HYPNOSIS ON THE SMALL SCREEN — Cosmic Pancakes!

Hypnosis: The Big Sleep – (Equinox, Channel 4, 1994), Open Media, produced by David Britland

Given all the terrible portrayals of hypnosis in supposedly factual books and fictional films, it was an absolute joy to watch a documentary that not only appears to care about the truth, but also gets to the truth through the mouths of experts.

That said, in 1994 the ‘state debate’ was still raging in academia (spoiler: hypnotic states and trances are imagined), so this documentary pitted psychologists on the state side, such as Helen Crawford and John Gruzelier, against those on the cognitive side, such as Nicholas Spanos and Graham Wagstaff.

Indeed, Crawford’s opening quote shows the confusion in this fight: “Hypnosis is really focussed attention, but can also be diffused attention.” Um, yeah, it could be something, or it could be the opposite; you’d think after a century of research those supporting the idea of a state would have had a stronger description than a Barnum statement. Spanos, alternatively, is resolute: “Hypnosis isn’t a thing at all… It’s part of a cultural mythology.”

And so it goes on; this whole documentary is mostly competing arguments and disagreements, but that’s a good thing, because whatever you currently believe, there’s a good chance someone here agrees with you.

Spanos, who died between filming and broadcast, does most of the theoretical heavy lifting for the cognitive perspective, with Wagstaff delivering the final left-right-left punch volley to kill state and trance once and for all. We’ll come to that in a moment, but first we have to wade through more viewpoints and terrible adverts – yes, my (legit) copy includes the original broadcast adverts.

I’d forgotten that Renault decided the best way to sell the Renault 5 Campus was to present it with a brown bear. Or that Boots Opticians apparently cared about your eyes in 1994; we were watching this in 2022, only a few weeks after they mis-tested my eyes and told me I needed glasses, having recently mis-prescribed varifocals for my wife (we sought second opinions from a local expert to confirm both mistakes).

Gruzelier claimed that people under hypnosis get more focused and more imaginative, and Crawford stated, “I have colleagues in the United States and Britain who think hypnosis is nothing more than social compliance.” Spanos, wearing an obviously and specially chosen “Bad Attitude” t-shirt, explains that people engaged in hypnosis simply do the things they are supposed to do.

Drawing on an example from past life regression, he destroys the account 'memory’ by ‘memory’: at the time the participant claimed she was reliving (500AD), people didn’t use a date system of BC and AD; her descriptions of her nomadic life made little sense (not knowing her neighbours, for example), and the ‘recent’ difficulties she expressed were presented as unlikely for that period of history, but perfect for the 1990s. If that wasn’t sufficient, the documentary spoke with an expert on UFO recall, particularly that under hypnosis, with similar conclusions.

Where Crawford had mountains of EEG ‘evidence’, Spanos only had walls of boxes (no idea what they contained but I like to think they were where he stored all the old-fashioned hypnosis ideas he killed in the 1980s). But Spanos didn’t care for the EEG (and neither should you); he stated that dramatic effects are assumed to have dramatic causes – eg, the effects of suggestion are often assumed to be caused by ‘hypnosis’ – but that there were no neurological correlates of trance. Almost 30 years later we still have no neurological correlates, and the vast majority of scientists in this field have stopped looking, concluding that trance is not A Real Thing.

That said, if anyone needed strong evidence to suggest hypnosis is something weird, the documentary presented graphic films of surgery being conducted under hypnosis, including very invasive techniques on a leg and a nose. Throughout, the patients were wide awake (not in a traditional trance) and had not had any anaesthetic! Spanos explained that some surgery isn’t as painful as you’d think, but I have to say it looked gruesome.

Which takes us to Graham Wagstaff, with his pen holder in the shape of a human head. He attended a stage hypnosis show by Andrew Newton in Blackpool and recruited the participants for some interviews and experimentation the following day. One described it as “so aware of what you’re doing but can’t help yourself”. Almost all agreed that they had been “imagining along with the suggestions” and few claimed that they had been in a trance.

To push this idea further, Wagstaff asked someone (with no instruction or guidance whatsoever) to simulate being a good hypnotic participant. He gave suggestions that were successfully received, for age regression, eating a raw onion as an apple, and for being the ‘bridge’ for Wagstaff to sit upon. Throughout, the participant looked hypnotised and acted as a hypnotic participant would. After, they said that they “thought that was what you were supposed to do”, and stated, emphatically, “I wasn’t hypnotised at all”.

It’s a fantastic documentary that I urge you to watch if you can find a copy. If I was to summarise the viewpoints, I’d say that Wagstaff’s and Spanos’ arguments are well-formed and based entirely in their investigations into how hypnotic behaviour happens; Gruzelier and Crawford, conversely, appear to marvel at the behaviour and appear content with documenting it, rather than questioning it.

Given the time that has passed and that we now live in a post-Derren world, and also that those searching for a hypnotic state seem to now be searching for psychiatric evidence that highly responsive participants are somehow different to everyone else, isn’t it now time for a reprise? Not only did Spanos train low responders to become highly responsive, but his work was never disproved.

Many thanks to David Britland for pointing us towards this documentary and for supplying the text for the booklet that accompanied the programme, and to Open Media for approving the use of the screen grabs.

Addendum: Thank you to the reader who messaged to point out that this documentary is available in the British Film Institute’s (BFI) Mediatheque archive and that it can be viewed for free at the BFI’s London Southbank site.