THE THIRTEENTH COMMANDMENT
Remote Depossession – Irene Hickman
Are you suffering from ghosts in your knees? Demons in your kidneys? Dark entities in your sinuses? If so, “Remote Depossession” is the only hypnotic solution to your psycho-physical woes to be officially approved by: The Dark Ones™️; the spirits of American clairvoyant Edgar Cayce and all whales and dolphins; “many saints” and Marys; and the demon formerly known as Rachaah. (The ‘Chinese-sounding’ entity called Lo Yuin on page 126 is now simply known as an agnostic interdimensional ‘Tricknotist’ who regrets manifesting for that particular séance…)
Apparently Remote Depossession also accounts for one-fourth of Jesus’s healing feats. And if it was good enough for The Prodigal Son, then who needs such trifles as citations, ethics, and basic common sense to get started as a modern mesmeric miracle worker?! Huzzah!
We first met ‘hypnotechnician’ Irene Hickman in her 1991 book, Mind Probe – Hypnosis. Trained as an osteopath, our Missouri-based author added hypnosis to her treatment work in the late 1940s and freewheeled into ‘past-life regression’, the subject of that debut book, and her own eccentric – somewhat isolated – belief system about hypnotism’s healing powers. This second and, I believe, final book, published in 1994, concerns ‘Remote Depossession’, which is a sort of soft-core maternal exorcism process that I’m surprised didn’t get Hickman and her coven coterie of hypnotherapists accused of witchcraft and abuse.
The book is a compelling call-to-action for (would-be) hypnotherapists and healers to expand into ‘spirit release therapy’. Hickman can’t claim ownership of this spiritual, spooky approach to hypnotism and self-help, but nor does she divulge who or what has influenced her beyond Cayce. She doesn’t strike me as motivated by money or fame, and how her followers might merge homespun exorcisms with a successful, sustainable hypnotherapy business is unstated.
Hickman, rather, is on a holy-ish lone mission, recruiting hypnotic helpers to achieve the “worldwide transformation” of “insane criminals, critically ill patients, incorrigible children, violent spouses, pain-racked clients, depressed and discouraged folks and others into productive, healthy, harmonious persons” using the techniques described in the book. She speaks to your fellow inner rebel-messiah – this work isn’t for the “timid” therapist; “boldness, assertiveness and fearlessness” are the necessary assets for, um, cos-playing a Catholic priest with, er, your knitting-circle cronies. Sorry: training as a Remote Depossession Hypnotechnician. A perfectly credible and acceptable ‘calling’.
I do appreciate the pomp and ceremony of A Hypnotherapy Session can include nebulous, metaphorical, imaginative co-created acts. For instance, symbolically releasing the malevolent spirit of Mr Gogo into The Light to rid oneself of a compulsion while Mother Irene smiles on can be quicker, simpler, more memorably impactful, and less socially excruciating than, say, three years spent explaining the sorry state of anyone’s upbringing to a hypno-psychoanalyst. But someone who’s diagnosed most of the globe’s population with “unwelcome non-physical parasites” (potentially hailing from the “sidereal world”, note) while simultaneously expressing uncertainty as to whether some people might instead have “Multiple Personality Disorder”, clearly isn’t qualified to help me – or whatever fragments of ‘personality’, soul, spirit, and consciousness an alter ego like Mr Gogo represents? To overcome this, Hickman scans people remotely and ‘frees’ them of their entities – without any contact or consent required.
Presumably, this is how Hickman winds up treating lost ghostly entities plagued with their own parasitic demons and devils. Is there any money in hypnotherapising the phantom of a spectre of a wraith of the old poltergeist living in an ageing rich man’s sock drawer, I wonder..? Time can but tell, I suppose… Her writing, which is poorly edited and proofed, can feel directional and comforting in the spiritual bog that was Hickman’s old America: who doesn’t want to hear from a ‘kindly’ grandmother stereotype with an unshakeable afterlife belief in the Amilius/Lilith myth. I wish I could picture her and her group therapy associates coaxing the spirits of ancient child sacrifice victims out of the living body of a girl afflicted with “soft eyes” (not A Thing) or curing another girl of headaches by exorcising a tentacle-covered ghost called Jim from her body and still find such scenes humorously absurd. Ugh.
Hickman does pause to question the rights and wrongs of her hypnotic am-dram sessions in the chapter on “meddling” – especially given the remote, anonymous nature of this hypnotic intervention. She writes: “I am of the opinion that if the Ten Commandments were to be expanded to twelve or thirteen, one of the added ones would be: “Thou shalt not meddle.” If you mentally meditatively void choosing between the numbers 12 and 13 while waiting to see what fuckery a bunch of credulous hypnotic seeker-participants get up to in the interim, then it’s a treat to play the twinkling-eyed ‘wise agnostic hypnotist’ no matter what unfolds realside.
Hickman died in 2002. I appreciated her 26 March 1999 personal inscription to ‘Lisa’:
“Welcome to the exciting adventure.”
I’m doing Decorative Gourd Season for the first time. It’s intuitive. Apparently some US/thematically inclined people POAs are fully out as doing it ever… in the first place..! Thinking. Controversial. Still useful. All my National Insurance entries are clear. Collectors of ‘insights’ are many things. Many. Just I appreciate the manyness of it all. The scale of ambitionness of some. Is just it’s a silver cream jug parade of Antiques Roadshowing that is was and always will be Public Service Broadcasting etiquettes.
I approved only of certain blogging. It shall be known.
Yours sincerely,
Amy
