Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy
Before the 1940s, hypnotism existed mainly as one of the minor tributaries of show business. Stage hypnotism was not as lowly as horses that could count, but less honest than the man who kept multiple plates spinning on multiple sticks.
People attending hypnosis shows anticipated the novel diversion of a professional hypnotist-performer laying a trance on an audience member (or an accomplice), and then ordering the victim to “feel” extreme cold, or to struggle to lift her arms against invisible weights. Audiences laughed, cheered, and happily threw away their coins to purchase the hypnotists’ DIY booklets in the lobby. Hypnotism seemed a pastime of fools and idlers.
Even Freud, a onetime devotee of hypnosis in psychoanalysis, grew disenchanted with it before 1900, suspecting (with good reason) that the memories his subjects conjured while under his hypnotic control had been inadvertently placed there by Freud himself. Some fifteen to twenty years later, physical trauma suffered by soldiers during the Great War inspired some interest in hypnotism’s possible role in “bloodless surgery,” but it was not until after World War II that serious people began to consider serious applications of hypnotism, primarily to help victims of physical and psychological injury. A respected American psychiatrist named Milton Erickson led hypnotism away from farce and into a relaxed, accessible period of therapeutic “induction,” by which suggestions were given to the subject in a low-key way, via something as seemingly simple as, for instance, a handshake that grips the subject’s lower arm rather than the hand. The new style of induction hypnotism came to popular venues, as well, led by an American songwriter and radio host named Dave Elman.
The new and improved regard for hypnotism and hypnotherapy continued into the 1950s, concurrent with an American preoccupation with mental and physical well-being that recalled the physical culture fads of the 1920s and ’30s.
Serious practitioners of hypnosis, though, had to continually explain what hypnosis is and is not, and struggled to counter pop-culture artifacts the likes of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), in which Dracula effortlessly hypnotizes Lou Costello in order to steal Costello’s brain; and a comic 1955 Danny Kaye vehicle, The Court Jester, concerning a cowardly royal Fool who is hypnotized (with a finger-snap) into fancying himself a great and confident lover. Then there is I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), in which an unscrupulous therapist hypnotically regresses a troubled teenage boy to an earlier, primitive stage of human development, with bloody consequences. By 1960, the producers of a sadistic (and weirdly effective) thriller called The Hypnotic Eye suggested that stage-show hypnotic suggestion could compel women to go home and mutilate themselves.