154 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 29, Number 2  June 2006
‘‘Hypnotizzy’’ in the Cold War:
The American Fascination with
Hypnotism in the 1950s
Robert Genter
In early 1956, amidst a burgeoning civil rights
movement and a presidential election, swarms of
journalists, historians, and genealogists in the Unit-
ed States were frantically searching for biographical
information on a nineteenth-century Irish woman
named Bridey Murphy who may or may not have
actually existed. The ‘‘riddle of Bridey Murphy’’
began in 1954 when the Denver Post published a
three-part installment by reporter William Barker
concerning the strange experience of 33-year-old
Colorado housewife Virginia Tighe who, under
hypnosis, had transformed into the personality of a
long-deceased Irish woman from Cork. When over
10,000 letters from local readers poured into the
newspaper, Morey Bernstein, the Pueblo business-
man and amateur hypnotist who had conducted the
sessions with Tighe, decided to write his own ac-
count of the incident. The Search for Bridey Mu-
rphy, published in January 1956 by Doubleday &
Company, recounted Bernstein’s 1952 hypnotic ses-
sions with ‘‘Ruth Simmons,’’ his pseudonym for
Tighe. According to Bernstein, he had gained inter-
est in hypnotism after witnessing the cousin of one
of his business associates perform a humorous dem-
onstration on a hapless young woman, a demon-
stration that led him ‘‘into a whirlwind investigation
of hypnosis, telepathy, and clairvoyance’’ (15).
After a detailed study of the history and tech-
nique of hypnotic induction, Bernstein began
Robert Genter is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the department of history at the University of Michigan. He has previously published
articles on Ralph Ellison, Lionel Trilling, and William James.
The Journal of American Culture, 29:2
r2006, Copyright the Authors
Journal compilation r2006, Blackwell Publishing, Inc.
practicing his art on his wife and neighbors.
Bernstein was particularly fascinated by the phe-
nomenon of age regression; the ability of hypnotic
subjects to relive or recall past incidents, including
those of early childhood. His successful experi-
ments with age regression soon led Bernstein to
wonder if he could use hypnotism to pry even
deeper into the recesses of the human mind, to
determine if the mind might possess ‘‘unique cre-
ative forces which transcend the space-time-mass
relations of matter’’ (63). After persuading Ruth
Simmons, a family friend and one of his former
hypnotic subjects whom he had once successfully
regressed to early childhood, Bernstein used a
hypnotic trance to help Ruth explore her memory
for ‘‘other scenes from faraway lands and distant
places’’ (111). After several minutes, Ruth Simmons
began speaking in an Irish brogue and referred to
herself as Bridey Murphy, the reincarnated spirit
of a nineteenth-century Irish housewife.
Bernstein conducted several more sessions
with Ruth Simmons throughout the late months
of 1952 in order to record as much information on
Bridey Murphy as possible. Born in 1798 in a small
wooden house, Bridey was supposedly the red-
haired daughter of Duncan Murphy, a barrister liv-
ing in Cork, and his wife Kathleen. At the age of
seventeen, Bridey met and married John MacCar-
thy, another Cork barrister, and moved to Belfast
 ‘‘Hypnotizzy’’ in the Cold War  Robert Genter
where they lived in a small cottage on Dooley
Road. In her conversations with Bernstein, Bridey
painted an image of a simple and pleasant life,
learning to play the lyre and dancing Irish jigs,
befriending Father John Goran of St. Theresa’s
church, patronizing a local grocer named Car-
rigan, and cooking simple Irish meals of boiled
beef and onions for her husband. Bridey claimed
that she died at the age of sixty-six after a terrible
fall down a flight of stairs and lived a transient
life-after-death until she was reborn in the United
States in 1923 as Ruth Simmons. Believing that his
experiments with Simmons had proven that
‘‘some persons do retain memories of a previous
life’’ (216), Bernstein concluded his account with
enthusiastic speculations about the metaphysical
wonders the tool of hypnotism might uncover.
Curiosity over the supposed power of hypno-
tism and the possibility of reincarnation trans-
formed The Search for Bridey Murphy into a
national phenomenon. The initial press run of
10,000 copies proved inadequate; by the middle of
March, over 200,000 copies had been sold. The
book remained on the New York Times bestseller
list for twenty-six weeks and was eventually
translated into thirty different languages in
thirty-four different countries. An audio record-
ing of Bernstein’s first hypnotic session with
Tighe sold 30,000 copies. Reporters from the
Denver Post, the Chicago Daily News, and Life
magazine were dispatched to Ireland to determine
the veracity of Bridey’s testimony. Paramount
Studios released a film adaptation later that same
year featuring Teresa Wright as Ruth Simmons
and Louis Haywood as Morey Bernstein. Radio
stations featured popular song titles such as ‘‘The
Love of Bridey Murphy’’ and ‘‘The Ballad of
Bridey Murphy.’’ Local businesses and institu-
tions followed suit. A restaurant in Houston
served a ‘‘reincarnation cocktail.’’ The Rehoboth
Art League of Delaware remained their annual
masquerade dance the ‘‘Reincarnation Ball.’’ Car-
toons in the nation’s newspapers featured sketches
of parents greeting their newly born infants in
delivery rooms with signs reading ‘‘welcome
back.’’ Television hypnotists induced age regres-
sion in a number of participants, discovering their
155
past lives as German leather merchants, French
peasants, English princesses, and, in one case, a
horse. The strange case of Bridey Murphy had
indeed placed the nation, as Life magazine noted,
into a ‘‘hypnotizzy.’’1
The History of Hypnotism
The frenzy caused by The Search for Bridey
Murphy was very problematic for practicing psy-
chiatrists because it once again associated hypno-
tism with the magical, the mystical, and the
middlebrow and unearthed its problematic histo-
ry.2 After an eighteenth-century Viennese physi-
cian Franz Anton Mesmer was disciplined by a
Parisian investigating committee for practicing a
debunked ‘‘magnetic cure’’ in which he manipu-
lated, through a series of gestures or ‘‘passes’’ over
the bodies of his patients, the ‘‘electric’’ fluid cir-
culating in the human body, any psychological
manipulation of the mind has been associated
with ‘‘mesmerism’’ and consequently with char-
latanry. James Baird, an English surgeon, coined
the term hypnosis in the 1840s from the Greek
word hypnos, meaning sleep, after he dispensed
with Mesmer’s unnecessary melodrama and
learned to place patients into a trance by having
them stare at a bright object. Since Baird offered
hypnosis merely as an anesthetic for use in sur-
gery, it was not until physicians in the late nine-
teenth century became interested in ferreting out
the causes of nervous disorders that hypnotism
was given proper attention. In the 1880s, two
French doctors, A. A. Liebault and Hypolite
Bernheim, experimented with the use of hypnotic
induction in treating hysterical patients, forming
what came to be known as the Nancy School of
Hypnotism. In 1889 a young Viennese neurolo-
gist, Sigmund Freud, traveled to Nancy to learn
the art, hoping the technique might provide the
key to opening the subconscious minds of his pa-
tients. In 1895 Freud and Joseph Breuer published
their classic work Studies in Hysteria and noted
their successful use of hypnotism to break
through stubborn psychic resistances. But Freud
156 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 29, Number 2  June 2006
soon came to worry that hypnosis produced a too
authoritarian relationship between therapist and
patient and consequently did not help to unearth
the deeper reasons such experiences were re-
pressed. He eventually replaced hypnotism with
the more benign method of ‘‘free association,’’ the
central technique in psychoanalytic treatment.
Freud’s transition from the spellbinding effects
of a swinging watch to the relaxed comfort of the
patient’s couch effectively jettisoned hypnotism
from most therapeutic practices, and the art of
suggestion was again relegated to the entertainment
stage, as magicians, vaudevillians, and illusionists
used hypnotism for ‘‘mesmeric’’ purposes. But the
bullets of World War II quickly changed the pro-
fessional status of hypnotism, if not psychology, as
a whole. An explosion of interest in psychological
treatment and mental health in general began dur-
ing the war, as congressional leaders, military of-
ficials, and army doctors recognized the connection
between the mental health of American soldiers and
the successful military, economic, and political ex-
ecution of the war.3 Government officials were very
much aware of the fact that the treatment of vet-
erans with psychiatric disabilities from the previous
war had cost approximately one billion dollars. A
detailed screening process was established by the
Selective Service System that weeded out roughly
12% of the 15 million men examined for apparent
psychiatric handicaps. Screening, of course, was the
first step; military officials also established clinics
for the treatment of psychiatric casualties and
created training facilities at the Brooke General
Hospital in Texas and the Lawson General Hospi-
tal in Atlanta for combat psychiatrists. The
Neuropsychiatry Consultants Division of the
Surgeon General’s Office reported that between
January 1, 1942 and June 1945 there were approx-
imately one million hospital admissions from the
Army for neuropsychiatric disorders, a rate of ap-
proximately forty-five admissions per 1,000 sol-
diers a year (Appel 433).
Psychiatrists soon were attached to military
divisions to advise in the management, treatment,
and early detection of neuropsychiatric patients.
Divisional psychiatrists were instructed in War
Department Circular #290 issued in July 1943 to
aid military commanders in imparting information
about ‘‘mental hygiene’’ and in developing the
‘‘mental toughness essential to combat troops’’
(Smith 303). Unfortunately a limited number of
psychiatrists were forced to deal with an exponen-
tial number of casualties. In his 1948 survey Psy-
chiatry in a Troubled World, William Menninger,
Chief Consultant in Neuropsychiatry to the Sur-
geon General, detailed the endless psychological
disorders therapists encountered in wartime pa-
tients: depression, free-floating anxiety, nervous-
ness, separation anxiety, paranoia, paralysis,
stuttering, compulsiveness, anorexia, amnesia, vom-
iting, and diarrhea (121). Patients with minimal
disturbances were treated in clearing stations close
to the front; others needing more detailed psycho-
therapy were moved to ‘‘exhaustion centers’’ away
from combat areas; and the more severe cases
needing extensive treatment were evacuated to
mental hospitals in the United States (Herman 115).
The exigencies of combat combined with the
inadequate number of trained personnel forced
psychiatrists to reexamine their disciplinary bias
against hypnotism as a tool of treatment. Two Ar-
my psychiatrists, Lieutenant Colonel Roy Grinker
and Captain John Spiegel, in their treatment of
‘‘war neuroses’’ at a base hospital in Algiers during
the Tunisian campaign in 1943, developed a treat-
ment known as ‘‘narcosynthesis’’ in which a seda-
tive such as sodium amytal was used to induced
hypnosis. The goal was to help soldiers ‘‘re-
experience’’ the emotions associated with their
battle experience and begin ‘‘synthesizing’’ their
repressed memories back into their ‘‘war disinte-
grated egos’’ (79). Narcosynthesis provided an ef-
fective means of dismantling the defensive barriers
within the patient’s mind and helping induce
abreaction, the emotional and personal reliving
of the damaging experience. Robert Heath and
Stephen Sherman, assistant surgeons at Merchant
Marine Centers, also detailed the successful use of
intravenous barbiturates in helping ‘‘to uncondi-
tion the patient to his traumatic episode’’ (357).
The only difficulty with narcosynthesis, they
warned, was the inability ‘‘to limit the patient
to the reliving of this specific experience only’’
without bringing to the surface ‘‘old neurotic con-
 ‘‘Hypnotizzy’’ in the Cold War  Robert Genter
flicts’’ (357). Heath and Sherman also noted that
narcosynthesis was only able to be administered
over relatively short periods of time. Hypnotism,
as a result, was a much faster and safer tool of
treatment. Because patients awakening from a
hypnotic trance did not encounter problems with
grogginess or muscular coordination as sometimes
occurred with the use of drugs, hypnotism, Heath
and Sherman argued, was a powerful adjunct to an
over-all therapeutic program.
Other accounts of the successful use of hyp-
notism soon emerged. In a 1943 article ‘‘Hypnosis
in the Treatment of Neuroses Due to War and to
Other Causes,’’ Dr. Charles Fisher detailed his
experience with severely traumatized soldiers
from the Coast Guard, the Maritime Services,
and the Merchant Marines who had been evacu-
ated to the neuropsychiatric clinic at the United
States Marine Hospital on Ellis Island. As the av-
erage length of stay for patients with ‘‘acute neu-
roses’’ was only 3–4 weeks, Fisher recognized that
hypnotism was the fastest method for ‘‘bringing
into consciousness dissociated or repressed
thoughts after the resistances have been broken
through, in the same way as is done in psycho-
analysis’’ (166). Likewise, Captain Fred Kartchner
and Lieutenant Ija Korner of the Neuropsychiatric
Section of the 147th General Hospital of the
US Army documented the successful use of
hypnosis in shortening the period of treatment.
Government officials were soon convinced. A
1944 review of hypnotic treatment, Hypnotherapy,
by Margaret Brenman and Merton Gill was sent to
every Army psychiatrist working in the field.
Medical officers trained in combat psychiatry at
the School of Military Neuropsychiatry at the
Mason General Hospital in New York received
instruction on the use of hypnotism.
But the best publicity came from psychiatrists
working on the front lines. In 1944, under the
direction of Colonel M. Ralph Kaufman, the chief
neuropsychiatric consultant for the US Army in
the Pacific Ocean Areas, and Lieutenant Colonel
Oscar Markey, the neuropsychiatric consultant
for the Tenth Army, a team trained in the field use
of hypnotism was established during the Philip-
pines campaign. A field hospital near the front
157
lines on Leyte was converted into a psychiatric
treatment center for the rehabilitation of psycho-
logical casualties. Kaufman resisted the reliance
on sedatives as a therapeutic method because the
drugs often interfered with the ‘‘interpersonal re-
lationship’’ between the medical officer and the
soldier (414). Hypnotism, Kaufman discovered,
was ‘‘surprisingly successful’’ in bringing about
‘‘the acceptance and mastery by the ego of trau-
matic experiences’’ (415). This success in the Phil-
ippines led to the increased use of hypnotic
practices during the Okinawa campaign in 1945,
probably the site of the most extensive use of hyp-
notism as a therapeutic practice on the battlefield.
After the war, many psychologists became ac-
tive proponents for research on civilian patients.
Dr. John Watkins, chief clinical psychologist at the
Welch Convalescent Hospital in Daytona Beach,
Florida, in his 1949 book, Hypnotherapy of War
Neuroses, offered the most detailed discussion of
the wartime use of hypnosis. Patients who went
through his particular hospital, Watkins explained,
were ‘‘men from the Anzio Beachhead, from
Cassine, from St. Lo, from the Battle of the Bulge,
and from other well-known battlefields of the
second World War’’ (8). Those casualties who did
not respond to group treatment (recreational and
educational activities) were sent to Company F,
the Special Treatment Center, where they under-
went hypnotic induction. Watkins concluded his
summary with a plea to his colleagues and their
respective institutions, a plea commonly heard
from psychiatrists who had successfully utilized
hypnotic treatment during the war—‘‘our major
universities, instead of looking askance at any
psychologist who wishes to do research in hyp-
nosis, might better provide funds, laboratories,
and equipment for its study’’ (355). Other psy-
chologists followed Watkins’s lead and promoted
this ‘‘Cinderella science’’ in the popular press.4
From the Battle¢eld to the
Dentist’s Chair
After the end of hostilities, the psychological
profession vaulted into public discourse on the
158 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 29, Number 2  June 2006
wave of enthusiasm it had generated during the
war, and its popularization dramatically increased
the popularization of hypnotism.5 Concerns
about the psychological state of American soldiers
so publicly discussed during the war immediately
led to concerns about the psychological health of
the American population as a whole. In 1946 Time
magazine noted that ‘‘about 8,000,000 US citizens’’
(‘‘For the Psyche’’ 73) were ‘‘neurotic or worse’’ and
nearly ten years later Newsweek placed the number
at 10 million (‘‘The Mind’’ 60). Indeed, the signing
of the National Mental Health Act in 1946 marked
the official beginning of the ‘‘romance’’ of Amer-
ican psychology. Centered around the creation of
the National Institute of Mental Health, the act
provided funds for the training of psychologists,
university research into mental disorders, and
grants to states to establish local mental health
clinics. The results were staggering. In 1940 the
American Psychological Association had approxi-
mately 3,000 members; by 1950 that number had
ballooned to 16,000. By 1955 Newsweek had an-
nounced that ‘‘the U.S. is without doubt the most
psychologically oriented, or psychiatrically orient-
ed nation in the world’’ (‘‘The Mind’’ 59).
In part, the popularization of psychoanalysis
stemmed from the easy adaptability of its vocab-
ulary to cover a range of familial and social de-
mands. In a cultural environment that prioritized
the insular nature of the nuclear family in the face
of the communist menace and impending nuclear
disaster, psychoanalysis offered an accessible lan-
guage with which to analyze social ills.6 From
the spread of homosexuality to the problem of
juvenile delinquency to the surge in alcoholism,
postwar problems were easily collapsed into
psychoanalytic terms. The ideological stress on
the importance of a well-adjusted, balanced fam-
ily life fit in well with the Freudian emphasis on
adolescent development and parental instruction.
It also fit in well with a culture in the midst of a
certain amount of existential anguish. As Franz
Alexander, member of the National Advisory
Mental Health Council explained in 1949, psy-
choanalysis was paramount in an age of atomic
weapons and unimaginable destructive capabili-
ties. According to Alexander, ‘‘we have harnessed
the forces of nature, but we now face the conse-
quences of our failure to harness the emotional
forces of man, that we may prevent him from us-
ing his increased technological knowledge for
self-destruction’’ (53). Consequently, Life maga-
zine was able to claim in 1957 that it was ‘‘the age
of psychology and psychoanalysis as much as it
[was] the age of chemistry or the atom bomb’’
(Havemann 68).
Popular culture helped to normalize thera-
peutic treatment. Hollywood successfully trans-
formed the stoic, European analyst into a friendly,
benevolent, native-born therapist, making treat-
ment seem more comfortable and more ordinary.
Hollywood films featured sensitive therapists
helping troubled characters find balance (Spell-
bound [1945], Lady in the Dark [1944], and The
Seven Year Itch [1955]) or used psychoanalytic
themes to explain the neurotic behavior of certain
characters (Rebel Without a Cause [1955] and The
Three Faces of Eve [1957]). Popular magazines
such as Vogue, Reader’s Digest, and Good House-
keeping published articles explaining the tenets of
psychoanalysis in the attempt to ‘‘remake’’ pop-
ular misconceptions about treatment.7 Newsweek
offered advice on how to select a psychologist and
overturn worries about the financial cost of long-
term treatment (‘‘Talking’’ 70). Enthusiasm was
everywhere. Life magazine went so far as to argue
that ‘‘analytic lore conceivably can seep so far
down into lay consciousness that future genera-
tions of parents may rear generations of neurosis-
free children by avoiding the mistakes that plant
the origins of neurotic trends’’ (Wickware 112).
Out of this cultural shift reemerged the prac-
tice of hypnotism. Professionally, experiments
both during and after the war led to the develop-
ment of a new therapeutic field merging the
clinical insights of psychoanalysis with the expe-
diency of hypnosis, producing a form of treat-
ment known as ‘‘hypnoanalysis.’’ Originally
developed by Dr. Merton Gill and Dr. Margaret
Brenman at the Menninger Clinic to Topeka,
Kansas, hypnoanalysis was a consolidation of the
findings of field therapists during the war. But the
most famous application of hypnosis to psycho-
analytic treatment came from Robert Lindner,
 ‘‘Hypnotizzy’’ in the Cold War  Robert Genter
the chief consultant at the Psychiatric and
Psychological Division at the Federal Penitentia-
ry in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, who recorded a
series of ‘‘psychoanalytic tales’’ about his institu-
tionalized clients. His most famous cases were
recorded in two national bestsellers, Rebel With-
out a Cause (1944) and The Fifty-Minute Hour
(1954), the former providing inspiration for
Nicholas Ray’s movie of the same name and the
latter adapted into Hubert Cornfield’s film
Pressure Point (1962) starring Sydney Poitier.
Hypnotism, as Lindner explained, offered an ex-
pedient means to dissolve a patient’s resistance at
the start of treatment. It also offered a means for
helping in the reconstruction of a patient’s indi-
vidual history after resistance had been dissolved.
Hypnotism, according to Lindner, was ‘‘a rapid,
sure and valid way to the understanding and
treatment of psychogenic disorders and aberra-
tions of behavior,’’ and he hoped to remove ‘‘the
stigmata of mystery, charlatanry, and ill-fame’’ of
this ‘‘ancient and honorable art’’ (Rebel 24, 15).
As a result, hypnotism finally achieved pro-
fessional recognition. Several official organi-
zations, including the Society for Clinical and
Experimental Hypnosis and the American Society
of Clinical Hypnosis, were founded after World
War II.8 Professional journals such as the Amer-
ican Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, the Annual Re-
view of Hypnosis Literature, the Journal of
Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, and the
Journal of Hypnosis and Psychology in Dentistry
appeared throughout the 1950s. Despite years of
resistance, the American Medical Association’s
Council on Mental Health in 1958 officially rec-
ognized hypnotism as a valuable aid in medial
practice. To encourage its professional use the
American Medical Association also established
courses for general practitioners, recognizing that
the approximately 1,000 trained hypnotists cur-
rently practicing within the United States was
highly inadequate (Pfeiffer 62). The AMA also
condemned the use of the technique for enter-
tainment purposes, particularly after the hysteria
caused by The Search for Bridey Murphy. Hyp-
notism, as the New York Times explained, had
indeed stepped ‘‘out of the shadows’’ and now
159
offered ‘‘possibilities for exploring memory, the
elusive mechanisms of neurosis, and many other
problems which baffle us today’’ (Pfeiffer 62).
Outrageous claims about this therapeutic tool
soon flooded the popular press.9 Hypnotism sup-
posedly cured the fear of flying and the fear of
snakes. It also offered ‘‘dentistry without fear.’’
Hypnotic suggestion also helped end nail-biting,
bed-wetting, facial twitching, and masturbation.
Experts proposed hypnosis as a cure for warts,
stomach ulcers, asthma, insomnia, constipation,
migraine headaches, high blood pressure, impo-
tence, stuttering, forgetfulness, timidity, and most
other conditions. Time magazine reported how a
specialist in psychosomatic medicine at a San
Bernardino hospital had cured a 14-year-old girl
suffering from a ‘‘deep, body-shaking cough’’ ow-
ing to pressure on her ‘‘laryngeal nerve’’ merely
through the use of hypnotic suggestion (‘‘Hyp-
nosis for Cough’’). Doctors and psychiatrists were
particularly enthusiastic about using hypnosis as
an alternative to anesthesia in surgical procedures.
At the 1956 American Medical Association meet-
ing, Dr. Milton Marmer, an anesthesiologist at a
Los Angeles hospital, described the first case of
major lung surgery using hypnosis as the only
anesthetic (Pfeiffer). In 1960 the American Society
of Clinical Hypnosis reported 3,898 surgical pro-
cedures and 4,363 childbirths performed with
hypnosis. It also served as an alternative to
nitrous oxide in the dentist’s chair. Dr. William
Heron, professor of psychology at the University
of Minnesota, reported that he had trained ‘‘over
500 dentists from Florida to Canada’’ to use
hypnotism on patients (Patterson 87). Indeed,
the ‘‘mysteries of hypnosis’’ seemed to offer
endless medical and psychiatric possibilities
(Daigh 21).
The Therapeutic Culture of
Hypnotism
The professional excitement generated over
this new psychological tool and the relative ease
160 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 29, Number 2  June 2006
with which beginners learned the art encouraged
many laymen to investigate hypnotism for them-
selves (‘‘Melnicker’’). Parlor hypnotism became a
cultural fad in living rooms across the country and
entertainment venues were littered with hypnotic
demonstrations. Hungarian-born hypnotist Franz
Polgar, who helped introduce hypnosis to combat
fatigue patients during World War I, became
a renowned stage performer, demonstrating the
powers of hypnotism to audiences at Carnegie
Hall (Mannix 25). Other stage hypnotists such as
Walter Gibson, Melvin Powers, and John Garrett
became national celebrities. A local Los Angeles
television program, ‘‘Adventures in Hypnosis,’’
hosted in the mid-1950s by Emile Franchel and
Edward Cochran, demonstrated a variety of
hypnotic techniques. On Friday evenings after
the evening news in 1949, CBS ran a 10-minute
demonstration on hypnosis, ‘‘Fun With the Mind,’’
hosted by Polgar himself. Local stores sold spiraling
machines called ‘‘hypnotrons,’’ long-playing re-
cords, and instructional manuals to help party hosts
place their guests under trance (‘‘Machines’’ 1).
But the entertainment value of hypnotism was
soon eclipsed by its supposed therapeutic power.
Hypnotic therapy became the lowbrow, mass-
oriented version of psychoanalysis, the former
providing a cheaper and more efficient treatment
than the latter—or at least that was what propo-
nents claimed. Indeed, the use of hypnotism for
self-improvement was the major theme stressed
by most advocates. Andrew Salter, a former
doctoral student in psychology at New York
University, published a 1941 article ‘‘Three Tech-
niques of Autohypnosis’’ in the Journal of Psy-
chology. Responses to his suggestion that
individuals might learn to hypnotize themselves
without having continuously to resort to the dis-
tortions of the therapist-client relationship were
so overwhelming that Salter started his own clinic
to instruct interested participants in how to use
self-induced hypnotic suggestion to lose weight,
stop smoking, or end any other bad habits
(‘‘Wickware, Hypnotism’’). Other practitioners
followed suit. The methods of Dr. Clark Bellows,
known as the ‘‘Dean of American Hypnotists,’’
were taught at the Institute of Applied Hypno-
logy, which offered lessons to ‘‘one of the most
unusual bodies ever assembled,’’ including ‘‘doc-
tors, lawyers, salesmen, housewives, ex-G.I.s, men
of worship, musicians, hairdressers, railroaders,
etc.’’ (Bellows 3). In Hypnotism for Fun, for
Health, Bellows promised his readers an under-
standing of the ‘‘workings of the subconscious
mind’’ and a way to bring it under ‘‘conscious
control,’’ achieving ‘‘what man has been seeking
for centuries—MIND DOMINANCE’’ (56).
Consequently, hypnosis became the proposed
solution for a variety of personal problems. For
instance, the Journal of Hypnotism, published by
the National Guild of Hypnotists beginning
in 1951, offered a series of self-help articles on
‘‘How to Make Money with Hypnosis,’’ ‘‘Hyp-
nosis and Sexual Frigidity in Women,’’ ‘‘Build
Your Own Hypnotron,’’ and ‘‘Breaking Habits
with Hypnosis’’ by famed practitioners such as
Harry Arons, Rexford North, and Herbert Charles.
In this sense, the fad of hypnotism in the 1940s
and 1950s was closely connected to other popular
self-help techniques. Hypnotic autosuggestion, as
described by Salter, was a descendent of the spir-
itual and metaphysical mental health practices as-
sociated with Christian Science, the New
Thought movement, and other ‘‘mind-cure’’ tech-
niques popularized in the twentieth century.10
Manuals on hypnotism in the 1950s sold alongside
other bestselling self-help books such as Norman
Vincent Peale’s The Art of Real Happiness, Harry
Overstreet’s The Mature Mind, and Lucy Free-
man’s Fight Against Fears. Hypnotism was the
practical, inexpensive, and secular version of these
more prominent religious and metaphysical
movements, bearing a strong resemblance to the
‘‘power of positive thinking.’’ Both methods were
designed to saturate the subconscious mind with
encouraging thoughts and behavioral orders. In-
deed, the entire philosophy of the ‘‘mind-cure’’
movement, from Phineas Quimby, Mary Baker
Eddy, Emmet Fox, and Norman Vincent Peale,
was based upon hypnotic autosuggestion as a
therapeutic treatment. Self-hypnosis soon found
enthusiasm from mid-level executives, suburban
housewives, and struggling small businessmen
searching for therapeutic help.
 ‘‘Hypnotizzy’’ in the Cold War  Robert Genter
As such, hypnotism was touted as the key to
unlocking the endless potentials of the human
mind. A study completed at the University of
Vermont detailed amazing ‘‘memory feats’’ by
hypnotized subjects who were able ‘‘to recall cor-
rectly the days of the week for their birthdays and
for Christmas when they were four, seven, and ten
years old’’ (‘‘Memory’’ 1). A report in Science Di-
gest claimed that ‘‘a person can memorize three to
four times as fast when hypnotized than when
not’’ and that other mental activities, including the
sense of time, could be distorted to increase
‘‘man’s power of thought and mental stature’’
(‘‘Do Five’’ 29). Dr. Emanuel Hammer of the New
York Psychiatric Institute promised parents that
hypnotic suggestion would improve children’s
schoolwork. Sports pages detailed the improved
performance of athletes placed into trances. In his
successful 1948 book, The Master Course in Hyp-
notism, Harry Arons, the founder of the Associ-
ation for the Advancement of Ethical Hypnosis,
offered ‘‘the means by which [the intelligent lay-
man] can pursue his course in life more confi-
dently and successfully’’ (5). Demonstrating the
technique for individual and group induction and
for autosuggestion, Arons argued that practicing
hypnotism would ‘‘result in a warm, strong, dom-
inating (although not over-bearing) hypnotic per-
sonality’’ (13). He followed the success of his first
instructional book with The New Master Course in
Hypnotism (1948), Techniques of Speed Hypnosis
(1953), and The Handbook of Self-Hypnosis (1959),
among others. Hypnotism had reached its zenith.
Beware the Hypnotic Eye
Despite its popularization as a self-help tech-
nique, hypnotism could not escape its previous
stigmatization, particularly given the cultural cli-
mate of the Cold War. The event that brought
hypnosis to the political attention of the nation as
a whole was the return of the last American
prisoners-of-war from Korea in September 1953,
upon which the nation discovered that twenty-
one soldiers had decided to remain in North Ko-
161
rea. Equally disturbing was the revelation that a
number of prisoners had collaborated with their
Communist captors, signing false confessions,
admitting indiscretions supposedly committed
by American military leaders, and making public
statements lambasting capitalist society. Although
these American soldiers represented only a hand-
ful of the thousands of prisoners during the
course of the war, it raised complicated questions
about soldier morale, discipline, and psycholog-
ical resolve.11 It also raised questions about the
ancient art of hypnotism.
Stories about American soldiers collaborating
with the enemy had already trickled out during
the war. In 1951 Harold Martin, an editor at the
Saturday Evening Post, published an account of
the capture and indoctrination of eighteen Ma-
rines by Chinese authorities, describing how
‘‘They Tried to Make Our Marines Love Stalin.’’
Journalist Edward Hunter, in a 1950 Miami Daily
News article and a 1951 New Leader essay, coined
the word ‘‘brainwashing’’ to describe the manip-
ulation and ‘‘programming’’ of the minds of
American soldiers. When a series of public broad-
casts in 1952 and 1953, in which American POWs
confessed that the US military had used germ
warfare on North Korean troops, reached the
American public, the nation went into a panic
about the sinister act of brainwashing. Such fears
were officially confirmed in April 1953 at a pre-
armistice exchange of prisoners, referred to as
‘‘Little Switch,’’ when 149 released American sol-
diers described the systematic attempt by their
Chinese captors to convert them to communism.
The threat of brainwashing became a national
nightmare, and stories filtered out that thousands
upon thousands of returning soldiers might be
indoctrinated. As ex-prisoners were marshaled to
a ‘‘de-brainwashing’’ facility at the Valley Forge
Army Hospital, Newsweek wondered aloud,
‘‘Washed Brains of POWs: Can They Be Re-
washed?’’
With this national crisis, Freud’s original fears
concerning the nature of hypnotism resurfaced. In
Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,
Freud had gone so far as to relate hypnosis to
the identificatory processes inherent to collective
162 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 29, Number 2  June 2006
formations, particularly those forms of mass pol-
itics that were threatening the foundations of
Western society. According to Freud, hypnosis
and group formation both contained an ‘‘element
of paralysis derived from the relation between
someone with superior power and someone who
is without power and helpless’’ (60). Although
postwar therapists had for years tried to convince
skeptics that hypnotized individuals could not be
made to do something immoral or something ab-
horrent to their character, the apparent suscepti-
bility of seemingly strong-willed American
soldiers to brainwashing reintroduced Freud’s
concerns. As the search for Communists went
on in the nation’s classrooms, laboratories, and
federal offices, national publications reported on
the development of Russian hypnotic practices at
the ‘‘headquarters’’ of this new war on the mind at
the ‘‘Presidium of the Soviet Academy of Sciences
in Moscow’’ (Coffin 120). Other publications
noted that ‘‘in accordance with one of Stalin’s di-
rectives, Moscow maintains a special ‘Pavlovian
Front’ (Dobrogaev) and a ‘Scientific Council on
Problems of Physiological Theory of the Acade-
mician I. P. Pavlov’’’ (Meerloo 9). Hysteria
reached absurd proportions. The American Mer-
cury, for instance, reported in 1959 that ‘‘a person
does not have to be hypnotized in order to have
hypnotic commands or suggestions imbedded in
his mind’’ (Pritchard 109). Hypnotism, it was also
feared, would soon be replaced by telepathy, the
ability to transfer thoughts or commands from
one mind to another without physical contact
(Wicklein 35).
The cultural document that best expressed
Cold War anxiety over the dangers of hypnotism
was Richard Condon’s 1959 novel The Manchu-
rian Candidate. A fictional account of an Army
patrol captured by Russian soldiers during the
Korean War and subjected to advanced Chinese
brainwashing techniques, Condon’s novel tells the
story of Staff Sergeant Raymond Shaw, an insuf-
ferable and contemptuous man, who is converted,
through hypnotic induction, into a ‘‘steady,
responsible, shock-proof assassin’’ (45) and un-
consciously forced, through a posthypnotic sug-
gestion, to do the bidding of Communist agents
when he returns to America. Yen Lo, the Chinese
psychologist who orchestrates the experiments on
Shaw, mockingly references ‘‘that old wives tale’’
that ‘‘no hypnotized subject may be forced to do
that which is repellent to his moral nature, what-
ever that is, or to his own best interests’’ (40).
Arguing that such a belief was ‘‘nonsense,’’ Yen
refers his audience to a series of studies on hyp-
notic suggestion: Margaret Brenman’s ‘‘Experi-
ments in the Hypnotic Production of Anti-social
and Self-Injurious Behavior,’’ W. R. Wells’s ‘‘Ex-
periments in the Hypnotic Production of Crime,’’
Andrew Salter’s Conditioned Reflex Therapy, and
Fredric Wertham’s The Seduction of the Innocent.
All of these works, in one way or another, dem-
onstrated the possibility of hypnosis converting
even strong-willed and moral Americans into
something dangerous. As Yen explains, ‘‘the
conception of people acting against their own
best interests should not startle us. We see it oc-
casionally in sleepwalking and in politics, every
day’’ (41).
The acknowledged advantages of hypnotism,
which compelled its use on the battlefield in
World War II and its use as a therapeutic device,
soon appeared to be the source of its apparent
dangers. Hypnotic induction, critics claimed, cre-
ated a misguided rapport between the practitioner
and the patient to the exclusion of external reality;
it helped to reorganize psychic life according to
posthypnotic suggestions; it removed ego resist-
ances and provided unimpeded access to uncon-
scious forces; hypnosis also reproduced through
age regression the dependent mother–child rela-
tionship and aided in the satisfaction of infantile
needs; and it allowed for identity transgressions,
hallucinations, and other induced psychic distur-
bances. Although a few psychologists had pre-
sented experimental evidence that hypnosis could
not interfere with injunctions from the superego,
others were not convinced. In her 1942 article,
cited in Condon’s novel, Margaret Brenman de-
tailed her success in getting six experimental sub-
jects to invade the privacy of others, engage in
verbal abuse, and commit thefts while hypno-
tized. According to Brenman, ‘‘such acts can
be induced even when contrary to the subject’s
 ‘‘Hypnotizzy’’ in the Cold War  Robert Genter
personal wishes or his moral nature’’ (60). More
directly, Dr. John Watkins of the Welch Conva-
lescent Hospital, whose work during World War
II helped further research in hypnotic treatment,
reported in the Journal of Abnormal and Social
Psychiatry on his experiments with hypnotic
persuasion on Army personnel. According to
Watkins, he was successful in convincing a ‘‘con-
scientious’’ Army private to try to strangle his
lieutenant colonel, after telling the young man
that his superior was a menacing Japanese soldier
(‘‘Hypnotized’’ 34).
The fullest discussion of the use of hypnotism
in thought control practices came from Dr. Joost
Meerloo, a professor of psychology at Columbia
University and the New School for Social Re-
search. In his 1956 book, The Rape of the Mind,
Meerloo coined the term ‘‘menticide,’’ which de-
scribed not just the process of ‘‘mind-killing’’
performed by Communist psychologists on
American soldiers in Korea but also the more
general and widespread pressures placed on the
human psyche by modern technological changes.
Exploring both Pavlovian psychology and Freud-
ian theory, Meerloo explained how physical pres-
sure, torture, fatigue, and confusion, combined
with the effects of hypnotic suggestion, produced
passive surrender and compliance in prisoners-of-
war. Meerloo advanced the discussion of brain-
washing in two important ways. First, he sug-
gested that the effectiveness of such techniques
was connected to the level of ‘‘unconscious guilt,’’
‘‘desire for punishment,’’ and ‘‘love of submis-
sion’’ already instilled within the individual un-
dergoing treatment. Arguing that ‘‘the pattern of
the mind, whether toward conformity and com-
pliance or otherwise, is conditioned rather early in
life’’ (95), Meerloo followed a number of other
psychologists in critiquing American child-
rearing practices for producing submissive
individuals.
Second, Meerloo suggested that Communist
brainwashing techniques were not an ‘‘oriental’’
aberration but part of modern industrialized
life as a whole. According to Meerloo, ‘‘the mech-
anization of modern life has already influenced
man to become more passive and to adjust
163
himself to ready-made conformity. No longer
does man think in personal values, following
his conscience and ethical evaluations; he thinks
more and more in the values brought to him by
mass media’’ (96). The practice of hypnotism
to induce mass suggestion was not, for Meerloo,
limited to Korean prisoner cells; it was part
and parcel of mass advertising, mass media, and
mass culture. When Meerloo testified at the hear-
ing of Colonel Frank Schwable, one of the germ
warfare confessors during the Korean war, telling
the court that no individual, regardless of how
strong-willed, could have withstood Communist
brainwashing techniques, the psychiatrist also
noted the inability of most Americans to resist
the ‘‘hypnotic’’ techniques employed by Madison
Avenue executives (‘‘Psychiatrist’’ 3). The ‘‘rape
of the mind,’’ according to Meerloo, occurred
every day.
Meerloo was not the only one to link the
problem of military brainwashing techniques to
the problem of American advertising, and hyp-
notism was soon connected to growing anxiety
over the bureaucratized and organized nature of
American culture itself. The surprising prosperity
that characterized postwar life gave rise to con-
cerns about a mass-consumption society and the
insidious methods used to instill a stultifying
conformity onto manipulated consumers.12 In his
1957 bestseller The Hidden Persuaders, journalist
Vance Packard detailed the appropriation of be-
havioral techniques by advertising agencies in the
development of ‘‘motivational research.’’ Packard
described how ‘‘depth psychologists’’ were now
used by the culture industry to probe the uncon-
scious motivations, desires, and fantasies of mod-
ern consumers in order to market goods and
services. The techniques used by marketers in-
cluded depth interviews, thematic apperception
tests, and psychological studies, all of which pro-
vided access to ‘‘our subconscious needs, yearn-
ing, and cravings’’ (72). In particular, Packard
noted how advertising executives had begun hir-
ing psychologists trained in hypnotism to help
‘‘get past our mental blockages’’ and to ‘‘find why
we use the brand of product we do’’ (42).
Packard’s book provided even more evidence to
164 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 29, Number 2  June 2006
a worried American public that hypnotism might
be employed to invade the privacy of the sub-
conscious. Motivational research was merely the
latest example.
Concerns about the possible ‘‘antisocial’’ uses
of hypnosis popped up everywhere. Americans
were warned to ‘‘beware of quack hypnotists’’
(Cannel, ‘‘Beware’’ 13) and to cease viewing hyp-
nosis as a cure-all for every condition. Experts
warned that hypnotic induction sometimes ob-
scured a person’s actual psychological distur-
bance, and, although it offered a potential
mastery of the mind, hypnosis could become as
habit-forming as other addictions. Moreover, crit-
ics told stories about dangerous neglect—a wom-
an suffering from insomnia was ‘‘cured’’ by a
hypnotic spell from an amateur hypnotist when
in actuality her sleeplessness was the result of
an undiagnosed tumor; a gas station attendant
with no professional training converted his base-
ment into a clinic and began charging his ‘‘pa-
tients’’ hundreds of dollars for treatment; and a
San Francisco trombonist who went to a hypno-
tist to cure the sudden paralysis in his left arm
exited without the ability to speak (Cannel and
Paris, ‘‘Hypnotism’’ 12). Dr. Harold Rosen, who
headed the American Medical Association’s Com-
mittee on the Medical Use of Hypnosis, issued a
warning on its unlicensed practice and encour-
aged state and federal laws limiting its use
(Harrison, ‘‘Doctors’’ 41). Moreover, Science Di-
gest warned that hypnosis could actually contribute
to mental illness when practiced by ‘‘unqualified’’
persons if latent neurotic symptoms in inductees
were unknowingly aroused (‘‘Hypnosis Can
Contribute’’ 15).
The practice of hypnosis had become a legal
and moral question. Pressure was placed on local
and national television broadcasters to limit or
even ban broadcast demonstrations of hypnotism.
Dr. Paul Reed, the chairman of the American
Academy of General Practice, cited a study
performed by the British Broadcasting Corpora-
tion that demonstrated that ‘‘viewers thousands
of miles away can be hypnotized while watching
TV demonstrations’’ (‘‘Televised’’ 31). In 1957 a
parental group in Los Angeles forced a local
television station to drop its featured hypnotism
program (‘‘Public’’ 7). Under pressure from
the Federal Communications Commission, the
National Association of Radio and Television
Broadcasters agreed to limit shows on hypnotism
and asked its local broadcast stations to stop
airing commercials with subliminal messages.
Other legal challenges appeared as well. In 1950
the state legislature in Virginia banned the practice
of hypnotism by unlicensed physicians.13 In a 1954
case, Leyra v. Denno, the United States Supreme
Court prohibited the use of hypnotism during
police interrogations on suspected criminals, con-
sidering it a form of involuntary confession.
The only real consensus concerning hypnotism
was that it had changed the landscape of the Cold
War itself. Psychologists argued that, despite the
alleged power of brainwashing, the United States
could not ignore the social and military uses of
hypnotism. George Estabrooks, professor of psy-
chology at Colgate University, encouraged the
military to experiment with hypnotism as a ‘‘se-
cret weapon’’ in the Cold War, claiming that the
psychological technique would help transform
soldiers into ‘‘super spies,’’ ‘‘secret-message bear-
ers,’’ ‘‘assassins,’’ and ‘‘saboteurs’’ (257). In his
1957 book Hypnotism, Estabrooks argued that it
was the responsibility of ‘‘our statesmen’’ to use
every effective means in fighting the enemy and
the responsibility of the nation’s psychologists to
offer their services in promoting the military use
of hypnosis. Other psychologists concurred. In
the ‘‘T.N.T. age of brainwashing’’ (Harrison,
‘‘New Evils’’ 27), one psychiatrist suggested that
Army officials distribute cyanide capsules to field
personnel with knowledge of military secrets in
case of capture and possible mental interrogation.
The Air Force responded by establishing a so-
called ‘‘torture school’’ at the Stead Air Force base
to teach survival and evasion techniques in the
face of possible brainwashing. The CIA even en-
gaged in a covert operation in the 1950s to devel-
op a ‘‘Manchurian Candidate’’ program of their
own, engaging in experiments on behavior mod-
ification using sleep deprivation, electroshock
therapy, and hypnotism.14 The ‘‘hypnotic eye’’
had now become a tool of the Cold War.
 ‘‘Hypnotizzy’’ in the Cold War  Robert Genter
The Bridey Murphy Phenomenon
Into this clamor stepped Morey Bernstein’s
The Search for Bridey Murphy. The surprising
popularity of his book, appearing at the height of
the hysteria surrounding the prisoner-of-war
brainwashing scandal, reflected the deeper impor-
tance of hypnotism within American culture in
the 1950s. Concerns over its manipulative use in
mass advertising campaigns were connected to a
much larger anxiety over the character of modern
life. In a gray-flanneled world supposedly dom-
inated by bureaucratic institutions, corporate cul-
ture, and a monolithic political structure, the
autonomous individual, whose self-identity and
independence had marked the ideological imagi-
nation of American culture, had seemingly been
replaced by the ‘‘organization man’’ of the new
postindustrial economy and the ‘‘one-dimensional
man’’ of mass consumer society. Individual iden-
tity, as sociologist Erving Goffman explained in
his 1959 work The Presentation of Self in Every-
day Life, seemed fragmented into disparate
organizational roles and responsibilities, a con-
structed identity that avoided the deeper existen-
tial issues of modern life. Substance had given way
to appearance, and autonomy had given way to
dependence. As Goffman explained, in a world
dominated by mass organizations, ‘‘a certain bu-
reaucratization of the spirit is expected so that we
can be relied upon to give a perfectly homogene-
ous performance at every appointed time’’ (56).
In response, Morey Bernstein hoped that the
unacknowledged power of hypnotism might serve
as an antidote to its acknowledged role in the
manipulative practices of modern industrial life.
Hypnotism in this sense became more than a form
of self-help; it also assisted in a deeper metaphys-
ical search. Behind his obsession was a determined
effort to demonstrate that ‘‘man is not, after all,
merely a physical contraption’’ and to utilize
hypnotism to unearth instead man’s ‘‘true nature’’
(63). The specter of totalitarianism across Western
Europe, according to Bernstein, had reduced man
to ‘‘a transient, expendable machine’’ and had sac-
rificed him to the ‘‘supremacy of the state.’’ The
165
ability to explore the recesses of man’s uncon-
scious, however, had provided ‘‘scientific evidence
that men are something more than bodies, that
they have minds with freedom from physical
law,’’ striking ‘‘hard against man’s inhumanity to
man.’’ In a world in which the conscious self was
horizontally fragmented into a variety of dispa-
rate, unrelated roles, hypnotism was a tool for the
vertical penetration into man’s deeper, uncon-
scious self. The Search for Bridey Murphy por-
trayed the unconscious as an unexplored, open
terrain and argued for the reconnection of the in-
dividual to a deeper spiritual heritage.
Bernstein’s exploration into the layers of the
unconscious through the use of hypnotic induc-
tion was merely one example of a much larger
cultural exploration into the workings of the
mind. The popularization of the psychoanalytic
theories of Carl Jung, for instance, presented in
part by the digestible translation found in Joseph
Campbell’s 1949 work The Hero with a Thousand
Faces, reflected a similar spiritual interest.
Arguing that man’s individual unconscious was
part of a larger, collective unconscious in which
man’s entire archaic heritage was buried, Jung had
encouraged the psychological journey into this
personal and collective psyche. Abstract artists
such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and
Adolph Gottlieb created paintings throughout
the 1940s and 1950s that attempted to express, as
Pollock explained, ‘‘the energy, the motion, and
other inner forces’’ (Pollock 21) of the uncon-
scious. A generation of Beat writers beginning
with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg experi-
mented with mind-altering substances and spon-
taneous forms of expression to discover man’s
deeper metaphysical grounding. Even Robert
Lindner, whose research in the 1940s helped to
introduce the field of hypnoanalysis, hoped that
this exploration into the recesses of the mind
might serve as a point of critique of the frag-
mented character of modern life. In his 1956 book
Must You Conform?, Lindner argued that
hypnosis revealed a fundamental ‘‘instinct for
rebellion’’ inherent to man, an instinct to help
man ‘‘break through this prison, to escape from
it’’ (140).
166 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 29, Number 2  June 2006
Bernstein’s book was not the only document of
popular culture to reflect this search for man’s
archaic past. A number of Hollywood films for
instance explored the possibilities of hypnosis
unlocking man’s hidden past.15 The 1956 horror
film She-Creature featured a mysterious hypno-
tist, Dr. Carlo Lombardi, who possesses a psy-
chological hold on his assistant Andrea and who
uses his hypnotic control to perform public dem-
onstrations of age regression. Dr. Lombardi not
only successfully regresses Andrea to past lives
but also unearths her prehistoric past in the form
of a monstrous sea creature. Unable to break his
hypnotic control, Andrea eventually learns to
control her creature form and enact revenge upon
Lombardi. The power discovered by hypnotism
had trumped the power of hypnotism. Similar
Bridey Murphy themes were repeated in Fright
(1956), I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), The
Undead (1958), and The Bride and the Beast
(1958). In this sense, The Search for Bridey
Murphy, despite the sensationalism surrounding
its publication, was part of a much larger cultural
search for some metaphysical or primitive
grounding of subjectivity that did not partake in
the stultifying limitations of Cold War America.
The speculations Bernstein offered were to take
on a much larger significance in the ensuing decade.
Disenchantment in the Age of
Aquarius
Unquestionably, the practice of hypnotism
helped to legitimate what Life magazine referred
to in 1957 as the ‘‘age of psychology’’ (Have-
mann). The efficacy of hypnotism combined with
its demonstrable nature made psychoanalytic
treatment seem more pragmatic and more effi-
cient. But by the early 1960s, the fascination with
hypnotism had begun to wane. As therapy be-
came more domesticated and more ordinary, the
need for hypnotism as a time-saving device de-
creased. Moreover, psychoanalysis, which had
done so much to popularize the art of hypno-
tism, had to compete with a proliferation of psy-
chological schools of thought including Gestalt
therapy, humanistic psychology, the Human Po-
tential movement, positive psychology, cognitive
psychology and a host of others. Each of these
schools offered alternative understandings of the
structure of the mind, the causes of psychological
disorders, and the nature of treatment. Few, if any,
had use for hypnosis. As therapists and doctors
began to temper the excitement over its healing
powers, some began to declare hypnotism ‘‘vastly
overrated’’ (‘‘Hypnosis Vastly’’ 32).
The subtle easing of Cold War tensions and the
decline of McCarthyism contributed as well. As
anxiety over brainwashing techniques dissipated
in the early 1960s, a critical reevaluation began.
Albert Biderman, senior research associate at the
Bureau of Social Science Research, published a
review of brainwashing studies in which he chid-
ed journalists, television producers, and fiction
writers for accepting the popular ‘‘facts’’ about
brainwashing before social scientists had thor-
oughly diagnosed the problem. Biderman, using
the work of Robert Lifton, Edgar Schien, and
others, debunked a ‘‘number of erroneous con-
ceptions’’ surrounding brainwashing that ‘‘had
gained currency’’ at the height of Cold War hys-
teria: the belief, for instance, that a ‘‘novel scien-
tific ‘gimmick’ for influencing behavior’’ such as
drugs or hypnotism was used in Chinese practic-
es; the assumption that Communist indoctrina-
tion was based upon ‘‘a deliberate application of a
scientific theory of behavioral influence’’; and the
notion that Communist practices involved a ‘‘new
and unprecedented epitome of the arts of influ-
ence’’ (550). According to Biderman, the recent
scientific studies of ‘‘brainwashing’’ proved that
‘‘thought reform’’ practices were experiences in
transforming human behavior repeated through-
out most of human history. Moreover, Ernest
Hilgard, director of Stanford University’s
Laboratory of Hypnosis Research, described in
his 1965 book Hypnotic Susceptibility a testing
scale to determine the possible effects of hypno-
tism on an individual. Hilgard’s complicated
dissection of the multitude of factors and charac-
teristics needed for ‘‘hypnotic suggestibility,’’
 ‘‘Hypnotizzy’’ in the Cold War  Robert Genter
ranging from personality markers, parental rela-
tionships, religious beliefs, occupation, age, hob-
bies, and health, offered quantitative proof
concerning the limitations and barriers to wide-
spread hypnotic use.
More importantly, the existential questions
raised by Bernstein’s book were soon answered
in more influential ways. For instance, the excite-
ment over reincarnation that hypnotic age regres-
sion supposedly demonstrated was reinforced and
expanded upon by the popularization of Eastern
philosophies in the 1960s. The anecdotal evidence
provided by Bridey Murphy demonstrations was
no longer necessary with the more extensive met-
aphysical speculations offered by Hinduism, Bud-
dhism, and Jainism. Moreover, the popularization
of New Age philosophies and Scientology offered
their own theories on astral projection, soul trav-
el, out-of-body experiences, and past life regres-
sion, theories that were in many ways heirs of the
Bridey Murphy phenomenon. Similarly, hypno-
tism as a self-help technique in the 1960s had to
compete with a number of other therapeutic prac-
tices including Reiki, crystal healing, biorhythmic
therapy, acupuncture, iridology, and aromatherapy,
among others. The age of Aquarius seemed to
have little use for the hypnotic eye.
Of course, hypnotism did not disappear. It
survived on the entertainment stage, exemplified
by the career of Pat Collins, the ‘‘Hip Hypnotist’’
and glamorous Sunset Strip nightclub owner who,
throughout the 1960s, famously turned patrons
and celebrities into ‘‘hypnotic fools.’’ Other per-
formers such as Marshall Sylver and Ormond
McGill carried this tradition into the 1970s and
1980s. The powers of hypnotism also became
regular staples in television and film scripts
throughout the ensuing decades, minus of course
the more sinister connotations the early Cold War
had imparted. More significantly, many therapists
still utilized hypnotism as a time-saving tech-
nique, and researchers continued examinations
into hypnotic induction. Hypnotism also survived
as a form of autosuggestion to help individuals
quit smoking, lose weight, and stop other unfor-
tunate habits. But by the mid-1960s, the anxiety
and utopian speculations about hypnotism had
167
disappeared. The ‘‘hypnotizzy’’ in the United
States was finally over.
Notes
1. On the Bridey Murphy hysteria, see ‘‘Hypnotic Adventure’’;
‘‘Found: Bridey Murphy’’; Brean; Rhine; Marsh; Hughes; and ‘‘Party
Theme to Be ‘Come as You Were.’’’
2. On the history of hypnotism, see Forrest, Hypnotism.
3. On the use of psychology during World War II, see Deutsch,
Herman, and Wanke.
4. See Berg.
5. See Hale.
6. In particular, see May.
7. See Lees, Nyswander, and Eysenck.
8. On the professionalization of hypnosis, see Wolfe and
Rosenthal.
9. On the outrageous claims concerning the power of hypnotism,
see, for instance, ‘‘Hypnotism’’; ‘‘Trance for Tosspots’’; ‘‘Power of
Suggestion’’; ‘‘Grow Slim by Hypnotism’’; Patterson; ‘‘Surgery
Under Hypnosis’’; and Goughlan.
10. On self-help movements in the twentieth century, see Meyer
and Weiss.
11. On the POW brainwashing controversy, see Robin, Wubben,
and Zweiback.
12. On postwar fears over mass consumption, see Horowitz,
McClay, and Pells.
13. On the legal challenges to hypnotism in the 1950s, see Levy.
14. See Zweiback.
15. On hypnosis horror films in the 1950s, see Heffernan.
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Appel, John. ‘‘Incidence of Neuropsychiatric Disorders in the Unit-
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102.4 (1946): 433-36.
Arons, Harry. The Master Course in Hypnotism. Newark: Power
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Bellows, Clark. Hypnotism for Fun, for Health. New York: The
Cathay Publishing Co., 1946.
Berg, Ronald. ‘‘Hypnotism: The Cinderella Science.’’ Look 18.13
( June 29, 1954): 33-35.
Bernstein, Morey. The Search for Bridey Murphy. Garden City, NY:
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