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

a remarkable book called The Law of Psychic Phenomena (psychic here means simply ‘mental’.) Hudson was a student of hypnotism and he advanced the interesting notion that we all possess two minds or ‘selves’: the objective and the subjective. The objective mind is the practical part of us, the part that copes with external problems. The subjective mind looks inward, and copes with internal problems; it also ‘summons’ energy when we need it. (As we shall see later, modern research suggests that these two ‘selves’ are located in the left and right cerebral hemispheres of the brain.) Under hypnosis, Hudson says, the objective mind is put to sleep and the subjective mind takes over. In effect, the hypnotist himself becomes the ‘objective mind’ of the patient, and the patient obeys him just as if he were his own objective mind.
    When the schoolboy goes into a daydream, he has descended into the subjective mind. The schoolmaster’s shout of ‘Wake up!’ jerks him back into the real world - wakes up the objective mind.
    And here we come to one of the most crucial points in the argument. You do not need to be in a state of ‘abstraction’ or daydreaming to be ‘hypnotised’. Consider the following hypothetical case. You are in a hurry to get to work and there is an unusual amount of traffic on the road. Every light is against you, and you get more and more angry. The traffic light changes to green, but the car in front of you does not move. You are just about to lean out of the window and shout something insulting when the man turns his face. You recognise your boss. Instantly, your rage dissolves...
    What has happened? The anger and tension have trapped you in a vicious circle of rising irritation, in which your values have become exaggerated, subjective. Your rage against the traffic is quite irrational, for the other cars have as much right to be on the road as you have. And traffic lights are mechanical; they do not really turn red because they see you coming.
    When you spot your boss, realism breaks in like the snap of the hypnotist’s fingers. The circle is broken. Your objective mind once again takes over. You came very close to getting yourself the sack, or at least losing your chance of promotion. And all for a momentary flash of rage. You heave a sigh of relief that you recognised him in time. It is as if you had been woken up.
    Hypnosis, then, is not simply a trance state. It is, as Hollander says, basically a state of abstraction - to be trapped in the subjective vicious circle, having lost contact with reality.
    There is an obvious analogy between such a state and the blind resentment of a Charles Manson, a John Frazier, or an Ian Brady, and this leads to the interesting recognition that the ‘hypnotic domination’ that Manson exercised over his followers, and that Brady seemed to exercise over Hindley, emanated from a person who was himself hypnotised. Like the hysterical girl in the hospital, Manson was trapped in a world of unreality.
    Is this equivalent to saying that the criminal is ‘not responsible’? Hardly. For the vicious circle is, in a basic sense, self-chosen. When you get angry in a traffic jam, you are giving way to your anger instead of telling yourself realistically that you are only wasting energy. A part of you remains detached. But if the anger becomes habitual, this detached part gradually loses strength, becomes involved in the anger. The mechanism can be seen clearly in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment . Raskolnikov’s increasing resentment at his poverty, his sense of dependence on his family, slowly builds up into the vicious-circle mechanism - at which point ii seems to him reasonable and logical to murder the old pawn-brokeress for her money. The essence of the ‘hypnotic’ reaction is to ‘block out’ part of the real world, to refuse to recognise its existence - in this case, the fact that the old woman is a human being like himself. The novel shows