Date:   Thu May 12 1994  08:00:00
From:   Sheppard Gordon
To:     All
Subj:   Abductions & hypnosis
UFO                            -------------------------------

Hypnosis: Memory of make-believe?
01/20/94
The Toronto Star

   WHETHER they cluck like a chicken or recall a ride on a UFO, hypnotized
people are just trying to please the hypnotist when they supposedly tap into
past lives, says a professor who calls it hokum
___

 "You are now living in a different life,'' she was told. "Living in another
life that you lived before."The 22-year-old Carleton University student, who
had agreed to be hypnotized in a laboratory experiment, was  already in a
trance.

"You are now reliving that other life that you lived once before in a
different time. Who are you?"From a hypnotic daze burst a voice, deep and
masculine, vaguely Oriental. The male voice seemed alien coming from the body
of the female Caucasian.

"I am a Japanese fighter pilot,'' it said.

Animated, quick, the pilot talked about his life in Japan flying planes. He
described the clothes on his back. The year was 1940, he said.

Some say this experiment proves the profound power of hypnosis to alter
consciousness and tap into forgotten memories, even past lives.

Nicholas Spanos says it shows that what is drawn out under hypnosis is a grand
sham.

"You heard me,'' says Spanos, the Carleton professor who conducted the
experiments and has spent his life debunking hypnosis.

"She didn't know that the emperor was Hirohito. She said Japan was at peace in
1940. They'd been at war with China since 1937. She spoke American with a
Japanese accent. It was all a big fantasy."

Spanos is said to be the world's foremost critic of hypnosis. He has done
dozens of studies and published hundreds of papers and a book all showing, he
says, that hypnotized people are just trying to please the hypnotist by co-
operating with suggestions, whether it's clucking like a chicken or recalling
a ride on a UFO.

In hypnotherapists' offices across the country, patients are recalling hidden
selves, controversial satanic ritual abuse, repressed memories of sexual abuse,
even UFO abductions.

"If it's weird, hypnosis is probably involved,'' Spanos says. Hypnosis is
accepted by professional associations, including the Ontario Psychological
Association, which says hypnotherapy is widely used.

"It's heightened, focused concentration,'' says Richard Stern, a hypnotist and
family counsellor in Ottawa who uses hypnotherapy to help clients quit smoking
and to deal with emotional problems. "I can't say really how it works. I just
know it does."

Stern says a lab is not the place to test hypnosis.  "Subjects are probably
scared. They feel like guinea pigs,'' he says. "And the type of person working
in a lab is not going to be the dramatic, artistic, emotional type that does
it best."

According to Spanos, "there's now good evidence that there's a big compliance
component to hypnosis. People just go along because of the social pressure of
the situation."

In one experiment, Spanos wanted to see if he could get students to create a
hidden self if they were given the right suggestions under hypnosis.

He obtained an American tape of an interview with suspected murderer Ken
Bianchi under hypnosis. During Bianchi's trance, another personality named
Steve emerged and confessed to the murders.

In that case, the therapist used the same interview procedures he regularly
used to diagnose multiple personality disorder.

People diagnosed with this disorder behave as if they possess two or more
selves, each with its own characteristic moods, memories and behaviors.

Multiple personality disorder patients are usually women and often claim to
have been physically or sexually abused.

This is what the therapist told Bianchi after hypnotizing him: "I've talked a
bit to Ken, but I think that perhaps there might be another part of Ken that I
haven't talked to. And I would like to communicate with that part. And I would
like that other part to come and talk to me . . ."

Students were asked to pretend that they, like Bianchi, were accused of
committing a series of murders and were undergoing a psychiatric interview.
They were told nothing about multiple personality disorder.

The students were told to summon another part of themselves, just as Bianchi
had been. Most adopted a different name, referred to their primary personality
in the third person, and at the end of the interviews said they didn't recall
they had alter-personalities.

Meanwhile, a control group of students were told to imagine they were accused
murderers but were never asked to summon another part of themselves. Not one
produced a hidden self.

Spanos believes that the more imagination a subject has, the more vivid the
"memories'' under hypnosis.

In one experiment, 35 subjects enacted past lives.

They were asked about the time they lived in, whether their nation was at war
or peace and who the leader was. Spanos says they frequently gave inaccurate
information.

Another experiment was aimed at seeing if suggestions made during hypnosis
could lead subjects to recall child and sexual abuse in a past life.

Half the subjects were told that history shows children in earlier times
appear to have been frequently and severely abused and mistreated.

Those who were told about abuse reported a higher level of mistreatment than
those who weren't.

Spanos believes his work can partly explain why there has been an increase in
cases of repressed child sexual abuse, multiple personality disorder, or
satanic ritual abuse.

For example, he says that between 1920 and 1970 there were 12 cases of
multiple personality reported in all American psychiatric literature.

Since 1974, there have been thousands.

There are no formal standards laid down for hypnotherapists, he says, and many
"are using very, very leading interviews and then reinforcing the imaginings
as real memories.

"People start thinking maybe it's true; start imagining, `What if it were true?'
They get very upset. The same may be true for so-called repressed memories
of sexual abuse."

Spanos says his work helps explain false memory syndrome, where an increasing
number of people's "memories'' of child sexual abuse are believed to be made
up.


