A Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson Read Free Book Online

And the notion that lizards - or even crocodiles - can be reduced to immobility by a gentle pressure on the neck seems somehow all wrong. What on earth is nature doing, making them so vulnerable?
    The answer would seem to be that the vulnerability is not ‘intentional’. Like crime itself, it is a mistake, a disadvantage that has emerged in the process of developing other advantages. In order to build up a certain complexity - which seems to be its basic aim - life had to create certain mechanisms. The more complex the ‘works’, the easier it is to throw a spanner in them. A big car uses a lot of fuel; a big biological mechanism uses a lot of vitality. If this vitality can suddenly be checked or diminished, the creature ceases to have free will.
    Human beings, as Völgyesi points out, are far more complex than birds and animals. Yet the same principles apply. He noticed that the easiest people to hypnotise were those of a ‘nervous constitution’. Clever, sensitive people are far more easily hypnotised than stupid, insensitive ones. He noticed that these highly sensitive people usually had damp hands, so that he could tell by shaking hands whether a person would be a good hypnotic subject. He refers to such people as ‘psycho-passive’. People with dry handshakes are ‘psycho-active’. They can still be hypnotised, but far more co-operation is needed from the patient, and sometimes the use of mild electric currents.
    This is an observation of central importance. It means that clever, sensitive people are usually under-vitalised. They allow themselves to sink into boredom or gloom more easily than others. There is not enough water to drive the watermill, so to speak. Because their vitality is a few notches lower than it should be, it is easy to reduce it still lower by suggestion, and plunge them into a hypnotised state. In Hypnotism and Crime , Heinz Hammerschlag quotes a psychotherapist who got into a discussion about hypnotism in a hotel. He turned to glance casually at a young man sitting beside him on the couch; the young man said, ‘Don’t look at me like that - I can’t move my arms any more’, and sank with closed eyes sideways. This was pure auto-suggestion. Hammerschlag also has an amusing story of some practical joker - probably a medical student - who hypnotised a hysterical girl named Pauline in a hospital ward and ordered her to go and embrace the Abbé in charge of the hospital at four that afternoon. When the girl tried to leave the ward at four o’clock, nurses restrained her and she fought frenziedly. A doctor who suspected that the trouble was hypnotic suggestion placed her in a trance and got the story out of her. The original hypnotist was sent for to remove the suggestion. And even then she continued to have relapses until she was allowed to embrace the Abbé.
    In a case like this the problem is that the girl’s normal mental condition is close to sleep. She exists in a borderland between sleeping and waking. Above all, she is ‘under-vitalised’. Because of this, she lives in a permanent state of unreality, and her failure to embrace the Abbé reduces her to neurotic anxiety. Unless she can somehow be persuaded to make an effort to raise her own vitality, she is trapped in a kind of vicious circle. Neurotic anxiety lowers her vitality and makes the world unreal; her sense of unreality makes her feel that nothing is worth doing, and so increases the unreality and the anxiety.
    The schoolmaster who shouts: ‘Wake up, Jones!’ is, in fact, ordering Jones to increase his mental energy - to raise his vitality. Völgyesi achieved the same effect by sprinkling hypnotised frogs with a little sulphuric acid. And what precisely happens when a hypnotised subject is awakened? A vicious circle is broken; the critical self, the self that copes with the outside world, suddenly jumps to attention.
    This matter can be made clearer by borrowing the terminology of Thomson J. Hudson, who in 1893 produced