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THE purpose of writing a chapter on hypnotism and psychic diagnosis in a book devoted to the study of abnormal psychology is this: I have stated repeatedly, in the chapters which have gone before, that much if not all of the material advanced by mediums as having had its origin in the supernatural world, is brought forth from the confines and reservoirs of their own subconscious minds. Now, it is by means of hypnotism on the one hand, and psychic analysis on the other, that we are able to obtain this proof. Experimentally, by means of hypnosis and psychic analysis, we can take these clairvoyants and mediums in hand, and after they have transmitted to us messages from their spirit controls and given us touching converse with our dear and departed dead, we are able to prove, first to ourselves and subsequently to the mediums themselves - if they are sincere - that all this stuff, the whole sordid mess, has a purely human origin in the depths of their own subconscious minds.
Hypnotism may consist of the hypnoidal state, in which the patient is really awake but in a passive state of mind, ready to receive the suggestion and teachings of a medium or a healer, on down through increasing passivity to a profound state of hypnosis, in which the patient is oblivious of his surroundings and under comparatively full control of the hypnotizer.
Hypnotism is basically wrong as a method of strengthening the intellect and educating the will, in that it leads its victims to depend more and more upon the hypnotic operator. Hypnosis is certainly not a natural state of mind; it is highly artificial and unnatural. Some authorities have endeavored to show that hypnotic sleep was analogous to natural sleep, but that certainly is a mistake. The hypnotic state in some respects resembles the somnambulistic state, but somnambulism is not a state of natural and normal sleep. Hypnotism necessitates the surrender of the mind and will in a peculiar way to the influence of another personality; I regard these procedures as in the highest degree subversive of individual strength and stamina of character. But, notwithstanding all these facts, hypnotism is an invaluable agent for perfecting our diagnosis in the case of numerous abnormal psychic individuals, such as multiple personality, complex dissociation, etc., and is indispensable in the investigation of mediums.
Hypnotism operates to produce dissociation between the higher reasoning centers of the mind (the central consciousness) and the lower and automatic centers (the marginal consciousness).
Mesmerism is the old-fashioned method of inducing hypnosis, by making physical contact with the patient. Modern hypnotism is usually practiced without this physical contact. Leading physicians throughout the world now recognize hypnotism as an exceedingly dangerous two-edged therapeutic sword. They recognize that frequent repetition of hypnotic procedures, in the case of highly neurotic and nervously unstable individuals, not infrequently leads to insanity.
We feel impelled especially to condemn the public exhibitions carried on by professional hypnotists. The authorities should speedily bring these demonstrations to an end. They are debasing and demoralizing.
Many years ago I became interested in psychic analysis and its possibilities in the study and treatment of nervous disorders, but I had not gone far in the employment of this method when, as a result of an experience that came to me through the study of a spirit medium , I saw I had accidentally stumbled upon what, to me, seemed the most valuable tool I had as yet discovered for scientifically investigating and intelligently explaining the more subtle phases and phenomena of spiritualism. I take it for granted that the reader understands something of the principles and methods of psychic analysis. Suffice it to say, in this connection, that psychic analysis enables us, without putting the patient into hypnotic sleep, systematically to explore the superficial strata of the subconscious mind. In this way I have been able to show, again and again, that practically all of those things which mediums bring forth as communications from departed spirits have been palmed off on their critical consciousness by their own subconscious selves.
In the case of the sincere spiritualist I am able to sit down and look him straight in the eye as I listen to his enthusiastic recital of the marvelous phenomena associated with his favorite medium, while I say: "It is all very interesting, but I have in my own mind another, and what seems to me to be a much more reasonable, explanation of what you are telling me. If your medium is sincere and you will bring him to me, and he will honestly and fairly submit to the tests that I can put him through, I will first prove to you that his physical manifestations and phenomena are materialistic and fraudulent, and, second, that his psychic phenomena - his messages from the dead - take origin in the subconscious depths of his own mind". By means of either or both hypnotism and psychic analysis, and perhaps in certain cases by means of automatic writing, if these mediums are sincere, this can usually be demonstrated.
I have had experience with both sincere and insincere mediums, when it comes to investigations of this sort. I have had mediums who knew I was going to discover their tricks, and they took particular pains to see that I did not. I have had other mediums who were self-deceived and who honestly believed they were channels of communication between the living and the dead. And in every one of these cases, where the mediums came to me as patients of their own volition, I have been able not only to convince myself, but also to convince them that their hallucinations all had birth in the buried memories and subconscious machinations of their own minds. Maeterlinck recognizes this possibility when he says, in The Unknown Guest:
"For the present it (the spiritualistic theory) simply relegates to posthumous regions the phenomena that appear to occur within ourselves; it adds superfluous mystery and needless difficulty to the mediumistic mystery whence it springs. ... Before returning toward the mystery beyond the grave let us first exhaust the possibilities of the mystery here on earth."
Mediums should be warned against submitting to psychic analysis of a thoroughgoing sort if they wish to persist in the practice of their profession as a means of gaining a livelihood, for all those of any honor will be forced to seek other ways of making a living; any experienced psychoanalyst can soon convince them of the auto-psychic origin of their so-called spirit communications.
Within the last year I have had five or six cases of clairvoyants and mediums, who, after they had been but superficially studied and analyzed, have abandoned belief in the supernatural origin of their voices and visions, and who are rapidly bringing their minds into safe and normal channels. It is only fair to say that these persons - with but one exception - came for professional advice of their own volition, and that they entered upon the study with a spirit in every way cooperative. In fact, they were anxious to know what modern psychic science had to offer along the lines of diagnosing and determining the nature of their peculiar gifts.
The societies for psychic research have done much to eliminate the grosser frauds among mediums; it must be said to their credit that they have always been quick to repudiate the mediums detected in fraud, but they have done little or nothing to help the situation when it comes to those honest but self-deceived mediums whom we are here discussing. Little progress can be made in this direction until trained psychologists and experimental psychoanalytic clinicians are brought in contact with these cases, and until the mediums themselves are brought to desire the truth, so that they will fearlessly submit to all tests requisite to the proper diagnosis of their peculiar gifts. And it is a question if we can lead many successful mediums to do this. They are making too easy a living. The medium who can become the idol of a coterie of rich men and women can, within a few years, amass thousands of dollars, and few such are willing to make voluntary sacrifice of themselves for the advancement of science and the welfare of the race.
The spiritualists have set us an example - they have appealed to men of science to substantiate their claims - they have dared to go to science to prove their allegations. Now the time has come for science to go back to them, to ask them to come out into the open, to shake off their trumpery and submit themselves to honest laboratory examination. But the trouble is that the true believers and honest mediums seem to live on a plane separate and apart from the rest of the hum an family. They seek to progress without knowledge and to grow without demonstrated truth. They exist in a world of fantasy; everything is made subordinate to the realization of their great desire - the wish to communicate with the dead.
We now know that the subconscious centers of the average individual are swarming with suppressed ideas, emotions, hungers, instincts, and longings, and that these are all struggling for expression. We believe that a great deal of our dream -life is the manifestation of these suppressed desires. In other words, the unconscious maintains an incessant drive to eliminate these repressed emotions, and it is my belief that clairvoyance, spirit medium ship, etc., as well as spiritualism as a system of religious belief, constitute a vent for their escape; that the dogmas of spiritualism constitute the only channel discovered hitherto whereby many of these individuals with an exaggerated ego and an unsettled nervous system can gain that self-satisfaction which accompanies the liberation of their buried emotions.
The medium's surroundings in a trance, and the automatic writer's quiet and repose, both are appropriate situations for the removal of repression from certain sections of past memories, because both shift the responsibility for what is said, done, and written from the medium and automatist to some other "personality", either the medium's "control" or the dictating "spirit".
One writer recently reported an interesting case of automatic writing in which a Miss X. wrote some matter pertaining to art which seemed to be mysterious and which was correct; but when Miss X. was hypnotized it was found that she had once met the artist who was named in her automatic writings; that she had read in a newspaper about his death, and had seen his photograph; and that on another occasion she was in a hotel in a town where this artist lived and had him pointed out to her. It further developed that she remembered seeing, in a convent school, one of the chemicals noted in her automatic writings, labeled "liver of sulphur". Now, all these things had been forgotten by Miss X., but they remained in her subconscious mind and were brought out in a connected and intelligent fashion in her automatic writing; thus the employment of hypnosis served to clear up the mystery.
Elsa Barker represents the type of sincere psychics who are willing to cooperate with science in an effort toward further honest investigation of all psychic and spiritualistic phenomena. In the introduction to her work, published several years ago, she tells of becoming interested in psychoanalysis, and writes of her experiences as follows:
"When made aware of the presence of `X' I take a pencil and a note-book, as any other amanuensis would, and by an effort of will, now easy from long practice, I still the activity of my objective mind, until there is no thought or shadow of a thought in it. Then into the brain itself come the words, which flow out without conscious effort at the point of my pencil. It is exactly as if I heard the dictation with a single auditory instrument, like a small and very sensitive sphere, in the center of the brain. I never know at the beginning of a sentence how it will end. I never know whether the sentence I am writing will be the last or if two thousand words will follow it. I simply write on, in a state of voluntary negativity, until the impression of personality described above leaves suddenly."
This woman is undoubtedly correct - these things do emanate from her own subconscious mind; her experience is not greatly unlike my own. On the majority of occasions when I am dictating, the ideas seem to be all fully formulated in my mind. I visualize the material in paragraphs, with all the punctuation clearly recognized. In the majority of instances, when I am dictating to my secretary, as I have often expressed it, I am merely redictating what I see passing before my own eyes, as I would look upon the titles of a moving picture flashed upon the screen. My experience in writing is sometimes so marked in this respect that I could easily be persuaded that I was under the control of some external power, that my mind was being used by another author, and I am sure that if I were a devotee of spiritism, I could even persuade myself that much that I write is indited by spirits separate and apart from my own mind and body. I have talked with many of my patients who have the same experience in writing letters. Most of us have had thoughts come to us with a suddenness that startled us. It seems as if they had been whispered to us from some source outside of our own minds. These are all commonplace experiences, but in the case of our psychics and mediums, they have this a little more highly developed at some point, so that they themselves become more or less confused; they continue to encourage its development because it is a means, first of producing a livelihood, and second, of gratifying the ego. We all like to be the hero whom the public is glad to worship.
It should be made clear to the reader that hypnotism, in and of itself, has nothing directly to do with spiritism. Hypnotism is purely a psychological and physiological proposition, and in the last analysis probably consists in bringing about a psychic state that enormously increases the suggestibility of the patient.
I am inclined to believe that hypnotism is a short cut to the subconscious, that it brings about such conditions of mind and body as favor the tapping of the subconscious; tho in some cases it seems to me that the patient's behavior under hypnosis far more resembles hysteria, so that it may be, after all, that in some persons hypnotism merely artificially induces the hysterical state. At any rate, I am sure that the actual condition of the individual under hypnosis varies from person to person.
The psychoanalysts believe that hypnotism is a reversion to that state in which the child shows submission to its parents - that under the hypnotic spell the subject tends to behave much as he would have behaved as a child in the presence of his parents and elders. There is much to substantiate this interpretation of hypnotism because we know that there does exist in the human heart a willingness to be led. In certain ways and up to a certain degree, we all enjoy submitting ourselves to the direction and leadership of others; this is well shown in the crowd listening to an orator, or in the case of the mob as it is swayed by some frenzied agitator. We perhaps see this in the case of certain classes of religious revivals.
It should be made clear that the removal of disease-symptoms by hypnotism is only transient. It is not curative. In this respect, at least, Freud is right when he speaks of hypnotism as being merely a psychic cosmetic - it leaves the patient fundamentally unchanged. While hypnotism may not weaken the will to the extent that some authorities have thought, its frequent repetition undoubtedly serves to bring about unnatural and undesirable dependence of the patient upon the hypnotizer.
Hypnotism may be induced by various methods, such as gazing at a crystal, eye strain, monotonous tom-tom beating, etc., but it is more frequently induced by the patient's intelligent cooperation with the operator. Drugs are of no value in producing true hypnosis.
Under hypnotism the patient responds to both negative and positive suggestions, but will never do anything that is diametrically opposed to his moral and ethical standards or to his habitual mode of thought. If you suggest a criminal act to an individual when hypnotized, he will either refuse to carry out your suggestion or immediately awaken. It is a well-known fact that when you tell patients under hypnosis to do a certain thing at a certain time, in the majority of cases they will proceed, tho the spell has long been removed, to carry out the instruction when the time arrives. Under hypnosis there is sometimes marked alteration of sensations, and the state may be carried to rigid catalepsy.
It has often been said that a patient cannot be hypnotized against his will, and in general this is no doubt true; but in certain peculiarly susceptible cases, if the individual has great fear of hypnotism, or has a profound belief in the ability of some operator to hypnotize him, it is possible that he may be hypnotized against his will.
Hypnotism then, is largely a matter of increased suggestibility and depends upon the individual's range of consciousness, the directness or indirectness of the suggestions made, and the willingness of the subject to be hypnotized, not to mention his general health.
It will be apparent that I allow little place for hypnotism in the treatment of psychic and nervous disorders, aside from its value as a means of perfecting the diagnosis in cases of marked dissociation, double personality, trance mediumship, and in some cases of profound hysteria, more especially in hysterical fugue.