Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis Read Online Free PDF Page B

him from his trance, and he soon drops dead. Caligari is chased by Francis back to the insane asylum of which he turns out to be the head doctor. Francis recruits the help of the other doctors; they search his office and find indisputable evidence that the doctor took control of a somnambulist patient, in order to try to repeat the experiments of a mad monk of the eleventh century called Caligari, who toured with a somnambulist called Cesare, and to test the theory that a somnambulist may be made to commit murder. The doctor is hauled off in a straitjacket to join the other patients. But there is a final twist: it turns out that Francis and Jane are actually inmates of the hospital. These are all the fantasies of a pair of paranoid patients!
    Other fictional treatments are even more alarming or macabre. In ‘A Tale of the Days to Come’ (1927) H.G. Wells gave a fore-taste of the brainwashing scare of the 1950s, the ludicrous consequences of which will entertain us in a later chapter. Wells speculated that in the future the art of hypnotism will be able to change a person's character permanently (or at least until the change is reversed by the original hypnotist) by effacing or replacing a person's ideas and feelings, so that she has no memory at all of an element of her former life (in this case, the existence of a lover whom her father considers unsuitable, which is why he brought in the hypnotist).
    In Conan Doyle's 1885 short story ‘The Great Keinplatz Experiment’ (later to be plundered by H.F. Heard for the plot of his1944 novel
The Swap
) Professor von Baumgarten believes that the phenomenon of clairvoyance proves that the mind can separate from the body, and that it does so during hypnotism. He simultaneously hypnotizes his young assistant Fritz von Hartmann and himself to see if in its disembodied state his spirit can see Fritz's spirit. But the experiment goes ludicrously wrong when the two minds reincarnate in the wrong bodies. The scary 1964 movie
Devil Doll
takes this idea of transposing souls to a more bizarre level; the story depends on a stage performer using hypnosis to steal a young woman's soul and transfer it to the dummy he uses in his ventriloquist act.
    The possibilities hypnosis holds – in fiction, at any rate – for baffling the authorities have often been exploited in fictional media. For instance, in the 1972 film starring Robert Redford,
The Hot Rock
, the employee of a bank is hypnotized to help a gang of thieves rob the bank, the idea being that the bank employee would then forget all about his involvement and appear genuinely innocent to the police. For a similar reason, in the 1949 movie
Whirlpool
, directed by Otto Preminger and starring Gene Tierney and José Ferrer, the hypnotist (played by Ferrer) hypnotizes
himself
to commit a murder! Or again, the virtual unassailability of the murderer in Michael Connelly's tense 1996 thriller
The Poet
depends on his hypnotic abilities. But as we will see later in this book, hypnosis would be at best an erratic tool for criminals.
    Another myth perpetuated by fictional treatments has been that hypnotism involves or bestows supernatural powers. This is familiar not just from
Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari
and from countless Dracula movies, but more insidiously has appeared in children's fiction. T.H. White's 1957 children's adventure story
The Master
is an example of this. The Master has the ability to hypnotize people (male and female, children and adults) and enter into telepathic communication with them while they are hypnotized; they can't communicate in this way unless they are under his spell – the trance they are in gives them their special powers.
    In
On a Clear Day You Can See Forever
, Barbra Streisand sits in on a psychology lecturer's demonstration of hypnotism, and is accidentally hypnotized herself, leading to comic consequences. Every time she hears the word ‘Wednesday’, she takes off a shoe. Or again,