5. Hypnosis, volition, and mind control

5.1. Is the hypnotist in control of me?

The exact nature of what we experience as 'will' or volition is anage-old philosophical problem that has yet to be resolved by brain scientistsor psychologists.

Some aspects of hypnotic responding point out weaknesses in our understandingof the nature of volition, such as: its exact relationship to consciousawareness; the capacity and limitations of external stimulii (such as'suggestion') to influence our sensory experience and behavior; and thedetails of the patterns by which specific phenomenological and physiologicalevents influence each other.

The vast majority of hypnosis researchers seem to believe that the individualhas a capacity for volition which may be influenced but not ablated byhypnotic suggestion. That the individual under hypnosis is still acting ontheir own will in some sense, although possibly with distorted or limitedinformation presented by the hypnotist. In addition, there may be influenceson their behavior which the subject is not consciously aware ofresponding to, or does not report an awareness of responding to. Thishas been challenged by some theorists by questioning the nature ofself-awareness itself in various ways.

The question of volition becomes important when we consider the long-studiedquestion of whether a hypnotist can influence an individual to performbehaviors which they would not 'ordinarily' want to perform, such as to commitcrimes or to injure themselves or others.

This issue arose in part from the commonly held premise that an individual'scharacter traits are more important than immediate stimulii in guiding theirbehavior. Some of the behaviorist theorists of hypnosis have historicallydownplayed the stable traits of individuals and attributed their behavior to agreater extent to responses to external stimulii. To them, there is lessquestion of 'ordinary' behavior, and more a matter of conditioned responses.Andrew Salter's What is Hypnosis published in the middle of this (20th)century is a good representation of that viewpoint.

The likelihood is that the truth lies between stable character theory andconditioned response theory. There are seemingly what some call 'ecological'concerns in hypnotic responding, aspects of an individual's experience thatwill tend to be consistent with each other, or to move toward consistency (oneolder example being the theory of 'cognitive dissonance').

Individuals can probably be influenced under a situation of contrived hypnoticimagery to do things that would ordinarily be considered very unusual, and todo them at unusual times and places. But there are clearly 'ecological'limits to this as well.

For example, most studies have sugggested that the individual can and doesreject suggestions of some types, in some way, both during hypnosis,and in the form of post-hypnotic suggestions, and is not being coerceddirectly under hypnosis to act against their 'will' in any meaningful sense,though they may act under false premises.

A classic early study supporting this view was done by Milton Erickson,published in Psychiatry in 1939 (2,391-414), "An experimentalinvestigation of the possible anti-social use of hypnosis." M.T. Orne'ssimilar view is represented by his chapter on hypnosis in the 1961 TheManipulation of Human Behavior, by Biderman and Zimmer (p. 169-215).Orne argues that the coercion or 'Svengali Effect' sometimes attributed tohypnosis is an artifact of the hypnotic experimental situation.

However, it has also been shown that an individual can be tricked by thehypnotist, and possibly led by their trust in the hypnotist, to performunusual behaviors in unusual situations, even potentially dangerous orembarrasing ones. This potential is well known to fans of 'stage hypnosis,'particularly with that subset of individual's particularly susceptible to thedramatic tactics of the stage hypnotist. These tactics are for the most partdifferent from the classical induction used in medicine and psychotherapy,relying on surprise, sudden confusion, social pressure, and other factors notunknown to medical hypnotherapists, but not normally emphasized by themeither.

A classic study which illustrated how far individuals would go in hypnoticresponses to contrived hypnotic situations was Loyd W. Rowland, "WillHypnotized Persons Try To Harm Themselves or Others?", Journal of Abnormaland Social Psychology 34(1939):114-117. This study is described inWilliam Corliss' The Unfathomed Mind: A Handbook of Unusual MentalPhenomena, pp. 120-123. This study showed subjects sticking their handsinto boxes with what they presumably believed were live rattlesnakes, andthrowing concentrated acid into what they presumably believed was theunprotected face of another person.

Other studies showing response to suggestions of anti-social behavior in anexperimental setting included:

• * W.R. Wells, "Experiments in the hypnotic production of crime," Journal of Psychology, 1941, 11:63-102,
• M. Brenman, "Experiments in the hypnotic production of anti-social andself-injurious behavior," Psychiatry, 1942, 5:49-61.

Various authors have reported attempts by the U.S. CIA to research or usehypnotic techniques for mind control. All seem to report failure ratesconsistent with the experimental findings. Some people in some situationsare apparently vulnerable to sudden confusion techniques of suggestion, butthe use of classical hypnosis as 'mind control' is entirely unreliable ingeneral. If you consider the speeches of a powerful orator or evangelicalpreacher to be a form of hypnosis, this seems to be the type most powerful ininfluencing the minds of people. And this type of situation is perhaps as welldescribed in terms of social/group psychology as individual response tohypnotic suggestion.

Another class of mind control technology reportedly attempted was thedeliberate cultivation of secondary or multiple personalities. The truenature of multiple personality disorder is still under intensive research,with a few leads from PET scans suggesting that in some people, a trueneurological distinction between personality states may occur, in spite of theapparent inability of EEG to pick up such a distinction. If true, this wouldtend to imply that at least for some individuals, Hilgard'sneo-dissociation theory is closest to the truth, and that a cognitivedissociation of some sort does literally occur. As with the mind controlattempts based on stage hypnosis, this never seems to have been consideredpractical as a means of controlling the minds of individuals in general.

The experimental studies showing people performing aberrant, criminal, orself-destructive acts have long been criticized, notably by M.T. Orne, asreflecting the implicit trust of the hypnotic subject that the experimenterwould not put them into truly dangerous situations during the experiment, andthat the experimental conditions were too contrived to represent what theindividual would do in real life. The dialog here is obviously veryreminiscent of the critiques of Stanley Milgram's "obedience to authority"experiments, where subjects believed they were giving progressively morepainful and dangerous electric shocks to other subjects as part of abehavioral learning experiment.

Which brings us to reports of someone actually committing a crime, or becomingthe victim of one, under the influence of hypnosis, outside of theexperimental laboratory. Leo Katz, Bad Acts and Guilty Minds, 1987,University of Chicago Press, pp. 128-133, describes cases of crimes committedby patients of unethical hypnotists. The Fortean Times, #58, July 1991,reports in an article "The Eyes Have It," by Michael Gross, the prosecution ofa man who sexually assaulted at least 113 women, preceded by hypnosis, and therevocation of the medical license of a psychiatrist in 1982 for abusing womenunder hypnosis.

Similar allegations and sometimes prosecutions of cases of misconduct or rapewith the aid of hypnosis by therapists have been reported in the media inrecent years as well.

The actual role of hypnosis in each of these cases is unknown. It is likelythat it provided the abusing therapists assistance in the seduction of thewomen in question, but that again, it was a matter of using the hypnoticinduction to abuse their already elevated trust in the therapist at least asmuch as any loss of their 'will to resist' at the time of the abuse.

For contrast, compare the case of a victim being drugged into helplessness.There is no evidence that hypnotic procedures ever 'drug' individuals intohelplessness, or that they are in any sense actively resisting things thatthey do or allow under hypnosis. There is, however, good reason to believethat the relaxation and vivid imagery of the hypnotic situation makes iteasier to 'trick' an individual in some sense into doing something that theywouldn't 'ordinarily' do in that particular situation with that particularperson at that time. Thus the justifiable sense of remorse and violation whenthey realize what they've been led to do. Not dissimilar from the alsocontroversial situation with abuse or alleged abuse by parents, where thechild's implicit trust in the parent's interest in their welfare oftencomplicates the evaluation and treatment of the situation after the fact.