon.

Just what can hypnosis do? Here are some of the simply induced and common phenomena possible under hypnosis. In the lightest trance, it is possible to lock a subject so firmly in one place that if ten thousand dollars is placed on the floor in front of him, and he is told that it is his if he can get out of the chair and pick it up, still he won't be able to move. The house could be set aflame and unless the subject were released by the operator, he would die in the fire, nailed to his chair by the "suggestion" that he could not leave it. Hypnosis (continued on page 74) Hypnosis (continued from page 42) can produce a case of stuttering so severe that a man cannot pronounce his own name; similarly a trained hypnotist can cure many cases of stuttering that are psychosomatic in origin.

All of the senses can become hyper-acute under hypnosis. Vision, hearing, smell, taste and touch may all improve to a remarkable degree. Consider this experiment, for example. A subject is shown a series of plain white cards and told, as he sorts through them, that one is a photograph of his mother. He is asked if he recognizes it.

"Of course," the subject replies.

"Will you recognize it if I show it to you again?"

"Certainly."

The operator makes a small mark on the back of the card so that he will be able to recognize it himself. He then shuffles the cards and hands them to the subject, asking him to pick out his mother's photograph, which the subject promptly does. This remarkable feat is possible because the subject's visual hyper-acuity picks out microscopic flaws and irregularities on the face of the one card on which he has been told his mother's photograph appears. He can, of course, pick out this card again and again.

Many experiments have been done to demonstrate hypnotic subjects' awareness of time-factors. Many good subjects can calculate time to the second: put a subject into trance and tell him to awake in exactly four hours and thirty-four minutes, and he may well do just that. One explanation of this phenomenon is that the subject may be able to tell the exact time by subconsciously counting the tickings of his watch, or someone else's; or by counting his own pulse or heartbeat.

Some of the commonest of hypnotic feats demonstrate the complete deception of the senses. Sweet oranges can be turned into lemons that make the subject pucker uncontrollably; spirits of ammonia may smell like Chanel No. 5; water becomes whiskey and causes drunkenness. The arms, the legs or the whole body will accept anesthesia, and there will be no feeling of pain when pins are stuck into the subject at random, or when fire and electrical shocks are applied. On the other hand, a subject can be told that a pencil is a burning cigarette and when it is placed on the skin a blister may form.

Blistering of the skin and hypnotically-induced bleeding and other such phenomena are of special interest because they demonstrate one of the most remarkable aspects of hypnosis. An operator can take control of a good subject's secondary or involuntary nervous system and thus put under control body functions which are normally involuntary. Blood pressure and body temperature can be raised and lowered at will, the heartbeat increased or slowed, the pupils of the eyes made to dilate at will (as in experiments with the conditioned reflex) and, of course, all pain can be eliminated by the simple expedient of blocking the nerves that send the message of pain to the brain. The ability of hypnosis to block pain is currently attracting the most attention from the medical profession, because of its value in childbirth and dentistry. It is really one of the least remarkable of the many incredible powers of hypnosis.

The Indian fakirs who have amazed Western man for centuries with their ability to walk on hot coals, pierce their bodies with swords, go into death-like catalepsy and fast for long periods of time are practicing auto-hypnosis, and any good hypnotic subject could do the same if he cared to, or, rather, if his hypnotist cared to have him care to.

After digesting the notion of control over the involuntary muscles and the autonomic nervous system through hypnotic suggestion, hallucinations and delusions seem like rather tame stuff. It is possible to create almost any kind of hallucination or delusion with a good subject and to make it stick indefinitely through post-hypnotic suggestion, after the subject has been brought out of the trance. The pretty young hostess who walked nude into the living room to greet her guests and asked them how they liked her new dress was under a hypnotically-imposed hallucination; she really saw the dress and couldn't understand the shocked reaction of her friends. A simple and effective hallucination that stage hypnotists often use is to tell a subject that when he awakes, he will be completely naked; or that he will be clothed and everyone else, including the hypnotist, will be completely naked. The results are almost always hilarious, because the subject really believes what he has been told. For instance one subject, a girl, told that she was nude, awoke and covered her face.

Hallucinations can sometimes backfire. A rather high-strung and sensitive subject was told that one member of a group at a party had left the room, and when she awoke, he would not be there. He had not left, of course, but when the subject was brought out of the trance, she could no longer see him. He walked directly in front of her and she looked right through him at the others in the room with whom she was conversing. For her, this fellow was simply not there. Then the operator asked the subject if she would like some champagne and she indicated she would. He joked about having a rather unique and lazy man's means of getting it, whereupon the fellow the subject could not see poured a glass of champagne and started to bring it to her. The subject saw the champagne bottle and the glass, but nothing else, and she became hysterical. The subject was unable to view the situation objectively, or realize that it was part of a hypnotic trance (as many subjects can, even while actually viewing the hallucinations) and so seeing the glass and bottle hovering in mid-air severely frightened her.

The polar bear that accompanied the man at the club was a hallucination, of course, and it is just as easy to make things appear for a good subject as it is to make them disappear. Estabrooks comments on a pet bear that he created as a hallucination which became something of a pest after a while. In the beginning, Professor Estabrooks was able to produce the hallucination at will and he got a kick out of materializing it for himself in the corner of a room during a bridge game and remarking, "Why there's my bear! He looks hungry." After a while, the bear began appearing on its own, without being summoned, and it got into the habit of following him home at night, and appearing unexpectedly under the bed or peering through a window. Even though Estabrooks knew very well that it was a hypnotic hallucination, it was also a thoroughly real bear to him in appearance and it became a bit unnerving, and so he finally had it removed from his subconscious, but it took three or four long sessions to accomplish the job.

Hypnosis (continued from page 74) anyone practicing hypnosis of any kind make certain he "clears" the subject of each and every suggestion made to him, whether or not the suggestion was acted upon. The greatest danger of parlor hypnosis, where no ill is intended, lies in not taking hypnosis seriously enough.

Delusions are very different from hallucinations and, as we shall see, they can be quite important in the relation ship between hypnosis and crime. When the gentleman in his club petted his polar bear, that was a false sense impression, a hallucination. But when the church deacon rushed around on all fours, barking like a dog, that was a false belief, a delusion. If we tell a subject that he is President Lincoln, he will be President Lincoln. And if we give him a copy of the Gettysburg Address, he will read it with all the dignity, emotion and regard that we would have a right to expect from a man in his position, at that historic moment. If we tell a good subject that the is Frank Sinatra and ask him to sing us a song, he will be delighted to do it and he will probably do a fair job of it, since most of us can carry something of a tune if we're not nervous or embarrassed. The hypnotic subject, of course, is not nervous or embarrassed in the slightest. Why should he be? He is Frank Sinatra. If we tell the subject that he is Van Cliburn, hypnotism will not give him the ability to play the piano, if he could not play it before, but he will sit down and try to "fake it" in the real sense of that phrase.

It is characteristic of the good subject in post-hypnotic suggestion, that he will defend his assigned position, however absurd it may be, with persistence and cunning, sometimes apparently instinctively selecting the one feasible line of defense. Estabrooks tells of a man given the delusion that he was God. An Oxford professor said to him, "I have not the least doubt that you are God. There is something I would like to ask you, God. I have always been baffled by the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. I am unable to understand it. Now, since you thought it up, I'm sure you can explain it to me." The man in the post-hypnotic state looked at the professor with a calm and level gaze. He spoke; "God never talks shop."

Dr. Estabrooks describes a subject who is told that he has been to Utica that afternoon between four and six and that he visited a railroad station, and while there he was the President of the United States pass through the station on his way to the Hotel Utica. The subject, upon being awakened, insists that this is true and that he realy did spend the afternoon in Utica, despite all attempts to show him it is ridiculous. Now the next step: "You saw the President pass through the station. Then you went into the taproom. There you overheard two men discussing a plot to assassinate him that evening as he boarded the train for New York City. Here are the pictures of the two men. Be sure you remember them, for you will see them again tonight at the Utica station." Once again a delusion, or false belief, mixed with hallucinations and a post-hypnotic suggestion, and one which might make things very unpleasant for two innocent men in Utica. The application of this form of hypnosis in the fixing of false witnesses for real crimes is obvious. And it would be foolish to assume that while this example of assassinating the President was only a laboratory experiment, real criminals are not using hypnotism to gain false witnesses for themselves, cover crimes and avoid justice.

The thirty-two-year-old man in the bar, who seemed to be enjoying a six-year-old's birthday party, was undergoing a common but fascinating hypnotic phenomenon known as regression. Under hypnosis, it is easy to pick out all manner of memories that have been lost to the conscious mind, but are still hidden deep in the subconscious, where hypnosis moves with ease. But regression is actually something more than that. Rather than simple islands of memory, in regression the somnambulant subject is able seemingly to "go back in time" to an earlier age, to relive so completely an earlier time in his life, that he can remember all manner of the smallest details, describe where he is, who else is there, what clothing they are wearing, etc. He will be able to report every gift that he received on his sixth birthday, who sits about him in class at school, his teacher's name, and any number of other facts that have long vanished from his conscious memory. One subject of our acquaintance, a young woman, had lost her mother in early childhood, and having been raised in an institution, had never seen a photograph of the mother, and so had no idea what she looked like. In a deep hypnotic trance, she was regressed to her early childhood, was able to describe completely the home in which she lived, and both of her parents who lived there. Before she was brought out of the trance, the subject was told she would remember everything that had occurred, and so, today, she has a clear mental picture of her mother. The memory was there all the time, of course, buried in the subject's subconscious, but through hypnotic regression it was possible to bring the mental image out as a conscious memory. In hypnotic regression a subject may write approximately as he wrote at the age to which he has been regressed, and the handwriting will change markedly at fifteen, and ten, and again at six when it becomes a childish scrawl; if given psychological tests, the subject's score will often approximate also the age to which he has been regressed.

Hypnotic regression ends where memory ends and the talk of recalling "other lives," a la Bridey Murphy, is nonsense. Although the subject may sincerely believe he is remembering another life, he is remembering another life, he is simply pulling something unusual out of his own past experience that he cannot consciously account for. A classic case concerns a woman of quite ordinary educational background who recited ancient Greek in a trance. Her performance could have been turned into a Bridey Murphy case if anyone had cared to, with the implication that the woman had actually lived in ancient Greece in another life. But ultimately it was discovered that the woman had, as a child of three or four, been taken by her mother to the home of a professor who was in the habit of walking around his workroom declaiming in Greek. The little girl remembered a great deal of what she had heard. It may be that every word of a quarrel that you overheard between a policeman and a streetcar motorman when you were four, is stored in your subconscious. The more emotionally meaningful the early incident, the more likely it is to be buried deep within your mind, perhaps complete and intact. Hypnosis can release the dormant transcript.

Post-hypnotic suggestion is a thought implanted during a trance that is acted upon or becomes real after the subject has been brought out of hypnosis and seems normal again, in every way. The post-hypnotic suggestion can include hallucinations, delusions, in fact anything we can achieve in a hypnotic trance; yet the subject will seem to be completely free of any hypnotic influence and normal in every way, immediately before and after the post-hypnotic suggestion is acted upon. What is more, the post-hypnotic suggestion may be activated a short time after the trance has ended, or a long time later. There have been cases of post-hypnotic suggestions that lasted for years. Some examples of simple, typical post-hypnotic suggestion: The subject is told, while in a deep trance, that sometime after he awakens the operator will remark about the weather. The subject will then have an uncontrollable urge to smoke a cigarette; when the operator remarks that it is getting rather late, the subject will throw the cigarette down, announcing that it is stale. The subject is then told that he will remember nothing whatever of these instructions, and he is brought out of the trance. Everything goes along normally until the operator remarks about the weather, and the subject reacts to the subconscious cue and asks for a cigarette. The subject has absolutely no idea that he is acting on a post-hypnotic suggestion and will laugh at the idea, if anyone suggests that there is a relationship between the remark about the weather and his picking up a cigarette. Why did he pick up a cigarette at that particular moment? Why, because he felt like smoking, of course. And why did he throw it down, when the operator remarked that it was getting late? Because the cigarette was stale, and for no other reason, he will stoutly insist.

Auto-suggestion, or self-hypnosis, can, with practice, be achieved by anyone capable of being hypnotized and, since it is possible to achieve anything under self-hypnosis that can be achieved in hypnosis produced by another, this is obviously an area of very great potential, since it means that a great many of us, with relatively little effort, can successfully maintain controls over ourselves to a degree previously undreamed of. Would you like to be able to cut off headaches and other pains at will? Actor Cary Grant, who became intrigued with the subject of hypnosis some years ago, can. He can anesthetize any part of his body at will, simply by thinking the pain away. Would you like to be able to concentrate for hours on end on a given subject, without being distracted? Child's play. Would you like to break that bad habit that has the best of you – smoking, nail-biting? If not too deep-rooted, hypnosis can take care of it, but there are some other considerations in the forced cure of bad habits that we may wish to consider, and will touch on in a discussion of the medical uses of hypnosis, a few paragraphs hence.

Nevertheless, auto-suggestion supplies a potentially remarkable control over oneself, including even one's sex life. For a good deal of sexual impotency is really just a problem of mind over matter, and with auto-suggestion at your beck and call, you have a real control over the body in which you live.

There are dangers to auto-suggestion too, of course. The pain that you arbitrarily take away may be there as a warning of something more serious. The pet bear that plagued Dr. Estabrooks was produced by auto-suggestion and for a time it was under wonderful control, but it got out of hand, which is the problem with a great many hallucinations. There is the general danger in auto-suggestion that it may easily lead to disassociation. In theory, the subject should be able to guide his own treatment and become the master of his own personality, but it may just as readily encourage a tendency to disassociate oneself from reality in the development of neurotic traits. In the application of hypnosis to any kind of problem, it is important to have the cool objectivity of the professional. And auto-suggestion is most meaningful when taught by a professional as an aid to whatever else is being accomplished for the subject by hypnosis. Auto-suggestion can be of considerable value in aiding and abetting the breaking of a bad habit or the improvement of some condition for which hypnosis has been prescribed.

In medicine hypnosis can be used as anesthesia for procedures ranging from the preparation of dental caries for filling to childbirth and amputation. (Esdaile reported amputations under hypnosis as long ago as 1845.) It is necessary only to suggest to the patient that he can feel nothing in his left leg. He accepts this suggestion as fact. He now cannot feel anything in his left leg. He is told that he cannot hear any sound at all save the sound of the hypnotist's voice. He becomes deaf to extraneous sound. He will not react to a shotgun fired in the room, and so he lies there serene, oblivious to the whine of the surgical saw.

Less spectacularly but not less efficiently, hypnosis is useful in treatment of any illness of psychosomatic origin, a category including some of the most persistent and painful maladies. It has been frequently demonstrated that peptic ulcers will respond to hypnotic treatment; so will chronic gastritis and colitis, some asthmas, migraine, high blood pressure and other circulatory difficulties, certain cases of hives and eczema and sexual frigidity in the female and impotency in the male. Startling feats of sexual endurance may be possible in a normally potent male who is also adept at autohypnosis. There would seem to be very real possibilities for the use of hypnosis in supplying the often very important "will to live," which may be missing in some patients recovering from serious physical illness or accident. Hypnosis may also prove valuable as a means of avoiding the serious secondary effects in accident cases, caused by shock.

The alteration of habit patterns by hypnosis is comparatively so easy that anyone who attempts, for example, to stop smoking by another means is probably indulging in an absurdity. Rationing, smoking by the clock, the use of so-called "will-power" and other such primitive devices equate poorly with the hypnotic subject's conviction that he loathes tobacco and would not put a match to it for a million dollars. The suggestion will need periodic reinforcement, of course, but it will take the addict over the difficult first few weeks as nothing else will.

The only real problem which exists in the elimination of bad habits through hypnotism is that these may be only compulsive symptoms of a more serious disorder, and removing the symptoms will not solve the problem. Psychotherapists like to tell the tale of the patient who went to a hypnotist to cure his nailbiting and was now a chain-smoker. The hypnotist made the very sight of cigarettes repulsive to the subject, but he returned in a few months with a serious drinking problem. The hypnotist wisely decided not to make alcohol repugnant, which might have pushed the subject over the edge to a serious mental disorder, but led him instead back to nail-biting, which seemed the least of several evils. The story is probably too pat to be true, but it points up a real truth: if the habit is a superficial one, hypnosis can cure it with no unwelcome secondary effects; if it is actually a release for compulsive or neurotic tensions, then bottling it up may be the worst thing to do. In that case it's better to leave the habit alone and go after the root of the problem.

Hypnosis will probably make its heaviest contribution to medical science in the field of psychotherapy, once the resistance of the orthodox Freudians and Jungians, now crumbling, is finally overcome. On the face of it, hypnosis would appear to be a weapon of enormous utility in the analyst's armorarium. The basic purpose of the Freudian therapy is to bring the patient to an understanding of himself by helping him to dredge up from the subconscious, and examine, in the light of certain set principles, the various traumatic incidents in his life that have disturbed him. The process is often absurdly extended – analyses running from five to seven years are commonplace – because the patient has simple mechanical difficulty in recalling, and often because he does not want to recall a painful incident. Analysands, as the customers are dubbed in the trade, have spent six months and $3000 in discovering that at the age of four they happened upon their parents in the carnal act. Under hypnosis the same discovery might have required a very short time. It is easier for the patient to recall painful happenings under hypnosis than under standard therapy. In standard therapy his resistance may completely overcome the effort and the therapy may end in failure.

Orthodox analysts argue that Freud used hypnosis, and dropped it. So he did. He stated that he did so because cures wrought by hypnosis were temporary, the induction process was laborious, that it was limited in scope, and that there was an undesirable element "behind" it. Says Marcuse: "Relapse into sickness has never been shown to be more or less frequent with hypnotherapy than with other therapies . . . hypnotic induction is neither more nor less laborious than other forms of therapy ... the objection concerning applicability of hypnosis contains a measure of truth. However, no claim is made that therapy is accomplished by hypnosis alone ..."

The mysterious element "behind" hypnosis may be explained in Freud's autobiography. A woman patient, coming out of hypnosis, embraced Freud as one of his servants entered the room. Freud was seriously embarrassed. A modest man, Freud could not account for the woman's behavior on the basis of his own animal appeal, so he ascribed it to hypnosis, and apparently became convinced that hypnosis was somehow associated with the libido. There is no agreement on this point, but it appears to have been one of the reasons Freud abandoned hypnotherapy.

Some analysts maintain that the suffering and struggle of the analysand in his effort to haul traumatic material out of his subconscious are important to the treatment. This appears to be of a piece with the centuries-held belief that it was evil to alleviate the suffering of a woman in childbirth, since obviously God had ordained it. Orthodox analysts argue further that to break through the patient's defenses quickly may upset him. It is not necessary in hypnosis to break through quickly; the therapist can take what pace he thinks best. Nor is deep hypnosis necessary. Says Milton Kline: "Many highly complex and subtle changes in psychological functions can be brought about by extremely light hypnotic states."

The lightest possible hypnotic state may be that induced by contemporary American advertising. The legendary George Washington Hill of American Tobacco may have been the first really to understand the potential of the hypnotic concept in advertising. Before Hill, and before Albert Lasker, the giant who founded Lord & Thomas, American advertising tended to resemble British advertising. There was a hat-in-hand air about it. "Glotz Chocolates are Good Chocolates," it said, amiably. George Washington Hill knew that a company that advertised in that fashion would never find it necessary to build steamships with which to rush cacao-beans to the factory. A potential customer addressed in that fashion might buy Glotz Chocolates, but he might also buy Glumley Chocolates. There had to be a better way.

There was, of course. The better way was to grab the prospect by his shirtfront and say, "G is C and C is G and G is C and C is G and Glotz is Chocolate and Chocolate is Glotz" and do this over and over again until the prospect was so conditioned that whenever he thought of chocolate, in whatever form, he would inevitably think of Glotz.

Seize the prospect's attention. Make him concentrate. Repeat the instruction. Do it again, and again, and then again. Hypnotize him.

Some people thought that George Washington Hill's advertising was not efficiently planned because some of it was irritating. It was meant to be irritating. This was one solution to the problem of getting the subject's attention. In laboratory hypnosis. The subject willingly gives the operator his attention. Seizing his attention in the middle of a workaday world is another matter. Suppose you are driving to work and your car radio is on. A familiar commercial theme comes up – a catchy tune, load and very repetitious. Then the announcer gives his pitch: "Glotz! Glotz! Glotz! Gopher Glotz, All-Alabam fullback, says, 'I Go for Glotz!'" The repetitious theme music comes up again. You catch yourself listening to it. You shake yourself and turn your attention again to the road. You don't know it, but you've been taken to the edge of a light hypnotic trance. Big Brother Glotz has almost hooked you. Next time, maybe he will.

When Harold Ross, late editor of The New Yorker, embarked on a successful one & – man fight to prevent canned advertising commercials from being broadcast in New York's Grand Central Station, he wasn't trying merely to protect the tired commuter from annoyance. He considered that he was fighting an assault, albeit a small one, but an assault nonetheless, on our basic freedoms. If a man flips on a radio, he expects to be sold something. He has his guard up. People milling around in a railway station form the aptly-named "captive audience" & – the huckster's delight.

The radio or TV commercial that appeals to a man's conscious mind through legitimate sales techniques, at a time when he is more or less paying attention and consciously prepared to receive such a pitch, is not open to criticism here. But the "captive audience" in New York's Grand Central Station presumably had other things on its mind, and so the commercials could be beamed directly to the subconscious in much the same way that the hypnotist gives suggestions to a subject while misdirecting his attention with soothing patter or the spinning of a shiny object. In the same way, extremely repetitious, monotonous radio and television commercials dull the active conscious mind that exercises free choice and permits the message to reach the unguarded subconscious, where free choice does not exist. In this regard, the radio or television audience is being conditioned to buy Glotz Chocolates by the repetition of sounds, both musical and verbal, in much the same way Pavlov's dog was conditioned to salivate at the sound of a bell in the classic experiment on the conditioned reflex. (The conditioned reflex and hypnosis are actually separate manifestations of the same phenomenon.)

Many authorities are openly frightened of "subliminal" advertising – advertising in which, typically, a message is flashed on a television or movie screen so quickly that it is placed just below the level of consciousness. The eye receives the image, but for so short a time that it is recorded only by the subconscious. Through this means it would be possible to build up in an individual such a passion for Glotz' Chocolates that he would throw a brick through a candy store window to get a box of them – and afterward be quite unable to explain why he had done so.

Mass hypnosis, in the laboratory sense, is demonstratably possible on both radio and television (an ideal medium – supplying, as it does, both visual and verbal stimuli), and the British Broadcasting Company has banned hypnotic demonstrations on British TV and radio. Formal experiments have shown that a competent operator could put a major number of a typical listening or viewing audience into a trance – without their consent, or even their knowledge. This huckster's dream could make frightening fact, out of Gahan Wilson's fanciful cartoon in last June's Playboy, depicting a bug-eyed shopper in a supermart loading up her cart with breakfast cereal under the hypnotic influence of a sign bearing two gigantic eyes and the words "You will buy Crispies!" And what would work for Madison Avenue would also work for the politician and tomorrow's demagog.

Hypnosis is all around us, like the air we breathe. Its power to influence us staggers the imagination, and so it is imperative that we understand it. If the pen is mightier than the sword, hypnosis may very well be mightier than the H-bomb.

Using today's techniques, no operator could hope for one-hundred-percent effectiveness in a random audience. But he might expect eight out of ten to be drawn into a light trance and two of that number to fall into the deepest, somnambulant state. Those only lightly hypnotized the first time would be more easily and deeply hypnotized the next. In a police state in which the government controlled all means of communication, hypnotic messages could be beamed at the masses via television, so that the random audience of ten became a million, ten million, or one hundred million – and two hundred thousand, two million or twenty million, and eventually most of the population, could be virtually enslaved, responding on subconscious levels to government-ally controlled subliminal cues, without freedom of selection or choice. One has only to witness the compulsive directness with which a good subject acts out a post-hypnotic suggestion to realize how helpless he or she is in the hands of the operator. The subject may even be informed beforehand that he has been given this post-hypnotic suggestion and be told to resist the suggestion if he can and still be totally unable to resist it when the cue is given. Such a subject appears perfectly normal before the post-hypnotic cue. Having failed to resist it, the subject may describe afterwards having "blacked out," while he executed the post-hypnotic suggestion. In a somewhat lighter trance, the subject may successfully avoid executing the suggestion for a while, only to be eventually driven to it some time later. Estabrooks offers an excellent example of this compulsive quality in a post-hypnotic suggestion. He told a subject in a trance that sometime after he had been, awakened the doctor would use a key word, after which the subject was to go to a desk in the office, pick up the deck of cards there, and remove from it the ace of spades, giving it to the doctor. When the subject awakened, he announced that he remembered the instructions and that he would fight the impulse to carry them out. The operator offered the cue word, but the subject successfully resisted the urge to get the card, or so it seemed. The experiment over, Dr.Estabrooks purposely failed to "clear" the suggestion from the subject's subconscious. The following day the subject called the doctor on the phone. He had been unable to study that evening, he said (he was a student at the university where Estabrooks was teaching), nor could he sleep. He was unable to put the card from his mind. Would the doctor please meet him at the doctor's office, so that the subject could take the ace of spades from the deck and give it to him, and so free himself from the compulsion that was so strong that he was unable to concentrate on anything else. And not until the subject had taken the proper card from the deck and handed it to Estabrooks did he feel, as he later described it, "set free."

Would it be possible for a political candidate to beam hypnotic messages at the public via network TV which would virtually guarantee his victory on election day? Yes, if he were allowed to, it certainly would. And in a one-party country, in which the state controlled television, there would be no one to stop him.

If hypnosis exists as such a mighty force, for good or evil, why do we read so very little about it and why is most of what we do read limited to the less sensational medical applications of the phenomenon? Quite simply because hypnosis has been, for so long a time, in disrepute that few experts in the field of human behavior know very much about it. It has existed, in America especially, as an interesting psychological oddity the far-reaching implications of which have received almost no attention from the modern scientific world. Few laws have been passed to control its use and yet, as we shall see, its possibilities in the execution of crimes and the avoidance of detection and successful prose- cution are frightening to contemplate. "It is probably correct to say that little is known about hypnosis, compared with what will ultimately be discovered," says Andrew Salter. "The position today may be analogous with the discovery of the Roentgen ray, or X ray. The full potential of hypnosis for good is not known to us, nor is the full danger. In all matters involving hypnosis I counsel conservatism and caution."

Some of the political potential inherent in hypnosis has already been demonstrated by Adolf Hitler. When a hundred thousand Germans, their faces upturned in the light of smoking torches, screamed as one, "Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!" we had a very real example of mass hypnosis. It took more than an elaborate hypnotic trance to lead the German nation down the bloody road of world conquest, of course, but Hitler had many strings to his bow for he was not, as William L. Shirer has so painstakingly pointed out, a madman, but an authentic political genius, who supplied many seemingly legitimate rationalizations to his followers for their incredible acts of atrocity and aggression. Nevertheless, the hypnotic influence was clearly there, affecting both the nation and many of those most closely associated with him.

In the late Thirties, Charles Lindbergh returned from a trip to Germany, during which he was decorated by Field Marshal Goering, to tell the American people that we would be foolish to become involved in a Second World War, because the Luftwaffe was invincible in the air and would beat England to its knees in short order if an outbreak occurred. This was an unpopular notion coming from so highly regarded an American, and Life magazine published a story wherein a stage hypnotist demonstrated how Goering might have hypnotized Lindbergh during the moment in which he pinned the medal on him, the suggestion being that Lindbergh was then enacting a post-hypnotic suggestion. This is the stuff that Sunday-supplement features are made of, and it seems much more reasonable to assume that Lindbergh was so impressed by the German war machine in the late Thirties, contrasted to the ill-prepared English and Americans, that he sincerely believed we would lose a war. But whatever the facts, the hypnosis theory was theoretically possible; it could have happened.

The same stage hypnotist who got his name in the papers with the Lindbergh-Goering story popped up again some twenty-odd years later. He was widely quoted in the press after both of the Ingemar Johansson-Floyd Patterson fights suggesting that Johansson had been in a hypnotic trance during both bouts. There is no question but what hypnosis can have a considerable effect on an athlete's prowess: can increase a fighter's stamina, make him immune to fatigue and pain, and remove any fear of an opponent. Whether or not hypnosis played any part in the two heavyweight championship fights must remain conjecture. The Johansson camp stoutly denied it, and if hypnosis was used, it is clear from the outcome of the second match that not even a deep hypnotic trance can make a real champ out of a second-rate contender. But those who viewed the second bout and believe the hypnotic theory point out that Johansson stumbled as though in a daze when he first entered the ring, that he wore a supercilious smile throughout the fight while being thoroughly and brutally beaten by Patterson, and that when he was knocked out it took an extraordinarily long time for him to awaken.

Hypnosis can have such a tremendous effect on the participants in many sports, especially those involving great strength or endurance, that it is difficult to imagine that it has not been used, and widely. And it is an example of how little we understand the phenomenon, that while most sporting events have rules, and even state and federal laws, governing the use of drugs, no such regulations have been set down controlling the use of hypnotism, which can produce many of the same bodily changes. And even if laws were enacted, how could they be enforced? You can discover the use of drugs on a suspect sports participant through chemical analysis, but how do you test for a post-hypnotic suggestion?

If a football team is losing at halftime and instead of the customary peptalk from the coach they are put into a hypnotic trance and told that they will go out in the second half and play as they have never played before, they will go out in the second half and play as they have never played before. There is the very real danger, of course, that some may play beyond their physical endurance and do themselves serious harm. Under hypnosis, a fullback could even be made to play on a broken leg, if it would hold him up. Dodger pitcher Don Newcombe's career was endangered by his irrational fear of airplanes. Four visits to a hypnotist made him indifferent to the possibility of a crash.

Consider such Olympic sports as weight-lifting. Here technique is important, certainly, but much less so than it is in, say, fencing. And the expenditure of sheer energy is absolutely vital. The ability to force the musculature to accept two more pounds of tension has won world championships. (Under hypnosis, a girl weighing 110 pounds can make her abdominal muscles so iron-hard that a twenty-pound granite rock can be placed on her and broken with a ten-pound sledge. She may suffer severe internal injury, but she will not know it until she is brought out of the trance.) A weight-lifter given the correct post-hypnotic suggestion would be able to lift a maximum possible weight when, normally, he might quit five pounds short of his potential, convinced that he had absolutely extended himself.

Consider the mile run. Great milers judge their performances by one big yardstick: If, one step past the tape, they are in a state of collapse, they have run a well-paced race. If, on the other hand, they have enough energy left over to step off the track onto the grass of the infield, they've gooled. That much energy would have cut a split-hundredth of a second off their time, and that's where it should have been expended. Under hypnosis a runner could drive himself to the outer limits of his ability.

If hypnosis is used in sport, it will be little publicized, you may be sure, and not by the winners. It has been suggested that the Russians, who pretty thoroughly trounced us in the Olympics, used hypnosis to do it. Perhaps. We don't know that they did. We do know the other factors in their success: a big country full of healthy people under a system that searches for athletic talent, trains it, pays it well, honors it if it wins and disgraces it if it loses. The use of hypnosis by Soviet athletes would be consistent with present U.S.S.R. attitudes. Hypnosis is an intellectual activity, and the Russians clearly understand that in the race for world domination, victory will go to that country that makes best use of its intellectual resources. There are those who believe Pavlov may have been the most important Russian who ever lived. Just how far Russian scientists have carried his first experiments in the conditioned reflex, delved into habit formation, hypnosis and related human behavior, no one knows for sure. We do know that Russia has placed a heavy emphasis on the sciences dealing with mind and body, and the relationship between the two, especially since the end of World War II. The more they understand the human animal, how he thinks, acts and reacts, the better equipped they are to conquer and control the world without ever having to fight a war to do it. It seems unlikely that Pavlov, watching his laboratory dog salivate to the sound of a bell, could have imagined that his work might someday supply a key to the controlling of men's minds, help one man to run faster than another, or enable a man to kill another and never be found out.

The old folk-saying, "murder will out," probably has as little basis in fact as the old election saw about the state of Maine. The only murders that "out" are the murders that prove unsuccessful. Most criminologists, while they are disinclined to say so for publication, believe that the number of undetected murders in the United States runs into many thousands. Poison alone must account for hundreds. After all, the autopsy is a rarity in most jurisdictions, and in some Southern states any sudden death that isn't caused by something as obvious as a cut throat can be certified as "heart failure." If this is true, consider the possibilities in hypnosis, particularly in the light of the incredible nation-wide ignorance of the phenomenon, ignorance that allowed a Chicago judge, for example, to refer to hypnosis, and this only a few months ago, as "hocus-pocus"!

How can hypnosis kill? Dr. Estabrooks' remark about the cat is pertinent: "Persuade him that chloroform is good for fleas." Killing a man would be easier. The only necessary pre-condition is that the intended victim be a good hypnotic subject. If this is the case, then as the old folk-saying goes, he's dead. One way out of fifty: The hypnotist picks a suitable moment and hypnotizes his subject. Deep in a trance, the subject is given this post-hypnotic suggestion, "Two weeks from tonight, on April 17, at midnight, you will go to the roof of your apartment building. You will stand on the parapet on the river side of the building. You will feel nine feet tall. You will feel stronger than you have ever felt in your life. You will feel more agile than you have ever felt in your life. You will jump from your roof to the roof next door. It will be easy for you. It won't even take much effort, it will be so easy for you. When you get to the other roof you will turn around and jump back. Now, when I count to three you will wake up, and you will feel calm and rested and content. You will remember nothing of what I have said, absolutely nothing, until the night of April 17!" And so on. At midnight on April 17 the victim will jump from his roof, but he won't quite make it to the other roof, because it's twenty-five feet away.

If your intended victim isn't a good subject then you can get someone to do the job who is. Pick him for his low moral character, so that a well-motivated killing won't upset his ethical standards too much, then put him into a trance and condition him into a ferocious hatred for the intended victim. This would be child's play for any competent hypnotist. Next, the hypnotist sets up a time-and-method chart for the murderer, gives him a post-hypnotic suggestion, and, to be on the safe side, arranges to be in London when the killing is done. If you can't find a low moral type for the job (for whom murder presents no moral conflict), or if you have two specific people in mind that you wish to eliminate at one time, you simply approach the one you know to be the good hypnotic subject and introduce the killing in a disguised manner: a poison that the chosen killer does not know is poison, a gun that the killer believes to be a toy (and a pre-established situation in which he is to use it, which you may wish to plan for broad daylight before several witnesses), or a post-hypnotic hallucination that turns the victim into a ferocious bear that must be killed by even the most moral and ethically upstanding of persons. Naturally, you wipe all memory of the hypnotic suggestion from the chosen killer's conscious memory, but there are risks involved in this one just the same, because it provides for the killer's being around for some little while after the deed has been done. The risk is greater the more sophisticated the environment of the crime. For example, this gambit failed in Denmark recently, tripping up an amateur hypnotist named Neilson. Neilson had given one Hardrup a post-hypnotic suggestion to murder a third man. Hardrup duly killed him as instructed, but was caught. His operator-subject relationship with Neilson was known. An international authority on hypnosis, Dr. P. J. Reiter, was the State's chief witness. Neilson got the maximum penalty under Danish law, life in prison. Hardrup, who had actually committed the murder, was given a two-year sentence. It is depressing to have to admit that so enlightened a view as this would probably not prevail anywhere in the United States.

Another method: A gives B a post-hypnotic suggestion to this effect: "On Wednesday at ten o'clock you will go to the airport and pick up a suitcase, using a locker-ticket which I will give you. You will then go to the Trans-American Airlines counter and pick up a ticket in my name for Flight 179 to Buenos Aires. You will board the plane at 10:15 and you will immediately fall into a deep and restful sleep. You will sleep soundly for the next six hours..."

In fact, B will sleep for longer than six hours, or at least he will never wake up, because the bag he picks up at the airport contains twenty-seven blocks of Gelignite, a clock and a detonating apparatus. Three hours after the plane takes off, A will be officially dead. Mr. A's wife collects an impressive amount of life insurance, joins him in Paris, whither he has repaired under a pseudonym, and they live it up forever after.

Wild? It is, except for the end, exactly what authorities believe happened in the case of William Allen Taylor of Tampa, Florida, who boarded a National Airlines plane last year using the name of a friend and acquaintance. Robert Vernon Spears. The plane blew up over the Gulf of Mexico with Taylor aboard and the FBI caught up with Spears in Phoenix, Arizona. The only evidence tending to show that hypnosis was used was a statement by Taylor's wife that she knew Spears was a hypnotist.

Too complicated? A good hypnotic subject can be made to kill himself. How's this for an Ellery Queen puzzler? Supposing a dentist is in love with a patient's wife. The dentist is a hypnotist, as many are today, and uses hypnosis to produce anesthesia on the patient involved. Supposing the patient drives home from work every night, and passes a lightly-fenced precipice, a bridge abutment, a big tree, or whatever. The dentist merely tells him that the next time he comes to a certain place on the road, a clearly-defined and easily-recognizable place, he will suddenly spin the steering wheel to the right. Nothing to it, really.

Of course the problem may be complicated if the matter comes to the attention of the increasing number of law enforcement officers who are studying hypnosis. While monumental ignorance is still the rule, there will usually be, in any sizable police department, at least one man who has a smattering of knowledge about hypnosis, and he can be dangerous.

One clearly demonstrable value of hypnosis is its ability to aid recollection. Using groups of trained officers, hypnotists have repeatedly demonstrated, by the so-called "dramatic test" that their ability to recall pertinent facts will be increased by hypnosis. The method is this: A group of police officers, listening to a lecture on hypnosis, are suddenly startled by the apparent commission of a murder under their eyes. Perhaps a woman staggers into the room, screaming "Help me!" as a masked man appears in the doorway, shoots her and runs. Before things get out of hand – one demonstrator, forgetting that detectives are always armed, even if you can't see their pistols, nearly lost an actor – the men are told that they have seen a faked incident and are asked immediately to write down everything they can remember about it. Their accounts will vary notably. Next, they are put under hypnosis and asked to tell what they remember. Almost invariably their recollection of detail will show what seems an astounding improvement. Actually it is "astounding" only to those who don't know that the mind stores in the subconscious every impression it ever receives.

Some attempts to use this principle have gone awry, however. One such case was a Chicago prosecution for kidnapping a few months ago in which an airline hostess testified that a man had kidnapped her. Her identification was positive, but at the trial it developed that Paul Newey, chief investigator for the State's Attorney, had twice put the stewardess into trance to aid her recollection. It was in this case that the presiding judge, Thomas E. Kluczynski, characterized hypnosis as "hocus-pocus." The jury returned a non-guilty verdict.

The potential of hypnosis in legal practice, on both sides of the courtroom, is fantastic. Supposing you commit manslaughter with an automobile and are picked up only because one headlight lens on your car is broken. You tell the police that you broke the headlight in parking and scream for your lawyer, who arrives promptly and is closeted with you in a small room. Aware of the hazards of existence, you have taken the precaution of retaining a lawyer who is adept in hypnosis. The lawyer (not too ethical, this one, and full of hope that the room is not bugged), immediately puts you into trance and expunges from your mind all recollection of the incident of your hitting the old man crossing the street. You now know that you did not do it. No amount of squad-room rough stuff will change your mind. You may be best advised to stay away from such hypnotic drugs as sodium amytal and other so-called "truth serums" but you can confidently volunteer to take a "lie-detector" test. Years ago, the writer stood off two of the best polygraph operators in the New York City Police Department for an hour and a half, completely confusing them, by using only the shallowest trance state.

To be on the safe side, your friendly barrister can provide a couple of solid witnesses. They'll be solid, all right, because they'll be convinced, through hypnotic suggestion, that they were playing pinochle with you twenty miles away from the scene of the crime. For additional insurance, when the matter comes to trial, your lawyer can avail himself of the probability that among the twelve people in the box there will be at least two superior hypnotic subjects, genuine somnambulists, on whom he can work to guarantee, at the very worst, a hung jury.

Warfare is of course crime raised to the Nth power, and the name, rank and nationality of the first officer to ponder the use of hypnosis in warfare is known to no one. That it has been so used, and for a very long time, is certain. Its most attractive utility is obvious: in the training of secret agents. An agent whose only protection against torture is a poison vial sewn to the lapel of his coat may be a very brave man, but he will not be a wholly effective agent. But supposing he has been fully trained in hypnosis? Supposing there have been implanted in him the strongest possible post-hypnotic suggestions buttressing the "cover-story" without which no agent is ever sent out on an important assignment? Now he really does believe that he is not Agent 518, he is M. Paul-Henri Delour, wine merchant. His knowledge of wines is encyclopedic. His recollection of detail is astounding. And, most of all, his mental agility and resourcefulness are superb – because he is wholly serene. He is not a captured enemy agent, subject to the death penalty. He is M. Delour, wine merchant. He knows he is, so he is tranquil and serene, he shows none of the nervousness and tension that so often betray the spy to a clever counter-agent. He will not fall into any of the traps that have brought death to so many underground operators – and some of them are fiendishly clever.

One extremely resourceful German agent, picked up behind Allied lines during the Battle of the Bulge was absolutely "clean." There wasn't a trace of evidence against him, and he was flawless in his role as a stupid, semi-literate Belgian peasant. But one of his interrogators, a man of long experience, sensed that there was something, somewhere, that did not ring quite true. He decided to attack the suspect's statement that he spoke no German. He made many approaches, such as having the man watched carefully in his cell while a sudden turmoil was staged in the corridor, with cries of "Fire! Fire!" in German. There was not a flicker of reaction to this gambit or a half dozen others.

Finally, he had the man brought before him. He asked him many questions in Flemish. He paused. He dropped to his desk the sheaf of papers he'd been holding. He looked up at the prisoner and smiled and said, in German, "Obviously, you're innocent. You can go now." The man smiled back, and had half-turned to the door before he caught himself – too late.

A hypnosis-trained agent could not have been so trapped because he would have given himself a suggestion that he had forgotten how to speak German – and he would have forgotten.

Much more complicated usages are possible. Estabrooks points out the possibility of setting up actually varying personalities in one man, so that on one layer he would be truly a dedicated Communist, for instance, and on another layer truly a dedicated anti-Communist. Such an agent would be tremendously effective in the circumstances for which he had been trained.

"Brainwashing" is a relatively new wrinkle in warfare and international skullduggery and its relationship to hypnosis is obvious. Actually, brainwashing includes rational appeals, reflex conditioning and hypnosis all at the same time, practiced under ideal circumstances, with an opportunity for endless repetition. The world witnessed the results in Stalin's time, when many old-line Russian Bolsheviks stood up and denounced themselves and were led away to die for crimes everyone knew they had not committed.With the political prisoner in enforced concentration, the Communists have the ideal human guinea pig for their experiments in reshaping men's minds. Here is the proof, if further proof is needed, that the Russians have indeed developed Pavlov's simple conditioned reflex to a highly sophisticated art. Men of many stripes and backgrounds have borne false witness against themselves in open court in Moscow, without the aid of drugs or physical torture, and been taken out and shot. It is torture of a far more insidious kind that dulls the conscious mind and then enters the subconscious, where no will to resist exists, to shape and remold to the dictates of the operator.

If these things are possible with hypnosis as it is rather crudely practiced today, what must tomorrow hold, since we must assume that advances in this technology will be made? Hypnosis is an old art in history, but very young in the light of the brief time that has passed since men began to seriously study it.

Hypnosis offers man a means of influencing and controlling both himself and those around him, to a degree only now vaguely hinted at. It is imperative that we draw the dark curtain of superstition and disrepute away and study most seriously hypnosis and its implications as they affect the behavior of mankind. There is a very great need for legislation, for controls, and most of all, for greater public understanding. Hypnosis offers too great a power, for good or evil, to be left any longer in the shadows.