Comments on: Hypnosis and criminal mind control in 1890s France

By: Marc Savage

Marc Savage — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 12:35:59 +0000

Interesting article…Although you mention people can’t be hypnotized against their will. That is not 100% true.
There are certain techniques that can get people to do what you want even against their will. A few hypnotic mind control experts know how to do this.
Charles Manson used these techniques to get many of his followers to kill for him.
Like everything else there are always exceptions to the rule

By: ChristianK

ChristianK — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 17:26:44 +0000

We know that it isn’t easy to get people to do something like killing another person via hypnosis.
There were however experiments that showed that it’s possible to get a proband to throw acid at the hypnotists.
Hypnosis can’t directly override someones will but it can rewire someone’s perception in a way that an act becomes okay (perceive acid to be clear water).
Afterwards the act of throwing water doesn’t conflict with their “will”, even when the water happens to be acid.

By: Mark Tyrrell

Mark Tyrrell — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 21:00:37 +0000

Hypnosis may have been the “command hallucination” of choice back then but when I worked with psychotics (more recently than the 19th century) people were much more likely to feel controlled through TV or the radio and I guess now possibly through email, msn, email etc.
Thanks to Mesmer hypnosis had been tagged with a “mystical” association. And George du Maurier’s character hypnotically controlling Svengali in his novel Trilby further shaped public misconceptions of hypnosis which always seep into psychotic delusions too I guess.
Robert Temple’s book: Open to Suggestion: Uses and Abuses of Hypnosis’ whilst betraying a lack of knowledge re the nature of hypnosis makes for reverting reading regarding the history of hypnosis and crime.