Book Reviews - Review 116

The history of hypnosis as currently practised in the West is remarkably short. Until the 18th Century, the phenomena now associated with the hypnotic state, such as heightened suggestibility, control over normally unconscious bodily functions, and greatly enhanced mental faculties, were mostly attributed to witchcraft, superstition or religion. Things changed with the arrival on the scene of Franz Anton Mesmer, an egotistical Austrian doctor who claimed to be able to use magnets to send patients into hysterical fits, from which they emerged cured of hitherto intractable physical ailments. Over the course of the 19th Century, Mesmer's magnets were dropped - firstly in favour of the notion of "fluid exchange" between doctor and patient, and finally in favour of the purely psychological model that remains current.

Unfortunately, just when the first glimmerings of true understanding of hypnosis emerged in the late 19th Century, Freud declared it of limited therapeutic use (largely, it seems, because he was rather a poor hypnotist). Since then hypnosis, while just about recognised as a real phenomenon by science, has largely been left on the sidelines, where its application by seedy stage performers has done little to relieve it of its ambivalent scientific status.

No less offputting to researchers are the large claims made by some about hypnosis's power: its alleged ability to cure physical ailments from warts to cancer, and its alleged effect of disinhibiting latent telepathic faculties. Robin Waterfield, the author of this witty and highly readable history of hypnosis in the West, believes that, disregarding the claims of rogues and cranks, there is too much credible evidence for both of these types of phenomena for them to be disregarded. Indeed, he waxes almost evangelical in his advocacy of the more widespread use of hypnosis in the medical profession, dismissing rather petulantly the claim that, badly applied, hypnosis might sometimes be dangerous.

Can hypnotised subjects be made to do things that contravene their moral codes? Can they get stuck in trances? And is there - as has been argued recently in UK law courts - any evidence for links between hypnotism and mental illnesses such as schizophrenia? Waterfield's answer to all these questions is "Not really", but his tone is uncomfortably defensive. I've drawn my own conclusions about the latter two claims and feel Waterfield dismisses them too glibly; and as for the first, whether hypnosis can loosen people's sense of morality, his argument that hypnosis merely lowers inhibitions, and does not affect our fundamental sense of morality, does not wash. Half of morality consists in inhibiting inclinations; so how can Waterfield argue, as he seems to, that women who claim to have been raped by their hypnotists were essentially "asking for it" - that hypnosis merely, as it were, exposed their fundamental immorality? It's a short step from there to saying that the crime is in the thought, and not in the act.

Still, these reservations aside, this is for the most part an informative, entertaining and well-written account of a phenomenon that, after more than two centuries of continuous practice, has yet to be either explored or exploited to the full.