subject: Stage Hypnosis - Is It Hypnosis? [print this page] Stage Hypnosis - Is It Hypnosis? Stage Hypnosis - Is It Hypnosis?
Is the hypnosis used in psychotherapy the same kind as the one used on stage? Will I let my patients float into the thin air? Will I make them go around and bark? Some of my patients, who didn't know hypnosis asked me these questions. These are very sensible questions regarding the fact that many people only know hypnosis from what they have seen on TV or in movies.
We can compare hypnosis to something else, for example, card tricks. Would you think that a famous poker player, like Gus Hansen is making card tricks? Or would you believe that someone good at card tricks is a good poker-player? Of course not. Hypnosis is a bit like that: Hypnosis can be used for a variety of things, and two of these things are therapy and stage hypnosis.
You have two kinds of stage hypnosis. One which is real hypnosis used on a subject (a willing person from the audience) and one which is tricks and doesn't have anything to do with hypnosis.
As a hypnotist, you can very well and very quickly find the spectators with high suggestibility. You use a preliminary suggestion test, such as asking the audience to clasp their hands and suggesting they cannot be separated. Some will follow. Some won't. If the hypnotist chooses the people who obviously were having real fun not being able to pull their hands apart, he'll have himself some very willing subjects.
When the person is on stage, you can little by little let him go deeper into hypnosis and use different possibilities. You have different levels of hypnosis, and you can do different things at a different level, so the hypnotist tries a first level thing: "let your hand go up and up, your hand is light as a balloon". If it works, there are some things you can make the subject do. Then you can go deeper and ask him to forget numbers (count from 1 to 10 and forget 6 or 7). If it works, some tricks can be used at this level. The hypnotist can go deeper and use the anesthetic trick. The subject won't feel pain (not much), and the hypnotist can use this to show different tricks with needles, hot, cold, etc. Of course, you will have hypnotists who will go directly down to this level and work from here. They will use the first couple of levels off microphone to check that the subject is deep enough. A stage hypnotist will generally use more than one person at the time because not everyone will go down to the same level so you can do things with A, you can't do with B, and so on.
In this case, the hypnotism technics that are used are real. They are the same, more or less, used by any therapist but instead of making the patient forget a number, we make them forget to smoke. Stage hypnosis is just another way to use hypnosis. In short, when some people saw how it was possible to influence others to do many things, they thought it was funny to see how far they could go and used the technics to have fun on a stage.
The other form of stage hypnosis is magic tricks and doesn't have anything to do with hypnosis. It might be a magician who never studied hypnosis and who is acting. Like the very famous Ronald van den Berg (his stage name is Rasti Rostelli). He pretended to be able to change the mind of any person sceptical about his talents. For his demonstration, he asked a sceptical girl on stage, borrowed a pack of cigarettes, teared out a piece of aluminium foil, gave it to her and asked her to chew a bit on it so it was really wet. Then he folded the wet foil into a plug, and gave it back to her. He asked her to hold it firmly in her hand. Then he said: "you have a piece of burning coal in your hand, it is red-hot and it is burning you". The girl dropped the plug on to the ground. She reported that it did, indeed, became "awfully hot".
In one case, one of the volunteers picked up the plug after she had thrown it down and was surprised to feel it still was hot. After analysis, it showed that the magician used sodium hydroxide powder (caustic soda) on the plug before handing it back. This reacted with the aluminium and made the paper indeed very hot. This is the only way you can "hypnotize" someone who doesn't want to be hypnotised.
Don't forget, magic is magic and hypnotism is hypnotism. Even though hypnotism can be used on stage, it doesn't mean that everything that is performed on a stage is hypnotism.
