Kosher Hypnosis?

Several books have been published over the past few years about using psychological methods to train oneself to internalize Jewish teachings and live better and/or more successful lives. The secrets of happiness, weight loss, meditation, memorizing important details in learning and the like are examined at length. Many of the recent books on these subjects acknowledge their debts to psychology, but only one goes all the way down the rabbit hole.

Bracha Pearl Toporowitch is a Clinical Hypnotherapist based in Israel who wrote Amazing Hypnotherapy Tales: Healing with Hypnosis the Jewish Way (Mosaica Press, 2021) in order to reveal “the power of the mind, and to remind us all never to underestimate it” while also "show[ing] the numerous ways hypnosis has been able to change a person’s life for the better.”

It’s no secret that, in addition to my rabbinic work, I have experience as a magician/mentalist. What I rarely mention nowadays, though, is that I dabbled in stage hypnosis as well. I was a member of the International Association of Teenage Hypnotists (a group which, at its height, had over 2000 members), received certification from an online hypnosis school, and incorporated it seamlessly into my performances. Of course, hypnosis is qualitatively different than mentalism, and I eventually decided to cut that aspect of my performances. Why make a portion of the audience needlessly uncomfortable when a bit of mind reading and card tricks were already good entertainment? I did, however, maintain an academic interest in hypnosis. What is it? How does it work? In his 2007 book, Tricks of the Mind, Derren Brown explains the debate well:

There are currently two major clinical schools of thought with regard to what hypnosis is. The first promotes it as a ‘special state’. Paramount to the logic of this school of thought is the idea that the hypnotized person is able to achieve things a non-hypnotized person cannot. If it can be shown that there is nothing special at all about hypnosis, then this line of thinking becomes redundant. Pitched against these ‘state’ theorists are the ‘non-state’ theorists who argue that in fact the various phenomena of hypnosis can be explained quite happily without thinking of ‘trances’ or ‘hypnosis’ as meaning anything special or peculiar or akin to a special state of mind. Their thesis would fall if the ‘state’ theorists could prove that something unique happens to the person who is hypnotized.

This debate is a little misleading. All agree that ‘hypnotic trance’ is a state of mind that people enter at various points of the day - think “highway hypnosis.” The question is simply if the hypnotic state is one that is fully unique. Brown himself subscribes to the “non-state” approach, which seems to be quite popular. Indeed, even when speaking of a hypnotic state, it’s unclear how useful the word is. The 2008 Oxford Handbook of Hypnosis, for example, uses the following language:

‘State’ (i.e. hypnosis-as-product) will serve our purpose as long as we keep in mind that the term ‘hypnotic state’ is not a unique condition, unvisited by unhypnotized people. What criteria to we apply in determining whether a hypnotic state has been attained? The motor responses of a hypnotized subject provide publicly measurable dependent variables… But there is little that is unique about these responses, at least as they occur descriptively. There is no superhuman strength; no change in volitional capacity… It is the subject’s experience that makes the hypnotic state exceptional.

What, exactly, is that experience? Brown tries to get to the bottom of it:

On stage, a common finale is for the hypnotist to make himself invisible (as I’ve mentioned I did with my friends) and then articulate puppets to elicit strong reactions from the punters on stage. This is often termed a ‘negative hallucination’, where the subject is instructed not to see something that is there, instead of vice versa. It obviously does not entail really seeing through anything or anyone, but it is presumed that the subject might hallucinate what he knows is behind the ‘invisible’ object to fill in the blank he imagines…

I also used to finish with the invisibility suggestion, but as I would generally follow the performances with an informal chat about it all, I would always ask the subjects what they had actually experienced. Out of the, say, ten or so subjects who were given the suggestion, the responses might break down the following way. Two had obviously been able to see me and had been openly separated from the rest of the group. Two or three would swear that the puppet and chair were moving all on their own and that they could not see me, even though they may have guessed I was somehow remotely responsible for the chaos that ensued. The remaining five or six would generally say they were aware I was there moving the objects, but that something in them would keep trying to blank me out, and they could only act as if I were invisible.

This breakdown makes much sense and perfectly matches Ormond McGill’s framing of hypnosis as “guided somnambulism” or, as I used to put it, induced sleepwalking. Indeed, he writes numerous times in his Encyclopedia of Stage Hypnosis that only one-in-five people or so have “the ability to enter profound hypnosis on a first trial.” Otherwise, the “degree of influence varies with the indvidual.”

All of this is well and good for entertainment, but things get murkier when one enters the realm of mental health. If, as suggested, a large part of hypnosis is about the expectation of the subject, then hypnotherapy paradoxically comes with significantly greater risk than a stage performance. The reason for that is because people know that a stage hypnotism show is merely entertainment and the hypnotist makes it clear that no one will be forced to do anything against their will or have to relive painful childhood moments. They may cluck like a chicken, but only if they really have no issue with that and only while they’re on stage. Therapy, however, comes with the expectation of altering behavior long-term and therapists themselves are looked as experts. It would be unsurprising, then, for hypnotherapy to have a much greater “hit-rate” than stage hypnosis.

Hypnotherapy is considerably less regulated than other forms of therapy. It may be better than any Joe Schmoe being able to be certified as a stage hypnotist, but not by all that much.

This brings me back to Amazing Hypnotherapy Tales. Toporowitch sees hypnosis as a direct conversation with the subconscious mind of her subjects, delving into the depths of their memories and their innermost essence in order to make appropriate changes moving forward. In one case, she reflects on temporarily merging the personality of a subject with a mental image of their childhood camp counselor in order to impart the latter’s confidence onto the former. In another, she leads a subject into childhood memories to confront forgotten abuse. She also helps a terminal patient embrace the possibility of no longer facing cancer and they are miraculously healed.

Toporowitch herself clearly means well and is well-trained. Those with less training, however, can do serious harm to patients. Many studies, for example, question the reliability of memories “brought back” via hypnosis (see, for example, no shortage of studies on hypnotic past-life regression - a subject which was, perhaps surprisingly, not at all mentioned in this book). It should also go without saying that while psychosomatic healing is certainly possible in specific circumstances, hypnosis cannot true cure cancer or any other disease. I worry that people who read this book will come out with both and overblown and oversimplistic understanding of what hypnotherapy does and does not offer.

Where, then, is the value? Well, Toporowitch is absolutely correct about the power of the mind to impact how we live. Her major contribution is bringing hypnosis into a fully religious space, seeing it as something Hashem helps to orchestrate. She also collects no shortage of statements from great rabbonim such as Rav Moshe Feinstein, Rav Eliyahu Dessler, the Maharal, and more about the value of visualization techniques in our own lives.

Most importantly, though, this book demonstrates how many of the ideas that are currently being pushed forward in Jewish spaces are, knowingly or not, rooted in hypnotic techniques. Such awareness will no doubt help people better and more practically utilize those sorts of practices by placing them in context with broader ways in which we attempt to influence our minds - implicitly and explicitly, long-term and short-term. Such techniques, used properly, can have real benefits if responsibly integrated into our lives. But it must be done responsibly and while understand what is and is not possible. Hypnosis is a fascinating subject, but it is not a miracle-solution to every (or even to any) problem we face. Work on our end is still needed as well.