HYPNOSIS DOESN’T EXIST
They Call It Hypnosis – Robert A Baker
This is an enjoyable, if outdated and flawed, read that mashes up then-current science with surrounding ‘what hypnosis isn’t’ phenomena in a persuasive attempt to argue that hypnosis doesn’t exist.
Published in 1990, the book is penned by Robert A Baker (1921-2005), an American psychologist who taught at Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Kentucky. Baker was a teacher, author, and sceptic, and spent much of his career seeking non-paranormal explanations for a raft of phenomena and cases – including hypnosis, as is the focus of this book.
Baker sets out to trace the history and then-current state of hypnosis, examining the role of suggestion, and the key theories – and misconceptions – surrounding the phenomenon. The book’s charm is, in my opinion, in its telling through Baker’s personal story; a psychologist who stumbled into hypnotism on realising relaxation suggestions he was giving his students constituted ‘hypnosis’, and his quest to distinguish fact from the many fictions this field is mired in.
If you find it difficult (as I do) to understand and integrate academic literature, then Baker is a useful guide to this world. The book is permeated by the findings and expertise of hypno-luminaries including Theodore X Barber, Graham F Wagstaff, Nicholas P Spanos, Irving Kirsch, William C Coe, and Theodore R Sarbin, as well as Frank A Pattie, Josephine and Ernest R Hilgard, and André M Weitzenhoffer. Baker also lists Peter Blythe amongst these names. I hadn’t heard of him before – turns out there’s a good reason why: he was a raging fascist… and a proponent of pseudo-scientific (and ideologically murky) alternative medicine.
Indeed, the third chapter is dedicated to recent and contemporary views of hypnosis, up to Kirsch’s and Coe’s respective contributions, and these bite-sized summaries of various academic theories and studies are handy if tomes like The Oxford Handbook are too hefty for your reading and learning style. (But don’t read them as current or gospel.)
But please don’t be fooled into thinking this academic content is the crux of the book! Baker provides a readable romp through hypnosis; he particularly aims to close the gap between academic and stage hypnosis, thanks to detailed personal correspondence with, and anecdotal stories from, the performer Kreskin. So, if you fall into the perfectly reasonable trap of feeling academia cannot account for the apparent feats of stage hypnotists, then you’ll be grateful for Kreskin’s candour and clarity on the realities of his showmanship.
Similarly, Baker tackles myths and misconceptions spanning past- and future-life regression and UFO abductions, etc, explaining the psychology and phenomena behind these and many more apparently paranormal and supernormal cases. Baker backs these assertions up with his own academic and anecdotal student studies; for instance, showing that past- and future-life ‘regression’ is just as easily achieved without hypnosis as with it; is heavily influenced by the hypnotist and context/framing suggestions; and is vastly more successful in more imaginative individuals.
The book is packed with fascinating, fantastical stories of hypnotic feats and myths. Of note is the farcical details of the CIA’s programme of behavioural research on hypnosis and the caper instigated by Morse Allen, known as Operation ARTICHOKE. In 1951, Allen was so intrigued by hypnosis that he attended a four-day course led by a stage hypnotist who convinced him that this power could be used to effectively seduce women. Allen convinced his superiors to embark upon a search for a real-life Manchurian Candidate, hypnotising CIA secretaries to shoot each other and, in one case, report to a strange man’s bedroom before falling asleep.
All Allen proved was that impressionable young women would do his bidding. But the project was then passed on to Dr Sidney Gottlieb, who believed the creation of a Manchurian Candidate could be accomplished – with the aid of psychedelic drugs as well as hypnosis. As Baker writes, the project descends into a Marx Brothers comedy, with a ‘Dr Fingers’ attempting to ‘mesmerise’ Cuban candidates to assassinate Fidel Castro to no avail. The agency’s obsession with sex, drugs, and mind-control continued up until 1966, and even included keeping a brothel to research how brainwashing could be deployed and countered. You literally couldn’t make this stuff up!
Baker starts his book with the fable of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, arguing that ‘hypnosis’ doesn’t exist, and that suggestion and imagination are instead the cause of the phenomena he explores. He attacks hypnosis from the ‘it’s a niche-of-psychology’ angle and, Kev tells me, is wrong about the science (which is also now, of course, outdated) he quotes to back his central claim that hypnosis doesn’t exist. Personally I found the ‘what hypnosis isn’t’ content interesting and enjoyable enough to put this fatal flaw to one side, but the book could be confusing and unbalanced for readers who take it on face value.
