Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis by Waterfield Robin

Author:Waterfield, Robin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

Hypnosis and Coercion

The question of the influence (for good or ill) that a hypnotist could have over his subject was not new. It had been simmering since the early days of mesmerism, when the Marquis de Puységur discovered the close rapport that is built up between operator and subject. Was the subject any more than a tool wielded by the magnetist? the mystic marquis wondered, and this of course immediately raised the spectre of sexual and criminal possibilities. Sexual energy also reared its head in the form of the attachment – transference, as Freudians would say – the subject might come to feel for her healer, and possibly the other way round too, as Dickens seems to have become attached to Augusta de la Rue. Opinion was divided even in the early days. D'Eslon believed that it would be possible for a magnetist to take advantage of a woman who had reached the crisis state (which, remember, was often orgasmic in nature anyway); de Puységur asked several of his somnambulists how far they would go, but they all said that while he could make them do something silly, such as hitting him with a fly-swat, he could not make them take off their clothes. The debate continued throughout the nineteenth century without resolving the issue.

Nineteenth-century fascination with mesmerism and hypnotism was tinged with fear, and novelists and stage hypnotists titillated that fear. Stage hypnotists made great play with phrases like ‘You are totally under my control.’ But if this was literally true, then anything could happen. A chaste Victorian maiden could be made to yield her virginity; a man could be turned into an assassin. These were precisely the scenarios hinted at or made explicit in fiction, in a series of books culminating in du Maurier's Trilby and Ambrose Bierce's short story ‘The Hypnotist’. Class and racial considerations muddied the waters: the lower classes were supposed to have larger sexual appetites than the bourgeoisie, and so were more liable to want to take advantage of middle-class women, and Jews were supposed to make better mesmerizers. In 1878 a Jewish dentist in Rouen called Paul Lévy only made matters worse when he was sentenced to ten years for the unlikely crime of having raped one of his patients in his dentist's chair with her mother present in the room. But this was not a clear case of anti-Semitism: it seems that he did have sex with the daughter, while the mother was asleep, having persuaded them both that in order to help with the daughter's chronic dental problems he had first to find out whether Berthe, the daughter, was a virgin. This seduction was classified as rape because of his supposed hypnotic powers.

Once the phenomenon of post-hypnotic suggestion was recognized, the possibilities were doubled. Not only could a novelist have someone kill while actually hypnotized, but also while fully awake, as a result of a suggestion implanted earlier in his mind by an evil mesmerist. These were the fears that spilled

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