(Ambiguous gifts, as what gods give must be)
What could not possibly be there,
And learn a style from a despair.
C H A P T E R 4
Hypnosis
IF I ASK YOU to taste vinegar as champagne, to feel pleasure when I jab a pin in your arm, or to stare into darkness and contract the pupils of your eyes to an imagined light, or to willfully and really believe something you do not ordinarily believe, just anything, you would find these tasks difficult if not impossible.
But if I first put you through the induction procedures of hypnosis, you could accomplish all these things at my asking without any effort whatever.
Why? How can such supererogatory enabling even exist?
It seems a very different company we enter when we go from the familiarity of poetry to the strangeness of hypnosis. For hypnosis is the black sheep of the family of problems which constitute psychology. It wanders in and out of laboratories and carnivals and clinics and village halls like an unwanted anomaly.
It never seems to straighten up and resolve itself into the firmer proprieties of scientific theory. Indeed, its very possibility seems a denial of our immediate ideas about conscious self-control on the one hand, and our scientific idea about personality on the other. Yet it should be conspicuous that any theory of consciousness and its origin, if it is to be responsible, must face the difficulty of this deviant type of behavioral control.
I think my answer to the opening question is obvious: hypnosis can cause this extra enabling because it engages the general bicameral paradigm which allows a more absolute control over behavior than is possible with consciousness.
380 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World In this chapter, I shall even go so far as to maintain that no theory other than the present one makes sense of the basic problem. For if our contemporary mentality is, as most people suppose, an immutable genetically determined characteristic evolved back somewhere in mammalian evolution or before, how can it be so altered as in hypnosis? And that alteration merely at some rather ridiculous ministrations of another person? It is only by rejecting the genetic hypothesis and treating consciousness as a learned cultural ability over the vestigial substrate of an earlier more authoritarian type of behavioral control that such alterations of mind can begin to seem orderly.
The central structure of this chapter, obviously, will be to show how well hypnosis fits the four aspects of the bicameral paradigm. But before I do so, I wish to bring out clearly a most important feature of how hypnosis began in the first place. This is what I have emphasized in I.2 and II.5, the generative force of metaphor in creating new mentality.
The Paraphrands of Newtonian Forces
Hypnosis, like consciousness, begins at a particular point in history in the paraphrands of a few new metaphors. The first of these metaphors followed Sir Isaac Newton’s discovery of the laws of universal gravitation and his use of them to explain the ocean tides under the attraction of the moon. The mysterious attractions and influences and controls between people were then compared to Newtonian gravitational influences. And the comparison resulted in a new (and ridiculous) hypothesis, that there are tides of attraction between all bodies, living and material, that can be called animal gravitation, of which Newton’s gravitation is a special case.1
1 A full history of hypnosis is yet to be written. But see F. A. Pattie, “Brief History of Hypnotism,” in J. E. Gordon, ed., Handbook of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis (New York: Macmillan, 1967). See also an historical paper by one of
H Y P N O S I S
381
This is all very explicit in the romantic and turbid writings of a wanton admirer of Newton‘s called Anton Mesmer, who began it all. And then came another metaphor, or rather two. Gravitational attraction is similar to magnetic attraction. Therefore, since (in Mesmer‘s rhetorical thought) two things similar to a third thing are similar to each other, animal gravitation is like magnetic attraction, and so changes its name to animal magnetism.
Now at last the theory was testable in a scientific way. To demonstrate the existence of these vibrant magnetic tides in and through living things similar to celestial gravitation, Mesmer applied magnets to various hysterical patients, even prefeeding the patients with medicines containing iron so that the magnetism might work better. And it did! The result could not be doubted with the knowledge of his day. Convulsive attacks were produced by the magnets, creating in Mesmer‘s words “an artificial ebb and flow” in the body and correcting with its magnetic attraction “the unequal distribution of the nervous fluids confused movement,”
thus producing a “harmony of the nerves.” He had ‘proved’ that there are flows of forces between persons as mighty as those that hold the planets in their orbits.
Of course he hadn‘t proved anything about any kind of magnetism whatever. He had discovered what Sir James Braid on the metaphier of sleep later called hypnosis. The cures were effective because he had explained his exotic theory to his patients with vigorous conviction. The violent seizures and peculiar twists of sensations at the application of magnets were all due to a cognitive imperative that these things would happen, which they did, constituting a kind of self-perpetuating escalating ‘proof’ that the magnets were working and could effect a cure. We should remember here that just as in ancient Assyria there was no concept of chance and so the casting of lots ‘had’ to be controlled the important experimenters in hypnosis, Theodore Sarbin‘s “Attempts to Understand Hypnotic Phenomena,” in Leo Postman, ed., Psychology in the Making (New York: Knopf, 1964), pp. 745-784.
382 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World by the gods, so in the eighteenth century there was no concept of suggestion and the result had to be due to the magnets.
Then when it was found that not only magnets, but cups, bread, wood, human beings, and animals to which a magnet had been touched were also efficacious (how false beliefs breed upon each other!), the whole matter jumped over into another metaphor (this is the fourth), that of static electricity, which — Ben-jamin Franklin's kite and all — was being so much studied at the time. Thus Mesmer thought there was a "magnetic material"
that could be transferred to a countless array of objects, just as static electricity can. Human beings in particular could store up and absorb magnetism, particularly Mesmer himself. Just as a carbon rod stroked with fur produces static electricity, so patients were to be stroked by Mesmer. He could now dispense with actual magnets and use his own animal magnetism. By stroking or making passes over the bodies of his patients, as if they were carbon rods, he produced the same results: convulsions, coiling twists of peculiar sensations, and the cure of what later were called hysterical illnesses.
Now it is critical here to realize and to understand what we might call the paraphrandic changes which were going on in the people involved, due to these metaphors. A paraphrand, you will remember, is the projection into a metaphrand of the associations or paraphiers of a metaphier. The metaphrand here is the influences between people. The metaphiers, or what these influences are being compared to, are the inexorable forces of gravitation, magnetism, and electricity. And their paraphiers of absolute compulsions between heavenly bodies, of unstoppable currents from masses of Ley den jars, or of irresistible oceanic tides of magnetism, all these projected back into the metaphrand of interpersonal relationships, actually changing them, changing the psychological nature of the persons involved, immersing them in a sea of uncontrollable control that emanated from the