[Published in Fortean Times, no. 62, April-May 1992, p. 63.]
Against Their Will
Further evidence against the assertion that hypnotised persons cannot
act contrary to their own moral code may be readily found (see 'The
Eyes Have It', FT58:36). William Corliss's The Unfathomed
Mind: A Handbook of Unusual Mental Phenomena, for example,
describes a set of experiments in which hypnotised subjects stuck
their hands into a box containing a rattlesnake and threw acid into
the face of an experimenter. (The snake was fake and the
experimenter's face was protected by unseen glass.) Corliss gives the
source for these experiments as Loyd W. Rowland: 'Will hypnotised
persons try to harm themselves or others?' in the Journal of
Abnormal and Social Psychology 34(1939):114-117.
Leo Katz's book of unusual legal cases, Bad Acts and Guilty
Minds: Conundrums of the Criminal Law (1987, Univ. of Chicago
Press, pp128-133), describes cases from Germany where unethical
hypnotists induced patients to give them large sumes of money, commit
crimes, and attempt murder and suicide (these attempts were all
failures). Katz's source is Paul J. Reiter, Antisocial or
Criminal Acts and Hypnosis: A Case Study (1958, Ejnar Munksgaard,
Copenhagen.)
Jim Lippard
Tucson, Arizona