I remember in the '60s as a little kid being taught---in school---that "hypnosis can't make you do anything bad that you wouldn't do while awake." Later on I started to wonder if that "fact" was pushed on us to keep the truth a secret---to reserve the nefarious uses of hypnosis for official use only.
Then a few years ago I opened a 1908 book I had lying around called "On the Witness Stand," by Hugo Münsterberg, then professor of psychology at Harvard and a leader in experimental psychology, which was a pretty new thing at the time.
The title threw me off, and I'd let the book sit on a shelf for a long time before finally cracking it. It contains some surprises---which maybe shouldn't have been surprises, considering it was published in 1908. Münsterberg's Wikipedia entry makes no mention of hypnosis, but he talks about it throughout "On the Witness Stand."
This passage grabbed me:
IT was in a large city which I was visiting for the first time. I went to see the hypnotic experiments of a friend, a physician for nervous diseases. He invited me to witness the treatment of a lady who had been deeply hypnotised by him for a local nervous disturbance. Her mind seemed normal in every respect. She was a woman of wealth and social position. When she was in hypnotic sleep, he suggested to her to return in the afternoon when she would find us both, and, as soon as he took out his watch, to declare her willingness to make a last will in which I should become the only heir to all her property. She had never seen me before and I was introduced to her under a fictitious, indifferent name. When she left the office after awakening from her hypnotic sleep, she did not take any notice of me at all. At the appointed hour she returned, apparently not knowing herself why she came. She found in the parlour, besides her physician and me, three or four others who wanted to watch the development of the experiment. She was not embarrassed. She said that she had passed the house by chance and that she thought it would be nice to show her doctor how much better she felt and to ask whether there was any objection to her going to the theatre. I then began a conversation with her about the opera. We talked for perhaps ten minutes on music and the drama, exactly as if we had met at any dinner party, and there was nothing in the least strange in her ideas or in her expression of them.
Suddenly my friend asked how late it was and, as arranged, took his watch out of his pocket. There was a moment of hesitation. The lady spoke the next few words in a stammering way; but then she rushed on and told us that she had not expected to find such a company, but that her real purpose in coming was to report to me that she had selected me as her heir and that now she wanted accordingly to make her last will. Up to this moment her action has been a mechanical carrying out of the post-hypnotic suggestion, but the really interesting part was now to begin. I told her that there must be a mistake, as she could not have seen me before, and I mentioned a fictitious city in which I claimed to live. At once she replied that she had just spent the last winter in that city, and that she had met me there daily on the street, and that from the first she had planned to leave me all that she owned. I insisted that at least she had never spoken to me. Yes, in that same city she had met me repeatedly in society. I represented to her the unnaturalness of leaving her wealth to a stranger instead of to her children. At once she replied that she had thought it out for years, that it would be a blessing for the children not to be burdened with riches, while she knew that I would use them in a philanthropic way. The others took part in the conversation, scores of arguments were brought up to discourage her from this fantastic plan. For each one she had a long-considered excellent rejoinder.
Finally, I told her directly that, as she knew, she had been hypnotised that morning and that this whole idea of the last will had been planted in her head by the witnessed suggestion of her physician. With a charming smile she replied that she knew all that perfectly well, but that she did not contradict and resist this proposition of the doctor simply because it by chance coincided entirely with her own cherished plans, which had been perfectly firm in her mind for a year. She would have written to me some day soon if I had not come to town. She went on that she was unwilling to hear any further doubts of her sincerity and that she was ready to take an oath that she had made up her mind in favour of such a testament long before she was hypnotised. To put an end to all this, she insisted that paper be brought to her, and then she wrote a codicil which left all her property to the fictitious man from the fictitious town. The doctors present had to sign as witnesses. I put the paper into my pocket, switched the conversation over to the theatre again, and, after a few minutes, she had evidently forgotten the whole episode. She treated me again as a complete stranger; and when I asked whether she happened to know the city before mentioned, I was told that she had once passed through it on the train. When she left the house, she had clearly not the slightest remembrance of that document in my pocket, which we others then burned together.
If I had been present as an uninformed stranger during that afternoon visit, I should have been so completely misled that I could not have thought of any additional inquiry or any further argument to test the validity of the testimony. Everything seemed to harmonise with the one plan which had been put into her mind. All her memories became falsified, all her tastes and emotions were turned upside down, all her life experiences were mingled with and supplemented by untrammelled imagination, coupled with the strongest feeling of certainty and sincerity, and yet everything was moulded by her own mind, with the exception of that one decision which had been urged upon her from the outside.
And this:
One aspect offers itself at once: the hypnotised person may become the powerless instrument of the criminal will of the hypnotiser. He may press the trigger of the gun, may mix the poison into the food, may steal and forge, and yet the real responsible actor is not the one who commits the crime but the other one who is protected and who directed the deed by hypnotic suggestion. All that has been demonstrated by experiments a hundred times. I perhaps tell the hypnotised man that he is to give poison to the visitor whom I shall call from the next room. I have a sugar powder prepared and assure my man that the powder is arsenic. I throw it into a glass of water before his eyes and then I call the friend from the next room. The hypnotised subject takes the glass and offers it to the newcomer; you see how he hesitates and perhaps trembles, but finally he overcomes his resistance and offers the sugar water which he must take for poison. The possibilities of such secret crimes seem to grow, moreover, in an almost unlimited way through the so-called posthypnotic suggestions. The opportunity to perform unwillingly a crime in the hypnotic sleep itself is in practical life, of course, small and exceptional. But the hypnotiser can give the order to carry out the act at a later time, a few hours or a few days after awaking.
Every experimenter knows that he can make the subject go through a foolish performance long after the hypnosis ended. Go this afternoon at four to your friend, stand before him on one leg and repeat the alphabet. Such a silly order will be carried out to the letter, and only the theoretical question is open, whether the act is done in spite of full consciousness, or whether the subject falls again under the influence of his own imagination at the suggested time into a half hypnotic state. Certainly he does not know before four o'clock that he is expected to do the act, and when the clock strikes four he feels an instinctive desire to run to the house of his friend and to behave as demanded. He will even do it with the feeling of freedom and will associate in his own mind illogical motives to explain to his own satisfaction his perverse desires. He wants to recite the alphabet to his friend because his friend once made a mistake in spelling, Might he not just as well run to his friend's house and shoot him down if a criminal hypnotiser afflicted him with such a murderous suggestion? He would again believe himself to act in freedom and would invent a motive. The situation becomes the more gruesome, as the criminal would have only half done his work in omitting to add the further suggestion that no one else would ever be able to hypnotise him again and that he would entirely forget that he was ever hypnotised. Experiment proves that all this is entirely possible, and that posthypnotic suggestion thus plays in literature a convenient rôle of secret agency for atrocious murder as well as for Trilby's wonderful singing.
Münsterberg tries to give human nature the benefit of the doubt with this reasoning:
It is true, I have seen men killing with paper daggers and poisoning with white flour and shooting with empty revolvers in the libraries of nerve specialists or in laboratory rooms with doctors sitting by and watching the performance. But I have never become convinced that there did not remain a background idea of artificiality in the mind of the hypnotised, and that this idea overcame the resistance which would be prohibitive in actual life. To bring an absolute proof of this conviction is hardly possible, as we cannot really kill for experiment's sake.
Ah, the good old days. Well, I'm sure that by now those experiments have been carried out...and replicated.
We can add one more step which is entirely possible: the hypnotiser may see a further opportunity to give the posthypnotic suggestion of suicide. The next day the victim is found dead in his room; everything indicates that he took his own life; there is not the least suspicion: and the hypnotiser is his heir in consequence of the spurious last will. Similar cases are reported, and they are not improbable. The easiness with which any hypnotiser can cover the traces of his crime by special suggestions makes the situation the more dangerous.
The point is,
they've known this stuff for 100 years.
And the conventional wisdom is still that "hypnosis can't make you do anything bad that you wouldn't do while awake." Is that what psychologists are still taught to believe?
The whole book is pretty interesting, and it's online:
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Munster/Witness/
