is whether a person’s will can be violated through
hypnosis. The Concise Textbook states:
A secure ethical value system is important to all
therapy and particularly to hypnotherapy, in
which patients (especially those in a deep trance)
are extremely suggestible and malleable. There is
controversy about whether patients will perform
acts during a trance state that they otherwise find
repugnant or that run contrary to their moral
code.
For some experts, will violation is controversial, but
other experts state it as a fact. Psychiatrist Arthur
Deikman calls the surrender of will “the cardinal feature
of the hypnotic state.”2 In their text Human
Behavior, Berelson and Steiner say, “Not only is a
cooperative attitude not necessary for hypnosis, some
people can even be hypnotized against their will.”3
In answering the question, “what are the dangers
of hypnosis?” stage hypnotist and entertainer James
J. Mapes said:
Like any other science, it can be, and is, abused.
Once the hypnotist has gained your trust, he or
she has an obligation not to abuse it, for the
hypnotist can induce both positive and negative
hallucinations while the subject is hypnotized.
That is, the hypnotist can make a subject “see”
that which is not there, as in a mirage, or can take
away something that is there, such as psychosomatic
blindness. For another example, the hypnotist
could give a person a real gun and through
suggestion tell the subject it was a water pistol
and suggest that the subject squirt his or her
friend. This is a dramatic example, but certainly
possible.4
This would certainly constitute will violation through
trickery.
Dr. David Spiegel, a Stanford University professor
in the school of medicine, says:
The common idea that you would never do anything
in hypnosis that you would not ordinarily
do is not in fact true. You are more vulnerable and
more at risk in a trance state because you are more
focused in your attention and you are not as likely
to think about peripheral considerations like is
this a good idea to do this or what am I really
doing?5
38 Hypnosis
Nevertheless, it is essential for the hypnotist to
sustain the notion of will control on the part of the
patient. The patient will more easily trust a hypnotist
if he is assured that his will is not being violated and
that he can exercise free choice at any time during a
trance. If hypnosis could cause a person to do something
against his will and if the trance state could open
up such a possibility, then hypnotism should be
considered repugnant to Christians.
Divided Will Control
The process of hypnosis brings about a type of
dissociation in which the individual retains choice
(referred to as executive control) in certain areas while
at the same time he submits other areas of choice to
the hypnotist. Thus, during hypnosis an individual may
feel in control of himself because he can still make
many choices. For instance, in experimental hypnosis
where persons had the freedom to move about as they
chose, they hallucinated according to the hypnotist’s
suggestions. Thus during hypnosis there is a division
of control. While the hypnotized persons retain numerous
areas of choice, they have turned some areas of
choice over to the hypnotist. Hilgard says of the
subjects, “Within the hypnotic contract, they will do
what the hypnotist suggests, experience what they are
told to experience, and lose control of movements.”6
For
example, when the subject is told that he cannot move
his arm, he will not be able to move his arm.
Margaretta Bowers tells how “the perception of the
world of outer reality fades away . . . and there comes a
time when the voice of the hypnotist is heard as if
within the subject’s own mind, and he responds to the
will of the hypnotist as to his own will.”7
Can the Will Be Violated? 39
Another area of the will surrendered during
hypnosis is the monitoring function. The monitoring
function helps us make decisions by comparing past
situations with the current situation. Such recall of
information and application to the present situation
may change our decision on how to act, such as: “If I
run around making noises and acting like a monkey, I
will look like a fool.” With such monitoring functions
impaired, an individual may perform acts which he
would not even consider otherwise.
Since reality becomes distorted during a trance, the
subject cannot properly evaluate which actions make
sense and which ones do not. Hilgard says that in the
trance state there is a trance logic that accepts “what
would normally be found incompatible.”8
Thus, an individual
within the hypnotic trance may flap his arms
up and down in response to a hypnotist’s suggestion
that he has wings. If reality is distorted and the person
is not able to make reality judgments, his means
of responsible choice have been impaired. He is unable
to exercise his own will responsibly.
The exercise of choice and the use of information
during a person’s normal state are distorted during
hypnosis and may result in the individual releasing
some of these areas to the hypnotist. If one does not
retain his complete normal capacity to evaluate reality
and to choose, then it appears that his will could be
intruded upon and at least partially violated. A wellknown
textbook of psychiatry states:
Hypnosis can be described as an altered state of
intense and sensitive interpersonal relatedness
between hypnotist and patient, characterized by
the patient’s nonrational submission and relative
40 Hypnosis
abandonment of executive control to a more or less
regressed, dissociated state.9
Although this interference with choice and reality
testing may be temporary, there is the possibility of
post-hypnotic suggestion which would remain as an
influence and also the possibility of further dissociation
of these functions.
It is apparent to us that a hypnotist can deceive a
person into committing an act which would be in
violation of his normal range of choice.10 A hypnotist
can even lead a person into committing murder by
creating an extreme fear that someone is attempting
to kill him. The patient would discern it as an act of
self-defense. Through hypnotic deception, it is possible
to cause one to do something against his will by
disguising the act into one which would be within his
choice.
Since a person under hypnosis would do something
if it is made plausible and desirable, and since reality
is distorted under hypnosis, violation can occur through
the fact that the subject is in a more highly suggestible
state and the trance propagator can make almost
anything plausible and desirable. Hypnotist Simeon
Edmunds cites numerous cases in his book Hypnotism
and Psychic Phenomena to illustrate his belief that it
is possible for a hypnotist to perform an illegal act
against a subject and that it is even possible for a
hypnotist to cause a subject to perform an illegal act.11
Aside from the calm assurances from
hypnotherapists that a person’s will is not violated
under hypnosis there is little proof that it cannot be
violated. The subject of will violation is not only
controversial, but is complicated by the fact that it is
Can the Will Be Violated? 41
impossible to know completely what a person’s true
will is in all circumstances. A man may say, “I love my
mother-in-law,” but actually hate her. The question of
violation of the will may not lend itself to solution by
rhetoric or by research because of its complicated
nature.12
In his book “R.F.K. Must Die!” A History of the Robert
Kennedy Assassination and Its Aftermath, Robert Blair
Kaiser raises the question of the accused, Sirhan
Sirhan, having been hypnotized beforehand and being
in a trance when he killed Kennedy. Kaiser says:
According to a widely accepted cliché, propagated
in the main by stage hypnotists and others who
have commercial interest in hypnosis, no one can
be induced through hypnosis to do anything
against his own moral code. The history of hypnosis,
however, and the annals of crime itself are
proof enough that skilled operators can lead
certain highly suggestible subjects to do “bad”
things by corrupting their sense of reality and
appealing to some “higher morality.”
On July 17, 1954, Bjorn Schouw Nielsen was
convicted in Copenhagen Central Criminal Court
and sentenced to life imprisonment for “having
planned and instigated by influence of various
kinds, including suggestions of a hypnotic nature,”
the commission of two robberies and two murders
by another man. This man, Palle Hardrup, is free
today because Dr. Paul Reiter, chief of the psychiatric
department of the Copenhagen Municipal
Hospital, spent nineteen months on an exhaustive
study of the weird—possibly homosexual—
42 Hypnosis
relationship between the two men, which began
in prison years before.
According to Dr. Reiter, Nielsen created a
blindly obedient instrument in Hardrup, who
would go into a trance at the sound (or the sight)
of a simple signal—the letter X—and do whatever
Nielsen suggested. Nielsen convinced Hardrup, in
hypnosis, that he was a chosen instrument for the
unification of all Scandinavia. Hardrup would form
a new political party, would work under the direction
of a guardian spirit—X—(who would communicate
to him through Nielsen). Once this attitude
was instilled, Nielsen induced Hardrup to raise
money for the new party by robbing banks (and
turning the money over to Nielsen). Hardrup
robbed one bank successfully, and then, in the
course of another, he killed a teller and a director
of the bank and was arrested soon afterward by
Copenhagen police.
It was Reiter’s conclusion that Nielsen had
created in Hardrup a split personality, a paranoid
schizophrenic, who was never aware, until Reiter’s
work with him, that he had been programmed for
crime, and programmed to forget that he had been
programmed. Reiter’s complete account is a chilling
tale of mysticism and murder—and of some
very persistent detective work by Reiter perhaps
unparalleled in the history of psychiatry and
crime.
So it was not impossible. Sirhan could have
been programmed and programmed to forget.13
Because hypnosis places responsibility outside the
exercise of objective, rational, fully conscious choice, it
Can the Will Be Violated? 43
does violate the will. The normal evaluating abilities
are submerged and choice is made according to
suggestion without the balance of rational restraint.
The will is a precious treasure of humans and shows
forth the indelible hand of our Creator. The human
will requires more respect than hypnosis seems to offer.
Bypassing the responsible state of reason and choice
just because of the hope for some desired end is bad
medicine and, worst of all, bad theology. Because of
this, we add the possibility of will violation to the list
of reasons why Christians should be wary of hypnosis.
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