The Sleeper Effect: Hypnotism, Mind Control, Terrorism
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
John Frankenheimer, dir. The Manchurian Candidate , 1962. Raymond’s mother manipulates and controls newspaper and television images that affect the whole nation. 88 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00051 by guest on 23 September 2021 The Sleeper Effect: Hypnotism, Mind Control, Terrorism STEFAN ANDRIOPOULOS Anxieties about clandestine terror cells have been prevalent in popular culture and political discourse since the attacks of September 11, 2001. Television shows such as Sleeper Cell: American Terror and 24 center on the frightening figure of the “sleeper”—a terrorist who lies dormant in our midst, living an ostensibly normal life while secretly plotting acts of destruction and mayhem. Corresponding to and possibly inspired by these fictional scenarios was the real-life but failed attempt to explode a bomb-packed car in New York’s Times Square by Faisal Shahzad, a natu - ralized U.S. citizen who lived in a small town in Connecticut. But the fear-provoking figure of the sleeper has a long prehistory—in Cold War culture and at the end of the nineteenth century. The Manchurian candidate Raymond Shaw seems to be a patriotic American, a war hero who earned the Medal of Honor fighting Communist North Korea. But as readers of Richard Condon’s best-selling novel know, he is in reality under “remote control,” waiting to be activated by his “operator” who will compel him to commit murder and to participate in an elaborate plot that is meant to destroy American democracy. 1 This fictional Cold War scenario of a brainwashed clandes - tine assassin coincided with contemporaneous warnings against the hypnotic power of advertising and theories of propaganda that described the delayed and clandestine workings of unreliable information as the so-called sleeper effect. But even earlier, at the end of the nineteenth century, medical researchers, legal theo - rists, and literary authors raised similar concerns, anticipating fantasies of absolute mind control by invoking the ostensibly unlimited power of hypnotic suggestion. During the 1880s French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot legitimized hypnosis as a subject of serious medical study. Charcot’s interest lay in a detailed clinical description of the “grand hysterical attack,” and he asserted a constitutive link between hysteria and hypnotism. According to Charcot, only hysterics could be hypnotized. But this assumption of a constitutive link between hypnosis and a Grey Room 45, Fall 2011, pp. 88–105. © 2011 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 89 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00051 by guest on 23 September 2021 pathological state of our nervous system was vehemently contradicted by other medical researchers. In diametrical contrast to Charcot, the doctors of the “Nancy School” defined hypnosis not as a disease of the nervous system but as a state akin to sleep. This conception was first formulated in Ambroise Liébeault’s study Of Sleep and States Analogous to It (1866) and was then adapted in Hippolyte Bernheim’s works, which found enormous resonance in the 1880s. 2 In the preface to his On Suggestion and Its Therapeutic Applications (1886), Bernheim directly opposed Charcot, insisting that the hypnotic state was “not a neurosis analogous to hysteria.” 3 Bernheim asserted that the “induced sleep” did not differ from a “natural” one. 4 The affinity of hypnosis to natural sleep also explained why “the overwhelming majority of persons” were “suggestible” even though they did not suffer from hysterical symptoms. But to account for the role of suggestion, Bernheim expanded Liébeault’s notion of hypnosis. In a circular equation of hypnosis and suggestion, Bernheim wrote, “To define hypnosis as an induced sleep, is to give a too narrow meaning to this word. I define hypnotism as inducing a specific psychic condition of increased suggestibility. It is sugges - tion that generates hypnosis.” 5 Whereas Charcot and his disciples characterized hypnosis as a physical con dition of “heightened neuro-muscular excitability” ( l’hyperexcitibalité neuro-musculaire), Bernheim conceived of hypnosis as a mental or “psychic condition,” marked by an increased suggestibility. 6 The emerging rapport between hypnotist and hypnotized subject was alleged to constitute a relationship of unlimited power on the hypno - tist’s part. Even Charcot asserted, in his description of the somnambulist phase of “grand hypnotism,” “Our power does not encounter any limits in this domain; for we can extend our influence almost toward the infinite.” 7 Bernheim in turn repre - sented the hypnotized subject as an “automaton controlled by a foreign will.” 8 As Bernheim and numerous other physicians affirmed, the hypnotized subject func - tioned as a sort of medium who could even be compelled to commit crimes, against his or her own will. Anticipating Cold War anxieties of absolute mind control, the medical theories of the école de Nancy thereby raised the “terrifying specter of hypnotic crime.” 9 Because no unequivocally verified cases of crimes committed under hypnosis were known, many medical researchers staged simulated hypnotic crimes in order to prove their possibility. Auguste Forel, who taught in Switzerland, described one such experiment: 90 Grey Room 45 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00051 by guest on 23 September 2021 To an older man of good suggestibility, whom I had just hypnotized, I gave a revolver that Mr. Höfelt himself had previously loaded with blanks only. Pointing to H., I explained to the hypnotized that the latter was a thoroughly evil person and that he should shoot him dead. With utter determination he took the revolver and fired a shot directly at Mr. H. Mr. H., simulating an injured person, fell to the floor. Then I explained to the hypnotized man that the fellow was not quite dead yet and that he should shoot him again, which he did without hesitation. 10 In addition to Forel, the physicians Bernheim, Edgar Bérillon, Henri-Étienne Beaunis, Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, and the young Arthur Schnitzler staged similar “performances” ( Vorstellungen )—all for the ostensibly scientific purpose of prov - ing to their largely judicial audiences that hypnotic crimes were feasible. 11 But the notion of sleep was central not only to Liébeault’s definition of hypnosis, which was extended by Bernheim to include phenomena of waking suggestion. A different, less conspicuous deployment of the term can also be observed in Bernheim’s description of so-called posthypnotic suggestions. In addition to his experiments on the therapeutic and criminal use of hypnosis, Bernheim explored “suggesting to a somnambulist actions . which were to be carried out not during hypnosis but after awakening.” 12 Bernheim conceived of such a suggestion as secretly hatching in the subject in whom it had been implanted under hypnosis. When the time arrived for its execution—which could be months later—the embed - ded suggestion took control of the body and was promptly carried out. Transferring the notion of sleep from the somnambulist or sleeper to the hypnotic command itself, Bernheim writes in his 1886 treatise De la suggestion , A suggestion can thus be sleeping unconsciously in the brain into which it has been implanted during sleep and will not emerge before the day assigned in advance for its emergence. Further research is necessary in order to elucidate this curious fact of psychology and to establish how long a hypnotic suggestion can thus, according to hypnotic order, remain latent before its realization. 13 Bernheim’s description of this “curious fact of psychology” highlights the latency of the implanted hypnotic suggestion that is dissociated from our waking con - sciousness and that does not manifest itself before the time for its execution has arrived. The hypnotized subject therefore has no way of detecting hidden sugges - tions that might be lurking in his or her brain. In 1915, Sigmund Freud described these posthypnotic suggestions as an early experimental demonstration of the Andriopoulos | The Sleeper Effect: Hypnotism, Mind Control, Terrorism 91 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00051 by guest on 23 September 2021 boundary that separates our unconscious from our ego: “Incidentally, even before the time of psychoanalysis, hypnotic experiments, and especially posthypnotic suggestion, had tangibly demonstrated the existence and agency of the mental unconscious.” 14 But in the late nineteenth century, many physicians were less interested in the theoretical implications of successful posthypnotic suggestions, focusing instead on fictional scenarios of criminal suggestion, which they presented as real. The Swiss researcher Forel came to see a particular danger in the employment of posthypnotic suggestions in which, in addition to a crime and the time set for its execution, the idea of “free volition” was implanted, causing the hypnotized person committing the crime to believe in his or her own free will. As Forel wrote, One of the most insidious ruses of suggestion, however, lies in the use of timing along with implanting amnesia and the idea of free volition in order to prompt a person . to perform a criminal act. That person then finds himself in a situation that is bound to create in him every illusion of spontaneity while in reality he is only following the command of someone else. 15 The belief in perfectly camouflaged suggestions produced the powerful paranoia that an unlimited number of hypnotic crimes could be committed without being recognized as such. In later editions of his textbook Forel shifted from asserting the reality of such hypnotic crimes to indicating their mere possibility. In 1907 he wrote, “One of the most insidious ruses of suggestion, however, would be the not impossi - ble use of timing along with implanting amnesia and the idea of free volition in order to prompt a person . to perform a criminal act.” 16 But Forel never renounced the plausibility of this scenario, which emerged from a reciprocal exchange between medicine, law, and literary fiction.