Free Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis by Robin Waterfield

Susceptibility Scale, the Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility, etc.), and I don't propose to weigh up their pros and cons, except tosay that one of their chief benefits is that they have given some stability to psychological experiments on hypnosis. You can make up groups of subjects who score the same on the same scale of measurement, prepare control groups of ‘highs’ or ‘lows’ and so on.
    If a hypnotist insists on using just a single technique, he will sometimes fail, because not everyone is susceptible to the same technique. He has to be flexible. Even reluctant patients, with whom all other procedures have failed, may be put under by a confusional technique, in which, for example, a lot of suggestions are given in rapid succession about different parts of the body feeling light or heavy. I will briefly look at other ways of overcoming resistance in a later chapter, when I talk about the work of Milton Erickson, because this was one of his special gifts.
    It is often said that children between the ages of seven and fourteen are more susceptible to hypnotism than adults, with a peak at around nine or ten years of age. There may also be some truth in the modern perception that fantasy-prone individuals, those who are capable of losing themselves in a book or a film or a private fantasy, and who played highly imaginative games when they were children, are more susceptible than the rest. Hypnosis involves dissociation, and fantasy-prone people find it easier than the rest to dissociate, to separate off a part of themselves into imaginary zones, while the outside world becomes less real.
    There does seem to be good anecdotal evidence that it is hard to hypnotize people who are insane. The more a subject can concentrate on a single sensory input, such as the hypnotist's voice, without getting distracted, the easier the induction of hypnosis will be. This perhaps explains why crazy people are hard to hypnotize. But don't worry: if you aren't a good hypnotic subject, that doesn't mean you're crazy!
    Hypnosis is not a single phenomenon; it may well be a combination of a number of things, including the ability to fantasize and play roles, that makes a person more susceptible. If it has this complex nature, it would be foolish to look for simple correlates between susceptibility and personality types. In Victorian times, people were convinced that women were easier to hypnotize than men. Recent tests have not confirmed this finding; it was due tonineteenth-century prejudice about women being the weaker sex, along with the notion that hypnosis involves the dominance of will.
    Contrary to the popular view that you have to be stupid to be hypnotized, there is evidence that hypnotizability is correlated with intelligence, or at least with the ability to concentrate. But the idea is put to great comic effect in the 1949 film
Abbot and Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff
. Costello is suspected of murdering people in the hotel where he works as a bellhop. Karloff, a mystic, tries to hypnotize him, but Costello is just too stupid to be hypnotized. Self-esteem is actually a more important variable than intelligence: those with a low self-esteem are going to be harder to hypnotize, presumably because they are either more apprehensive, or less curious about exploring themselves and less willing to be treated.
    On the whole, then, it has turned out to be hard for psychologists, try as they might, to correlate susceptibility with personality types. It used to be thought that hypnotizable people are more in touch with their right brain than the rest of us. Briefly (except for left-handed people), the right side of the brain governs the left side of the body, and spatial and holistic functions, while the left side governs the right side of the body, and verbal, logical, linear thinking. We draw actively on the left side, but have to surrender, as it were, to the right side. One might expect an artist to rely more