Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis by Robin Waterfield Page A

does then float up into the air, the hypnotist knows that the subject is hypnotized. For the subject, it is a peculiar feeling, I can assure you. You know what is going on, but somehow can't be bothered to stop your hand rising up off your knee, though you know you could if you tried. The postural-sway test is a little more dramatic. The client is instructed to stand up and make herself rigid, like a board. The hypnotist pushes her gently from behind, making her sway, and then tells her that when his hand is removed she will find herself being drawn backwards. So he pushes her and withdraws his hand – and she finds herself rocking backwards on to the hypnotist's waiting hands. These tests are likely to be employed as much as anything to convince the client that something is going on, but in fact a skilful therapist already knows how susceptible any given client is likely to be, and in any case has enlisted the client's support, which is the single most important factor in susceptibility.
    Some hypnotists prefer to use a device, rather than just the relaxing effect of their voice. The subject might be asked to stare fixedly at a bright object, and after a while the therapist will suggest that the patient is feeling sleepy. Whatever the induction technique, the therapist will then use suggestive procedures to deepen the trance. A common method is to get the client to visualize a set of stairs leading downwards … downwards … deeper and deeper. This will be repeated as often as is necessary during the process, if the trance seems to be getting shallower. Techniques seem all to be equally effective, so it depends on which ones the hypnotist and the client feel comfortable with. Further tests might be employed to check that the client is still entranced. For instance, the hypnotist might suggest that there is a mosquito in the room and the client will report (at the time and after the session) that he heard its whine.
    There is no difficulty waking someone up from a trance; on the contrary, the usual difficulty is keeping him in a trance. The hypnotist will probably simply suggest that the client ‘Wake up now’, or he may reverse one of the procedures: ‘You are climbing back up the stairs you went down earlier. When you reach the top stair you will wake up.’ One common waking-up instruction has the hypnotist counting backwards from five to one, at which point the subject wakes up, ready to implement whatever suggestions he and the hypnotist have agreed on during the session.
    Even if you are left alone, you will still come round from the hypnotic state. You will either fall into natural sleep, or wake up, and whichever of these happens is unlikely to take long. In a classic experiment psychologists Martin Orne and Frederick Evans hypnotized one batch of subjects but had others simulate hypnosis; the hypnotist left the room on some pretext; before long all the hypnotized subjects had come around, but those who were just pretending stuck it out for the whole half hour of the hypnotist's absence, because that is what they thought a hypnotized person would do.
    At the end of the session, the hypnotist will talk his client through the procedure, and is likely to give him an exercise in self-hypnosis to do at home to reinforce the beneficial effects of the session. This might be as simple as: ‘Every time you feel a craving for a cigarette, close your eyes, count to ten, and picture yourself jingling the extra money you have in your pocket as a result of not smoking.’
Methods of Treatment
    There are treatments without end, and I'll just be scraping the surface here. There's more in Chapter 11 . The method of treatment is likely to depend on the school to which the therapist belongs and the problem the client wants to solve. But nowadays most hypnotherapists are empirically trained rather than school trained, and so he is likely to use a range of treatments, culled basically froma Freudian or a