The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [80]
Although a Scottish physician had coined the word hypnosis, the British tended to regard the practice as the stuff of superstition and quackery. So, in general, did the American scientists. By contrast, French researchers approached hypnosis as a science, working from a theory that it could achieve a specific neurophysiologic state, an unusual suspension of most mental activity. Gurney, who had been an early admirer of Richet and his work, had considered the research gap as he mulled over a possible book on hypnosis. As he’d told James ruefully, “I don’t know how it is to be done. The French have all the material!”
In Paris, well-known physiologists Jean Charcot and Pierre Janet (the latter an associate of Richet) were using hypnosis to treat nervous system disorders, including epilepsy. Charcot believed that hypnosis tended to tranquilize the nervous system, creating what appeared to be a dreamlike trance. The French scientists could not agree on how to define the trance itself. Charcot and some of his colleagues, working from a strict physician’s point of view, felt that it indicated an abnormal mind, so that similar effects should not appear in the mentally healthy. Psychologists argued that, done well, hypnosis could induce a trance in anyone, that a hypnotic trance revealed the ability of one mind to impose its will on another. They pointed out that people with no evidence of mental defect had been and could be hypnotized. It was in studying the healthy, psychologists said, that the most interesting questions could be asked, such as why some minds appeared more suggestible than others.
As it pertained to psychical research, Richet considered another aspect of hypnosis. He wondered whether the trance state relaxed mental barriers, thus allowing one mind to become more open, more responsive to the thoughts of another. It occurred to him that a genuine medium might create her own internal hypnotic trance, that perhaps Mrs. Piper’s Phinuit was a personality produced by self-hypnosis.
Certainly, there was evidence linking the hypnotic state to telepathy, some of it from Gurney and Myers. Richet had also conducted earlier experiments, hypnotizing patients at a Paris mental hospital. He still remembered one adolescent girl who’d been sent there for treatment. One day Richet had brought an American medical student with him on a hospital tour. After Richet had hypnotized the girl, he said to her, “Do you know my friend’s name?”
Of course she didn’t. She began to laugh.
Let’s make it easier, he said; “Look, what is the first letter of his name?”
She lay in the narrow cot, silent, apparently asleep. He was ready to walk away when she replied, softly, “There are five letters; the first is H, then E ... I do not see the third, the fourth is R, and the fifth is N.”
The student’s last name was Hearn.
Richet calculated that the odds of the patient getting it right by chance were something like two hundred thousand to one.
Only recently, his colleague Pierre Janet had hypnotized a patient named “Leonie” and sent her “traveling” away from her secluded country home. Janet had been testing the idea that in a hypnotic trance, the human mind could float, balloonlike, drifting to the location that its owner wished to visit. Leonie announced that she was going to Paris to visit M. Richet.
Suddenly, her voice sharpened and rose. She said, “It is burning!” She began to twitch and toss in distress. Janet moved to calm her down. Leonie relaxed into a sleeplike state again, but unexpectedly, anxiously opened her eyes, saying, “But M. Janet, I assure you that it is burning.” When Janet contacted Richet, he learned that the Paris laboratory had caught fire that morning and burned to the ground.
If there wasn’t a connection between the hypnotic trance and the medium trance, then Richet didn’t know his science. He agreed too with one of Gurney’s ideas, that hypnosis gave the scientist control over his subjects, reducing the possibility of cheating. The son of a doctor, trained in