SCIENCE AND REASON… AND EQUALITY
Hypnotism – G H Estabrooks
I felt super inspired to write this post yesterday, fresh from my reflections on Alison Winter’s Mesmerized. But, after assembling Estabrooks’s classic and another book I planned to reference, ready to write, I’d lost my mojo.
I’d propped the second book open with Hypnotism at the section I wanted to reference, but then Kev appeared and provided a welcome distraction. I lamented my lack of mojo to him and thus got him to suggest I sit on the sofa with a fun fiction book instead so that I could absolve myself of my lack of industriousness.
But when I returned to my desk in search of said fun, I discovered that the (hard-cover) reference book had flipped closed – and flipped Estabrooks into my bin.
It seemed fitting, then, that I press on with this post. Because, following my Mesmerized mullings, I wanted to put it out there: is mesmerism, hypnosis, just a socially acceptable and accepted form of (white male) narcissism from yesteryear?!
Think about it. Women can’t, and don’t, get away with this shit.
Let’s consider witchcraft and spiritualism – two movements that, like mesmerism and hypnosis – are attributable purely/mostly to suggestion.
The aforementioned hard-cover book is Sarah Jaffe’s Work Won’t Love You Back, about freeing ourselves from the ‘labour of love’ myth and creating a new future of work.
Jaffe makes a compelling case early on that the witch-hunts were a terror attack on women who were living somewhat independently; particularly against midwives and healers, and women who owned a little property. Describing this period as “the bloodshed that birthed modern domestic relationships”, the witch-hunts forced women off common land and back into the home, took away what control they had over reproduction, and reminded people that they had to ‘work’ within the bounds of the emerging patriarchal, capitalistic system.
Given women and girls across the globe continue to face misogyny, oppression, violence and death on a daily basis still today, Jaffe’s case certainly has me convinced over the supposed ‘threat’ of superstition, curses, tricks and herbal tinctures.
The female-led spiritualism movement of the Victorian era was crushed, too. Many forces rallied against spiritualism, predominately for good. But crusaders from the magic world, most famous of all Houdini, profited from the ensuing publicity and plundered spiritualism’s techniques and technologies.
I don’t wish to live in a world governed by pseudoscience and charlatanism, but women who found voice, power and purpose in an age of oppression now live on in bargain-bin, non-ironic Derren Brown wannabes..? Sure, a hypnotist using a mentalism trick as a convincer may pose less of a threat to society than the epidemic of ectoplasm, toe-rapping and seemingly powerful women. But it doesn’t quite feel like the victory it’s made out to be, does it?
But if we are all for science and reason, let’s also be all for equality, too! Because, the more I read for this blog, the more it strikes me: these men are fucking batshit crazy, too!
From the influences of Mesmer, Braid, Freud and Bandler, to cults, voodoo and Indian godmen, who really has shaped societies and psyches for better or worse?! Something to ponder over a mug of herbal tea while chatting to your dead granny in the Summerland.
I decided to single out surely the maddest, baddest, most dangerous hypnotist there was to develop my point: G H Estabrooks.
George Hoben Estabrooks, 1895-1973, was a Canadian-American psychologist and chairman of the Department of Psychology at Colgate University in New York, specialising in abnormal and industrial psychology. Hypnotism was first published in 1943 and is, I think it’s fair to say, cult reading in hypnosis circles.
That’s because Estabrooks – whether it’s true, false, or a tangled web of rumours, lies and misinformation lost to the sands of the internet – was reputedly an authority on hypnosis and psychological warfare during World War II. There’s also the whiff that he was involved in (or influenced) the CIA’s Project MK-Ultra; illegal human experiments involving LSD, brainwashing and psychological torture.
I say ‘reputedly’ because, if you venture down a G H Estabrooks Google rabbit hole, you can also find plentiful stuff on him being a fantasist with no such credentials. I once found a treasure trove of a blog (which I can’t find now, alas) with apparent original letters and sources, including the CIA instructing him to cease claiming any association with them. (Which is precisely what they would say, of course.)
Hypnotism is every bit as mad, bad and dangerous as a budding hypnotist could wish, though, no matter its pedigree. The closing chapters are a playbook for The Manchurian Candidate (first published in 1959, 16 years after Hypnotism) – brainwashing, hypno-programming and hypno-spying in warfare, splitting personalities, framing crimes and doing hypno-murders, musings on the rise of dictators…
Whether fact or fiction, or a bit of both, this is not what I find maddest about Estabrooks. No. It’s that he seems to have a penchant for setting up complex hypnotic capers with groups of people that gets me the most.
Someone is hypnotised, and suggestions or post-hypnotic suggestions are implanted, and a story is set up. But the plots for his capers are quite convoluted, with different hypnotised and non-hypnotised collaborators given different roles and deceptions.
The main caper in the book is a confusing and socially awkward afternoon culminating in an accidental trip to a pub. Estabrooks, Mr Smith and Mr Brown are spending the afternoon together in Oxford. Brown made “some very cutting remarks on hypnotism” and so Estabrooks hypnotises Smith to give him a lesson.
Smith awakens believing Brown is a stranger, and also a patient from a mental hospital with delusions of grandeur on a mission to debunk hypnosis. (Estabrooks declines to mention how this belief actually comes about.) They all head out in the car to London to pick up Mr Black, “a fine subject” who had been “coached in advance” and so, wittingly or unwittingly, shares Smith’s belief.
Brown is subjected to an increasingly infuriating and “absurd” (in Estabrooks’s own words) time in the men’s company. Hence they wind up down the pub. But it’s not clear that the suggestions hold, and they are later switched to simply believing they’re meeting Brown for the first time. Estabrooks claims it as a triumph in changing Brown’s mind as to the veracity of hypnosis. But – it smacks of role play.
Either way, I can’t help but wonder: how much of Estabrooks’s university tenure was dedicated to puppeteering these hypnotic capers to cement his genius theory of hypnosis?! Given his position of power – as chairman of the Department of Psychology and, as I understand it, with some responsibility over admissions – how many impressionable students, and eager joiners, colleagues, acolytes and associates played along – with or without the frame of hypnosis?!
Now that is, IMO, mad! Would a woman get away with such puppet-mastery?! I doubt it. My hope though is that, sometimes, it wasn’t quite clear who in these hypno-capers was playing whom…
