Most people have never been hypnotized. Almost everyone has an opinion about it. Those opinions come largely from stories: the villain with the piercing stare, the helpless victim, the swinging watch. Fiction built the popular image of hypnosis, and that image has proved hard to shift.
Svengali
The template was set in 1894 by George du Maurier’s novel Trilby, one of the most widely read books of its decade in Britain and America.
Trilby is an artist’s model in Paris who cannot sing in tune. Svengali, a sinister musician and hypnotist, puts her under his spell and turns her into a celebrated diva who performs in a trance and remembers nothing afterwards. Without him she cannot sing a note.
The book gave English the word “svengali,” for someone who dominates and manipulates another person. It also fixed three ideas in the public mind: the hypnotist has total control, the subject is helpless, and the subject remembers nothing.
Svengali is also an ugly antisemitic caricature, a reminder that the evil hypnotist has often been a vehicle for whatever a society feared.
Dr Caligari
In 1920 the German silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari brought the figure to cinema. A fairground showman exhibits Cesare, a “somnambulist” kept in a coffin-like cabinet, and sends him out at night to commit murders.
The film is a landmark of horror and of expressionist design. It added a new fear: that a hypnotized person could be made to kill.
The pattern continues
Variations on these two stories run through a century of popular culture:
- The programmed assassin, as in The Manchurian Candidate, where a soldier is conditioned to kill on a trigger.
- The comic trance, where someone is stuck acting strangely until a word or finger-snap releases them.
- The swinging watch and spiralling eyes of cartoons.
- The stage hypnotist gone wrong.
- The recovered memory, where hypnosis unlocks the truth about a crime.
The Sunken Place
A recent and striking example is Jordan Peele’s 2017 film Get Out. A character uses the sound of a spoon stirring in a teacup to hypnotize the hero, Chris, who is left paralysed and falling through a dark void, able to see but not to act.
Peele has said that the Sunken Place is the film’s central metaphor for marginalisation: being silenced however loudly you scream. It is not meant as a depiction of clinical hypnosis. But it draws its power from the same old fear of losing control of your own body to someone else.
What fiction gets wrong
| In fiction | In reality |
|---|---|
| The hypnotist controls you | You stay aware and can refuse |
| You remember nothing | Most people remember everything |
| You can be made to commit crimes | People reject suggestions they object to |
| It happens against your will | It needs your cooperation |
| You can get stuck | Nobody ever has |
| Hypnosis reveals hidden truths | It can create false memories |
| A stare or a watch does it | Words and attention do it |
What fiction gets partly right
- Absorption is real. People do become deeply focused.
- Suggestions can feel involuntary. That is the hallmark of a hypnotic response.
- Post-hypnotic cues exist, though they are weak and easily refused.
- Some people are highly responsive, and they are the ones stories are based on.
- Trust matters. Hypnosis does involve some vulnerability, which is why who you see matters.
Why it matters
These images have consequences.
- People avoid hypnosis out of fear of losing control, and miss a safe treatment for pain or anxiety.
- People expect too much and are disappointed when they feel ordinary.
- Belief in memory recovery has contributed to real miscarriages of justice.
- Practitioners spend the first session undoing what films have taught.
The first task of almost every hypnotherapist is to explain that it will be nothing like the movies.
Enjoy the stories
None of this is a reason to stop enjoying them. Trilby, Caligari and Get Out are compelling because they dramatise something everyone fears: losing control of oneself. That is what they are about. They are not documentaries about hypnosis.
The bottom line
Fiction gave us the sinister hypnotist and the helpless subject. Real hypnosis is cooperative, remembered, and far less dramatic. Knowing where the myths came from makes them easier to set aside.
Next in the series: Hypnosis, Autogenic Training or Muscle Relaxation: Which Should You Choose?
This article is for general information and is not medical advice.