Hypnosis: Memory Prod or Production (continued)

One of the characteristics of well-rehearsed hypnotic confabulations, in fact, is the utter confidence with which they are eventually reported. Such memories tend to become extraordinarily detailed and believable with repetition. "The more frequently the subject reports the event," Martin Orne has written, "the more firmly established the pseudomemory will tend to become." As a final caution, he warns that "psychologists and psychiatrists are not particularly adept at recognizing deception," adding that, as a rule, the average hotel credit manager is a far better detective. 
Unfortunately, clinical psychologists and other therapists appear to have little interest in playing detective, even when they realize that hypnotism often produces false memories. [FOOTNOTE: Most therapists, whether trauma specialists or not, object strenuously to the notion that they should "play detective" or encourage their patients to do so, seeking external corroboration for the "narrative truth" revealed in therapy sessions. The trouble is, some therapists already are playing detective by unearthing these supposed trauma memories. They encourage a belief system that has dramatic effects in the real world and then invoke their intuitive, subjective therapy stance.] It is easy to see how the current disastrous situation evolved, given the attitude of psychologists such as Roy Udolf, who wrote the Handbook of Hypnosis for Professionals in 1981. "There is little support in the experimental literature," he wrote, "for many of the clinical claims made for the power of hypnosis to provide a subject with total eidetic [accurate] imagery-like recall of past events." Nonetheless, he went on to assert that "the kind of memory that hypnosis could logically be expected to enhance would be . . . affect-laden material that the subject has repressed . . . [i.e.,] traumatic early experiences." Moreover, Udolf concluded that it doesn't matter whether such elicited memories are accurate or not. "A memory retrieved under hypnotic age regression in therapy may be quite useful to the therapeutic process even if it is distorted, inaccurate, or a total fantasy as opposed to a real memory."

Age Regression: Let's Pretend

One of the most convincing forms of hypnosis, to the observer and the subject, is age regression, in which a client is taken back in time to a sixth birthday or a traumatic incest incident at age four. During such regressions, to all appearances, the adult disappears, replaced by an innocent waif. The subject often speaks in a childish, high-pitched lisp. Handwriting becomes large and primitive. Pictures appear stick-like and lack perspective. During the reliving of a childhood trauma, a client might scream just as a toddler would and, if frightened enough, might wet her pants. 
Yet there is overwhelming evidence that "age regression" is simply role playing in which an adult performs as she thinks a child would. As Robert Baker puts it, "instead of behaving like real children, [they] behave the way they believe children behave." Psychologist Michael Nash has reviewed the empirical literature on age regression and has concluded that "there is no evidence for the idea that hypnosis enables subjects to accurately reexperience the events of childhood or to return to developmentally previous modes of functioning. If there is anything regressed about hypnosis, it does not seem to involve the literal return of a past psychological or physiological state." Even when hypnotically regressed subjects perform credibly, normal control subjects do just as well. As final evidence that hypnotic regression involves simple role enactment, Nash points out that "equally dramatic and subjectively compelling portrayals are given by hypnotized subjects who are told to progress to an age of 70 or 80 years." Most people would agree that such age progression involves more fantasy than accurate pre-living. [FOOTNOTE: In 1954, psychiatrists Robert Rubenstein and Richard Newman came to the same conclusion when they successfully "progressed" five subjects into the future under hypnosis. "We believe that each of our subjects," they wrote, "to please the hypnotist, fantasied a future as actually here and now. We suggest that many descriptions of hypnotic regression also consist of confabulations and simulated behavior." Incredibly, however, they exempted repressed memories from this logic: "We suspect, however, that our doubts do not apply to the reenactment of traumatic past experiences."]

Past Lives and Unidentified Flying Fantasies

Hypnotism has similarly proven indispensable in the search for past lives and in "remembering" UFO abductions. Although nothing is impossible -- maybe we really can remember former incarnations, and perhaps aliens actually do snatch us out of our beds -- most readers will probably be more skeptical of such claims than of recovered incest memories. Yet the similarities are startling, including the reliving of sexual abuse while under hypnosis. Past-life therapists (such as Katherine Hylander, whose interview appears in Chapter 5) take people back before their births to previous centuries in which they were raped, tortured, or maimed. Only by recalling and reexperiencing these terrible traumas can they be mentally healed in this life. [FOOTNOTE: The ultimate age regression in this life is, of course, to the womb. In 1981, psychiatrist Thomas Verny wrote The Secret Life of the Unborn Child, offering examples of just such a feat. Under hypnotic regression, one of his patients reported the following placental message: "I am a sphere, a ball, a balloon, I am hollow, I have no arms, no legs, no teeth . . . . I float, I fly, I spin." Similarly, one Survivor claimed in a 1993 lawsuit that her therapist had helped her remember prenatal memories. Another therapist helped her patient access a memory of being stuck in the Fallopian tube, which explained her "stuckness" in adult life.] 
"It is extremely common," Jungian therapist Roger Woolger wrote in Other Lives, Other Selves (1987), "for childhood sexual traumas also to have past-life underlays. I have frequently found that the therapeutic exploration of a scene of childhood sexual abuse in this life will suddenly open up to some wretched past-life scenario such as child prostitution, ritual deflowering, brother-sister or father-daughter incest, or else child rape in any number of settings ranging from the home to the battlefield." As an example, Woolger quoted one his clients who recalled a scene in a Russian barn during a previous life in which she was an 11-year-old peasant girl: "They're raping me. They're raping me. Help! Help! HELP! There are six or seven of them. They're soldiers."
Hypnotic regression to past lives has a venerable history, reaching back to 1906. Under hypnosis, Miss C, a British 26-year-old, relived the life of Blanche Poynings, a friend of Maud, Countess of Salisbury in the late 14th century. She gave verifiable names and details. When closely analyzed, a previous source for the information was finally revealed. Miss C. had read Countess Maud, by Emily Holt, when she was 12. She had unwittingly taken virtually all of the information for her "past life" from the novel.
For quite a while, the search for previous existences died down, but it received a boost in 1956 with the publication of The Search for Bridey Murphy. As with every well-documented case, it turned out that Virginia Tighe, the American woman who convincingly relived the life of the Irish Bridey -- even reproducing her brogue -- had indeed delved into her subconscious. However, what she pulled up was not a previous lifetime, but conversations with a Bridie Murphy Corkell, who had once lived across the street. 
Theodore Flournoy, who debunked the earliest past-life regressions, coined the term cryptomnesia for this inadvertent mixing of prior knowledge with past lives. Elizabeth Loftus calls the same process "unconscious transference," while other psychologists use the term "source amnesia." [FOOTNOTE: When he was president, Ronald Reagan proved to be a master of cryptomnesia. The movies in which he had acted appeared to be irretrievably mixed in his mind with reality, so that he frequently repeated fictional stories as if they had actually occurred. At one point, he even asserted he had personally taken documentary concentration camp footage at Dachau following World War II, even though Reagan did not venture outside the United States at that time. As biographer Garry Wills noted, however, "Reagan's war stories are real to him."] 
Regardless of what we call the phenomenon, it offers intriguing evidence that the mind is indeed capable of storing unconscious memories that can be dredged up during hypnosis, though Virginia Tighe's memories of her neighbor presumably weren't "repressed," because they weren't traumatic. Those who are recounting tales of their previous lives invariably have read a book, seen a movie, or heard a story about that era or personality. Given the expectation that they will relive another life, their fertile imaginations combine this knowledge with other mental tidbits to create a feasible story. Those who are told to expect some trauma in a previous life add an appropriate rape, suffocation, or burning at the stake to the stew. This is probably not, in most cases, a conscious process of confabulation, because the subjects insist that they have no knowledge of the particular historical period. Similarly, people who are retrieving repressed memories of abuse routinely combine reality with fantasy. They mix their own childhood photographs, stories they have heard, real memories, and stereotyped scenes from Sybil or The Courage to Heal into a satisfactory scene. 
As a further indication of human credulity, among the earliest practitioners of past-life regression was Colonel Albert de Rochas, who hypnotized clients near the turn of the century. Rochas thought he could literally progress his clients into the future. Perhaps if we can pre-live the traumas that will be forthcoming in our lives, we might heal ourselves properly now -- and confront the evil perpetrator before he has a chance to act! 
Similarly, although I consider UFO abduction memories to be far-fetched products of hypnosis, many well-educated, otherwise rational professionals, including Temple University history professor David Jacobs and Harvard psychiatrist John Mack, believe in such events. They have proof. They have heard their clients recall the abductions while hypnotized. In his 1992 book, Secret Life: Firsthand Documented Accounts of UFO Abductions, Jacobs describes his clients in terms that should sound familiar by now:

'They were all people who had experienced great pain. They seemed to be suffering from . . . a combination of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and the terror that comes from being raped. Nearly all of them felt as if they had been victimized. As I listened to them, I found myself sharing in their emotionally wrenching experiences. I heard people sob with fear and anguish, and seethe with hatred of their tormentors. They had endured enormous psychological [and sometimes physical] pain and suffering. I was profoundly touched by the depth of emotion that they showed during the regressions.'

Similarly, in Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (1994), John Mack is impressed by "the intensity of the energies and emotions involved as abductees relive their experiences," in which they report being grabbed against their will and "subjected to elaborate intrusive procedures which appeared to have a reproductive purpose." Mack acknowledges the similarity to repressed memories of sexual abuse. In one case, he says, a woman went to a therapist "for presumed sexual abuse and incest-related problems. Several hypnosis sessions failed to reveal evidence of such events." Instead, however, she recalled being abducted by aliens when she was six. Mack stresses that the UFO therapist must have "warmth and empathy, a belief in the ability of the individual to integrate these confusing experiences and make meaning of them . . . , and a willingness to enter into the co-investigative process." 
I am sure that David Jacobs and John Mack feel real empathy for these people, who truly believe that they have been taken to UFOs and forcibly subjected to bizarre sexual experimentation. [FOOTNOTE: John Mack's Abduction follows the same basic pattern as that described by Jacobs. His hypnotized subjects reveal that the aliens took sperm and egg samples and inserted probes into their vaginas, anuses, and noses. Mack's aliens, however, are ultimately benign, trying to save humans from ecological disaster. The expectancy effect appears to be at work here: Mack has long been an activist for environmental causes. It appears that his expectations are sometimes quite overt. One reporter invented an abduction story that Mack eagerly accepted. Prior to her hypnotic sessions, he "made it obvious what he wanted to hear."] But their findings seem only to confirm what is already known about hypnotism -- that subjects tend to "remember" whatever the hypnotist is looking for. The pain is real -- regardless of whether the memories are of past lives, UFO abductions, or incest by parents -- but it was more likely prompted and encouraged through the dubious means of hypnotic "regression." Investigators such as Jacobs and Mack dupe themselves and others because they genuinely want to help people, especially if, in the process, they can feel that they are also exploring uncharted territory. 

Copyright © 1998 to the author. Reprinted with kind permission