Hypnosis & the Truth

Hypnosis is surrounded by a persistent myth: whatever a subject says while in a trance represents the real, deep-down truth. Lawyers have always been wary of the claim, although lately some have changed their minds. On film and videotape, psychiatric sessions with murder defendants under the influence of hypnotism and so-called "truth drugs" are being shown in U.S. courtrooms (TIME, Dec. 29, April 12). Last week, at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in Boston, New York's Dr. Herbert Spiegel warned that such evidence is dubious indeed.

A specialist in hypnosis as well as a professor at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, Psychiatrist Spiegel tested the cliches by choosing a volunteer who was "a normal, healthy neurotic like anyone else." While NBC-TV filmed the experiment for possible use in a documentary, Dr. Spiegel easily and quickly put his subject into a deep hypnotic trance. Next he told the man that he had important information about a major Communist plot to take over the television networks and radio stations. Dr. Spiegel provided no other information; he implied, however, that the subject could provide his own details and would not forget the story until he was touched on the left shoulder.

Who's Harris? Almost as soon as he was awake, the subject began talking about the plot. NBC's Frank McGee, who had been present throughout, tried to shake his story. But the more McGee questioned, the more elaborate the story became. Where had he heard about the plot? In a loft over a playhouse in Greenwich Village. What did he

remember about the loft? There had been an old movie poster of Rin Tin Tin on the wall, and he and his friends had been drinking Miller High Life beer. McGee asked if a Jack Harris had been involved. The name was completely imaginary, yet soon the subject slipped it into the conversation, confessing that Harris had really been the ringleader, and was a big man who 'looks like he could kill an ox."

Eventually, Dr. Spiegel put the volunteer into another trance and asked him what the real truth was. He stuck by the story. Then McGee upped the pressure by saying that he had witnesses who would swear that the subject had been in another city on the weekend he was supposed to have been told about the plot. "That's an absolute lie!" he shouted with conviction. "That's the action of Harris and his group. That man is a demon."

Finally touched on the left shoulder, the subject forgot the entire fabrication until he was shown the film five months later. He was flabbergasted. Left of center politically, he thought himself fundamentally skeptical of Communist-conspiracy theories. Even the details did not strike any familiar chord. He does not drink any beer; he had never been to a Greenwich Village loft and knew no Harris or anyone like the man he had so vividly described.

Skeptical Talk. The legal implications are important, said Spiegel. To begin with, the statements of a person under hypnosis are clearly not guaranteed truth, despite his obvious belief in what he is saying. Dr. Spiegel suggested further that prosecution witnesses or defendants are perfectly capable of telling a self-damaging story that they have been hypnotized into believing. Some persons, he says, are extremely susceptible and can even induce a "spontaneous trance state" in response to any pressure, for instance the pressure of a police interrogation. Then, if suggestions are made, the subject might well pick them up, incorporate them into a story and eventually make and sign a confession. The belief could endure through a trial, or the entire incident could be forgotten, thus accounting for suspects who cannot remember confessions they have already made.

Some of Dr. Spiegel's colleagues had doubts about his theory. McGee, it was pointed out, was aligned with Dr. Spiegel in the mind of the subject. Could the subject have been made to tell his story to the FBI? The current experiment did not answer that question, but to Dr. C. Knight Aldrich, a psychiatrist at the University of Chicago School of Medicine, the Spiegel film was nonetheless persuasive. "I am not saying that testimony under hypnosis has no place in a court of law," he said, "but it must be viewed as not having superior validity. Courts should be highly skeptical of testimony given under hypnosis."

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