UNDINE DE RIVIÈRE INTERVIEW
Hypno-kink is a thing – well actually it’s many things – so who better to ask about it than the leading hypno-kinkster and sex workers’ rights activist in Germany? Strap in and buckle up for the most enlightened interview yet to grace our lovely blog.
I’ve received some fascinating emails from my university supervisor, and all-round hypnosis guru, Zoltan Dienes, but none so much as the one about Undine. Not only did he suggest that the content could make for a great PhD topic, but also that I should invite her to be interviewed for Cosmic Pancakes! as someone with a really interesting hypnosis story to tell. So, after checking out Undine’s websites (see end of the interview), I got in touch and she was only too happy to oblige.
Now, I suspect avid readers will think that this interview will walk a fine line between salaciousness and hypnotic criticism, but that would be to misrepresent it entirely. Not only is Undine exceptionally wise and well-read when it comes to hypnosis, but she is also very insightful about how hypno-kink actually works, and how that crosses over with academic theories. Indeed, Undine got in touch with Zoltan because of her (and her friends’, colleagues’, play-partners’) interest in Cold Control Theory and Phenomenological Control!
Undine explained how this came about: “It was really funny because you guys [Zoltan and Cold Control Theory] have a bit of a fan club within the community, and we were talking about it: ‘Okay, are we going to contact them?’. And somebody said, ‘Wait, I'm following them on Twitter. I don't know if they're following back and I don't want to risk that.’ And I’m, ‘Okay’, because I really don't have anything to lose if they tell us to screw ourselves; I won't have any problems with that. So that was really funny – it was it was like in the school yard! ‘No you go. No, you.’”
So Undine did get in touch with Zoltan and she outlined her interest as being around the modification of hypnotic responses; something both Zoltan and I have a relatively significant interest in. We’d like to repeat some of the Gorassini and Spanos experiments around the Carleton Skills Training Package (CSTP) and Gorassini’s Brief Training, and Undine’s interested in how people in her community learn and train to become better hypnotic participants over time, simply by doing more, reading more, and experiencing more.
So we had obvious shared interests from that first email and the more we talked, the more we found ourselves aligned on what hypnosis is and how it might work. But that would be getting ahead of ourselves; Undine explained how she got into hypnosis in the first place and how that led to where she is now:
“I came across it pretty late. I think I was 27 when I came into contact with hypnosis, and it was really within the context of a BDSM club. I was a postgraduate student in Australia and I was doing my master's thesis there, and I spent a lot of time in fetish clubs. And one of my play-partners introduced me to it: he asked me if I've ever been hypnotised. I thought it was an interesting idea, so he hypnotised me and used a post-hypnotic suggestion that I then later followed. But I had no idea whether that was because of the hypnosis, or because I wanted it to work, or because I thought that he was a cool person and that was what he wanted, and that it was something I wanted to do?”
Undine spent a year in Australia and then returned to Germany, to where she brought her new interest in hypnosis and hypno-kink with her. “It was [the year] 2000 when I came back, and I had lost contact with that play-partner. So I read some books on hypnotherapy and stage hypnosis, and then kind of mixed it with what I was already doing in BDSM and started to hypnotise others. And then I also wanted other people to hypnotise me because I thought that was pretty cool. And that's why I started to teach hypnosis within the community and did little workshops.”
When Undine told me this, I thought, ‘What an awesome reason to start training others – because you want them to hypnotise you and there’s no one in your country who does this, at least not in the way you want to experience it.’ Undine was already a professional sex worker, but she wanted formal training in hypnosis, so she found a hypnotherapy training school and took a course.
It wasn’t long before her own training courses and workshops took off and she later brought in a partner to help teach: "I got to know him because he was interested in hypnosis and came to one of my workshops. And he wanted me to try it on him, and I did, and we kind of both got hooked on each other. That was fun! And so we're still doing workshops together over 10 years now.”
Undine explained that there wasn’t an equivalent of Derren Brown in Germany, and any stage hypnosis scene was small and not really in the public’s consciousness. But the Covid lockdown had provided many opportunities to join hypno-kink conferences that had been forced online, with teachers from numerous countries around the world, including the UK, USA, and Australia: “I was quite lucky that in the last two years I was able to attend virtually and also teach a few workshops to the international community, because in Germany, while we do have some local gatherings, we don't have any large-scale events, and I was never really interested in organising conferences. I always did my workshops and met with clients one-on-one.”
And the lockdown provided more online opportunities as in-person meetings were less appropriate or permitted: “2020 was when I branched out into recorded audios and setting up an online shop for MP3s and pre-recorded hypnosis sessions, which is something that is working quite well. And this is also something that made me do even more hypnosis; before it was one of my main interests, but still only part of what I was doing, but is now a much bigger part.”
So, given Undine’s interest in Cold Control Theory and Phenomenological Control, I had to ask her how that came about and how that had changed what she did. She explained that someone in her community ran a workshop called ‘Four definitions and a dead hypnotist’. “There's an old joke. Put three hypnotists in a room and ask them to define hypnosis – you’ll end up with four definitions and a dead hypnotist.” The workshop covered the main academic theories from Hilgard’s neo-dissociation theory to Wagstaff’s compliance approach, and it was there that Undine found an affinity with Zoltan’s work.
But when it came to practice, it didn’t actually change much, which I guess is how it should be. “I don't think it has changed anything about the way I do things in practice, because I've been doing hypnosis for 20 years now and I don’t really think about theories. I just connect with people and I also love mixing it up with with lots of other things. I'm not a stage magician, so I don't mix it up with magic. But I do a lot of hypnosis, a lot of verbal hypnosis, and I like mixing it with touch if I do in-person hypnosis because a lot of the things that I do are erotic sessions, fetish sessions or BDSM sessions.”
Undine continued: “A lot of the time I don't even call it hypnosis because in pretty much every interaction I have with a client or in private play, as a top or a dominant, I do hypnotic elements because the point is getting people into some kind of altered reality and some kind of perception, and the feelings and emotions that they want to experience; and there are many, many ways to get them there, and part is physical, and part is mental, and part is verbal, and part is kinaesthetic; and I mix it all up.”
But theory, and understanding how it worked, was still a big interest: “So knowing more about, or learning a new theory about, how that whole thing works was super, super thrilling and interesting for me on an academic level, but it didn't change the application for me much or at all.”
The thing that interested me the most about Undine’s knowledge and experience was the breakdown that she saw between the different people involved in hypno-kink:
“I just distinguish three different approaches. One is kind of guided imagination where you have pretty much a variation of dirty talk, just we have got one person listening and the other person talking and it's like a guided meditation, but you are not on some kind of forest walk or on the beach, but you're in some kind of erotic scenario. And you can talk people into arousal and you can talk people into orgasm, and it's very much a one sided thing: you get one passive listener and one active speaker, but you can incorporate physical sensations; you can incorporate massage, you can incorporate some kind of sensation play with different physical sensations. And this can even lead up to actually having sex in one way or another. So that's one approach.
“The second one would be playing around waking trances, which is basically enhanced role-play or method acting. You get people to really change their perception of reality and slip into some kind of fantastic role-play scenario. And that can have elements of power exchange, but doesn't have to, but it's also often incorporated. And it also leads into the whole kind of subspace [submissive headspace], and some kind of altered states and trance-y feeling. And that works really well together with compliance-sets and getting a person into accepting the other person as a leader. And then getting them into some kind of scenario, which feels super, super real for them, and they act within that scenario: one example of that would be gender play. So a lot of people are liking to play with gender roles and slipping into the opposite gender, and acting out that kind of fantasy and that kind of feeling.
“And the third one, which is also super, super popular is playing with post-hypnotic suggestions, especially with trigger play. So you implement some kind of trigger in a hypnosis session. And there's a huge, huge community around playing with so called ‘open triggers’; that is triggers that anyone who knows that trigger word can use on the person. And then there's just some kind of, you know, it's the dangerous life when anybody could just snap their finger and you have to do whatever they tell you! So that's kind of the [hypnosis] tropey thing.
“And yeah, sometimes people will ask for each other's triggers; like what's yours? ‘Age, Sex, Location, and Trigger list, please.’ And then the interaction with a partner just happens by using those triggers with each other without them actually having to do a real hypnosis session, but they just use the fruit of a previous hypnosis session.
“So those, I think, are the three big routes or applications of hypnosis. And of course, there’s a lot of overlapping of things, but I'd say that those are the three main ones.”
I found it really interesting how the three approaches, when we discussed them further, fitted really well with Graham Wagstaff’s thoughts in Hypnosis, Compliance, and Belief. Essentially there were those who loved to role-play hypnosis – one is in charge and another (or many others) were bound to do what they were told, but not because of a whip or bondage, but because of mind control and power play.
Second, and the style of play that Undine herself seemed more into, was that of imaginative suggestions. She told me that she saw the initiation of a session as an induction, that she would often blindfold and lightly bondage a partner, before leading them into a space that she controlled largely though the words she used. She said she, herself, had discovered (only after lots of practice) that she could orgasm through imagination and suggestion alone, but that this was a technique that often featured in her sessions, combined with a whole load of other stimulation that she could employ.
And finally, there were the hypno-fetishists (her phrase) who discovered the idea of hypnosis at a sexually formative age – usually related to Scooby Doo or The Jungle Book – where the idea of sexual fulfilment and mind control were interrelated and one caused the other, to some degree. This, in itself, was a fascinating revelation, as I doubt many who play with, or dabble in, hypnosis have really considered the inner world and sensitivities that their hypnotic participant might be feeling or considering.
Ultimately, there are those who love to play along, there are those who can imaginatively play along, and there are those who fervently long to be immersed in a world that they cannot control; for sexual gratification, mainly. I wonder how these stereotypes might map to the highly responsive subjects that we discover through testing, and whether, as Amanda Barnier insisted, that there are many ways to respond to suggestions.
Outside of hypno-kink (or alongside it, depending on your perspective), Undine is a sex workers’ rights activist and she founded the first sex workers’ union in Germany in 2013 – a total legend and someone you should definitely look up to. You can find out more at https://www.berufsverband-sexarbeit.de; for other Undine-related information, check out https://undine-de-riviere.de/ and https://hypnokink.de.
It was an absolute pleasure talking to Undine and, given our subsequent emails, a friendship I hope will continue, and a professional contact I hope I can mine for many years as I take on a PhD with Zoltan. We all have sex, but some have hypno-sex, and some of them have a Master’s degree in physics and an exceptional hypnosis library. It was an honour to have spoken to someone in such a similar world, but such a different one, on such an amazing level. Hypnosis is far more than hypnotherapy scripts and sweaty hand stick.