A Criminal History of Mankind (5 page)

How can hypnosis be explained? We know that we are, to a large extent, machines; but the will drives the machine. In hypnosis, the machine is taken over by the will of another. When I am determined and full of purpose, I raise my vitality and
focus
it. In hypnosis, the reverse happens; the vitality is suddenly reduced, and the attention is ‘unfocused’. The ‘machine’ obeys the will of the hypnotist just as a car will obey the will of another driver.

There is another part of the mechanism that should be mentioned here. If I am concentrating on some important task, I direct my full a attention towards it like a fireman pointing his hosepipe at the blaze. I permit no self-doubt, no relaxation, no retreat into my inner world; these would only weaken the force of the ‘jet’. If we imagine the snake confronted by the toad, or the two lizards, we can see that they are like two firemen directing their jets at each other. The first to experience doubt, to retreat into his inner world, is the victim. Another authority on hypnosis, Bernard Hollander, remarks in his hook
Hypnosis and Self-Hypnosis
(published in London in 1928), that ‘the hypnotic state ... is largely a condition of more or less profound
abstraction
.’ So when a bored schoolboy stares blankly out of the window, thinking of nothing in particular, he is in a mildly hypnotic state, and the schoolmaster is quite correct to shout: ‘Wake up, Jones!’ The boy has retreated into his subjective world, yet without
focusing
his attention, as he would if he were trying to remember something. Hypnosis seems to be a state when the mind is ‘elsewhere’, and yet nowhere in particular.

Völgyesi’s book brings out with great clarity that there is something very strange about the mind. A wild elephant trumpeting and rearing - that seems natural. The same elephant becoming completely docile after branches have been waved in front of its eyes seems highly unnatural. And the notion that lizards - or even crocodiles - can be reduced to immobility by a gentle pressure on the neck seems somehow all wrong. What on earth is nature doing, making them so vulnerable?

The answer would seem to be that the vulnerability is not ‘intentional’. Like crime itself, it is a mistake, a disadvantage that has emerged in the process of developing other advantages. In order to build up a certain complexity - which seems to be its basic aim - life had to create certain mechanisms. The more complex the ‘works’, the easier it is to throw a spanner in them. A big car uses a lot of fuel; a big biological mechanism uses a lot of vitality. If this vitality can suddenly be checked or diminished, the creature ceases to have free will.

Human beings, as Völgyesi points out, are far more complex than birds and animals. Yet the same principles apply. He noticed that the easiest people to hypnotise were those of a ‘nervous constitution’. Clever,
sensitive
people are far more easily hypnotised than stupid, insensitive ones. He noticed that these highly sensitive people usually had damp hands, so that he could tell by shaking hands whether a person would be a good hypnotic subject. He refers to such people as ‘psycho-passive’. People with dry handshakes are ‘psycho-active’. They can still be hypnotised, but far more co-operation is needed from the patient, and sometimes the use of mild electric currents.

This is an observation of central importance. It means that clever, sensitive people are usually under-vitalised. They
allow
themselves to sink into boredom or gloom more easily than others. There is not enough water to drive the watermill, so to speak. Because their vitality is a few notches lower than it should be, it is easy to reduce it still lower by suggestion, and plunge them into a hypnotised state. In
Hypnotism and Crime
, Heinz Hammerschlag quotes a psychotherapist who got into a discussion about hypnotism in a hotel. He turned to glance casually at a young man sitting beside him on the couch; the young man said, ‘Don’t look at me like that - I can’t move my arms any more’, and sank with closed eyes sideways. This was pure auto-suggestion. Hammerschlag also has an amusing story of some practical joker - probably a medical student - who hypnotised a hysterical girl named Pauline in a hospital ward and ordered her to go and embrace the Abbé in charge of the hospital at four that afternoon. When the girl tried to leave the ward at four o’clock, nurses restrained her and she fought frenziedly. A doctor who suspected that the trouble was hypnotic suggestion placed her in a trance and got the story out of her. The original hypnotist was sent for to remove the suggestion. And even then she continued to have relapses until she was allowed to embrace the Abbé.

In a case like this the problem is that the girl’s normal mental condition is close to sleep. She exists in a borderland between sleeping and waking. Above all, she is ‘under-vitalised’. Because of this, she lives in a permanent state of unreality, and her failure to embrace the Abbé reduces her to neurotic anxiety. Unless she can somehow be persuaded to make an effort to raise her own vitality, she is trapped in a kind of vicious circle. Neurotic anxiety lowers her vitality and makes the world unreal; her sense of unreality makes her feel that nothing is worth doing, and so increases the unreality and the anxiety.

The schoolmaster who shouts: ‘Wake up, Jones!’ is, in fact, ordering Jones to increase his mental energy - to raise his vitality. Völgyesi achieved the same effect by sprinkling hypnotised frogs with a little sulphuric acid. And what precisely happens when a hypnotised subject is awakened? A vicious circle is broken; the critical self, the self that copes with the outside world, suddenly jumps to attention.

This matter can be made clearer by borrowing the terminology of Thomson J. Hudson, who in 1893 produced a remarkable book called
The Law of Psychic Phenomena
(psychic here means simply ‘mental’.) Hudson was a student of hypnotism and he advanced the interesting notion that we all possess two minds or ‘selves’: the objective and the subjective. The objective mind is the practical part of us, the part that copes with external problems. The subjective mind looks inward, and copes with internal problems; it also ‘summons’ energy when we need it. (As we shall see later, modern research suggests that these two ‘selves’ are located in the left and right cerebral hemispheres of the brain.) Under hypnosis, Hudson says, the objective mind is put to sleep and the subjective mind takes over. In effect, the hypnotist himself becomes the ‘objective mind’ of the patient, and the patient obeys him just as if he were his own objective mind.

When the schoolboy goes into a daydream, he has descended into the subjective mind. The schoolmaster’s shout of ‘Wake up!’ jerks him back into the real world - wakes up the objective mind.

And here we come to one of the most crucial points in the argument. You do not need to be in a state of ‘abstraction’ or daydreaming to be ‘hypnotised’. Consider the following hypothetical case. You are in a hurry to get to work and there is an unusual amount of traffic on the road. Every light is against you, and you get more and more angry. The traffic light changes to green, but the car in front of you does not move. You are just about to lean out of the window and shout something insulting when the man turns his face. You recognise your boss. Instantly, your rage dissolves...

What has happened? The anger and tension have trapped you in a vicious circle of rising irritation, in which your values have become exaggerated, subjective. Your rage against the traffic is quite irrational, for the other cars have as much right to be on the road as you have. And traffic lights are mechanical; they do not
really
turn red because they see you coming.

When you spot your boss, realism breaks in like the snap of the hypnotist’s fingers. The circle is broken. Your objective mind once again takes over. You came very close to getting yourself the sack, or at least losing your chance of promotion. And all for a momentary flash of rage. You heave a sigh of relief that you recognised him in time. It is as if you had been woken up.

Hypnosis, then, is not simply a trance state. It is, as Hollander says, basically a state of abstraction - to be trapped in the subjective vicious circle, having
lost contact
with reality.

There is an obvious analogy between such a state and the blind resentment of a Charles Manson, a John Frazier, or an Ian Brady, and this leads to the interesting recognition that the ‘hypnotic domination’ that Manson exercised over his followers, and that Brady seemed to exercise over Hindley, emanated from a person who was himself hypnotised. Like the hysterical girl in the hospital, Manson was trapped in a world of unreality.

Is this equivalent to saying that the criminal is ‘not responsible’? Hardly. For the vicious circle is, in a basic sense, self-chosen. When you get angry in a traffic jam, you are
giving way
to your anger instead of telling yourself realistically that you are only wasting energy. A part of you remains detached. But if the anger becomes habitual, this detached part gradually loses strength, becomes involved in the anger. The mechanism can be seen clearly in Dostoevsky’s
Crime and Punishment
. Raskolnikov’s increasing resentment at his poverty, his sense of dependence on his family, slowly builds up into the vicious-circle mechanism - at which point ii seems to him reasonable and logical to murder the old pawn-brokeress for her money. The essence of the ‘hypnotic’ reaction is to ‘block out’ part of the real world, to refuse to recognise its existence - in this case, the fact that the old woman is a human being like himself. The novel shows Raskolnikov being slowly awakened to this realisation.

This leads to the crucial recognition that all crime contains this element of ‘hypnosis’. In his study in modern totalitarianism,
The Tower and the Abyss
, Erich Kahler cites the massacre carried out in the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane in June 1944 by Hitler’s SS. In reprisal for Resistance activity in the area, the Germans rounded up all the inhabitants and made them go to the market-place. The women and children were herded into the village church. No one was alarmed at this stage - the Germans were laughing and joking, and playing with the babies. Then, at a signal from a captain, the soldiers in the square opened fire on the men and massacred them all. The church was set on fire and the women and children burned alive. The children who managed to stumble out were thrown back into the fire. A Swiss who described the massacre remarked, ‘I am convinced that these Elite Guards did not feel the slightest shade of hatred against the French children when they held them in their arms. I am equally convinced that, if a counter order had arrived ... they would have continued to play daddy.’ But the SS men were ‘under orders’, and the order had the effect of a hypnotist’s command. They ‘blocked out’ the reality of the women and children, and ‘did their duty’. A confidence trickster swindles his victims in much the same way; he may actually feel genuinely friendly towards them as he lulls them into a state of trustfulness, yet the basic intention remains unchanged. Manson’s ‘family’ killed Sharon Tate and her guests in the same ‘blocked out’ state. And Myra Hindley helped Brady to murder children yet continued to strike her family as a person who loved children. When she heard that her dog had died under anaesthetic when in the hands of the police she burst out: ‘They’re just a lot of bloody murderers.’ For practical purposes, she had become two people.

Yet although crime - particularly violent crime - contains this element of ‘dissociation’, of ‘alienation’, there is another sense in which it is an attempt to break out of this state. The sex murderer John Christie remarked that after strangling and raping one of his victims, ‘once again I experienced that quiet, peaceful thrill. I had no regrets.’ The killing had removed the tension that kept him trapped in the vicious circle of his own emotions and desires; he was awake again.

We can discern the same factor in the petty crimes committed by Leopold and Loeb before they killed Bobby Franks. Loeb was the one who ‘got a thrill’ from crimes; it was like a game of Russian roulette in which he experienced relaxation and relief every time he ‘won’. (After all, to be caught in a burglary would mean social disgrace.) Crime was Loeb’s way of discharging tension, of waking himself up.

This is also quite plainly the key to the Moors case. When he murdered Edward Evans, Brady was trying to involve David Smith, with the intention of making him a part of a criminal gang; his aim was to commit bank robberies. We may assume that, since he had been planning bank robberies from the beginning, he regarded his murders as some form of training for the ‘bigger’ crime. It was Brady’s intention to become a kind of all-round enemy of society, the English equivalent of Public Enemy Number One - with the difference that, like Charlie Peace, he hoped to remain undiscovered and live happily ever after on his gains. Crime would become a way of life involving continual stimulation and excitement.

And in this we can note another interesting aspect of the ‘pattern’. At any given level, crime contains an element that reaches towards the next level of the hierarchy. Charlie Peace’s crimes are crimes of ‘subsistence’ (to make a living), but he shows a powerful urge towards security and domesticity. Many ‘domestic’ crimes - Dr Pritchard, Constance Kent, Adelaide Bartlett - contain a strong element of sadism, reaching towards the sexual level. Jack the Ripper’s sex crimes contain a strong element of exhibitionism - in the lay-out of the corpses, the letters to the police - reaching towards the self-esteem level. And the crimes of Manson and Brady contain a distorted element of self-actualisation, reaching towards the creative level. (In my
Order of Assassins
I have labelled such killers ‘assassins’ – those who kill as a violent form of self-expression; we can see a clear relationship between such crimes and the ‘violent’ art of painters such as Munch, Ensor, Soutine or Pollock.)

The case that, above all others, embodies this notion of crime as a ‘Creative act’ is scarcely known outside the country in which it took place, Sweden, and may serve as a demonstration of the main threads of the preceding argument. It concerned a real-life Professor Moriarty, Dr Sigvard Thurneman, who came rather closer than Charles Manson to the dream of one-man Revolution.