The Search for Bridey Murphy Read Online Free PDF Page A

as anyone can learn to dance—and to become a very proficient dancer if he combines a degree of natural talent with practice and training—so it is with hypnotism. Anyone can learn to induce the trance, but he who conscientiously applies himself to the study of the science and has a gift for the practice, or art, will obviously make the most satisfactory hypnotist.In both dancing and hypnosis there are many performers; a few are outstanding.
    The hypnotist, then, is a guide. And while some guides are far more accomplished than others, the fact remains that no weird, Svengali-like attributes are involved. Everybody can hypnotize someone.
    The question of whether a person can be hypnotized against his will really has two answers—a general answer, and its rare exceptions. In general, I find it impossible to put anyone into a trance against his will. If a subject refuses to co-operate or merely decides that he will not be hypnotized, that usually determines the issue right there. However, there are a few cases on record which indicate that certain subjects, despite all efforts to resist, will drift into a trance. The British
Journal of Medical Hypnotism
, 1 for instance, relates the case of a nurse, an especially good subject, who was purposely instructed to resist the efforts of a doctor to hypnotize her. Nevertheless, within a few minutes—and in spite of general noisemaking, including her own talking and shouting—she gave up to the persistent voice of the doctor, who had continued to talk steadily all through the clamor. Such rare subjects are the exceptions that prove the rule.
    And there is another query with a two-pronged answer: Will a hypnotized subject commit a crime or an immoral act? The definite consensus, I learned, is that nobody will do anything under hypnosis that is fundamentally against his or her principles. On the other hand, it might be possible, over a period of time, to engineer the suggestion so that the final result is an act contrary to the basic principles of the subject. Thus again we have a “No” in general and a very rare “Yes.” A wife, for instance, would not react to the hypnotic suggestion that she poison her husband. She might even awaken the moment the suggestion was made. But the same wife, repeatedly told under hypnosis that her husband was slowly poisoning her children, might conceivably be convinced that the only way to save her children would be to poison her husband.
    However, this whole question is purely academic. Obviously no serious operator would even be concerned with the matter. As psychologist Leslie Le Cron wrote, “There is about as much dangerfor one to become involved in hypnotically inspired antisocial actions as there is to being struck by a flying saucer.” 2
    An example is provided by one of my good subjects, then twenty-one years old, with whom I was working on an age regression. When he had been regressed to the age of eight, I asked for the name of the person who sat behind him in school; he promptly replied with a boy’s name. Then I asked, quite innocently, whether he liked this boy. “No!” he said emphatically.
    “Why don’t you like him?” I asked.
    Bang! That simple question was apparently loaded! He awakened with a start. Ordinarily, when this lad is in a hypnotic trance, a bugle blast in his ear would not stir him. But this naïve question somehow agitated him immediately; he jumped to his feet.
    I reviewed the session for him, explaining that he had suddenly burst out of the trance when I asked why he didn’t like the boy—and I used the name he had given me—who sat behind him in the third grade.
    “Oh,” he said, “I can understand that!” And that was all. Tact required that I press the question no further.
    Why he avoided answering this question under hypnosis I’ll never know. But here was another affirmation that a subject will not ordinarily even discuss a matter which goes against his principles. After all, most subjects know