Humans can be hypnotized. Is this capacity healthy?

Only months after hypnotism became an accepted medical procedure and topic of academic inquiry, this question popped up.

The fact that people can be programmed to do embarrassing things, or carry out silly acts—and not realize that they are following a command—is probably the scariest of all human capacities. Here is an animal that can be programmed to do X and to forget that it has been so programmed—and then, when it carries out the command and does X, swear that it is the author of its actions.

This is embarrassing.

“Gross! Only sick people do that!” It’s an optimistic first response, and that of the Paris School that identified hypnotizability with mental sickness—specifically, hysteria. The Nancy School decided that being dissociated and suggestible is just part of normal mental nature. Agency and execution are just detachable by nature.

The disagreement between the two schools can be summarized sharply thus:

• Charcot (Paris): Suggestibility is correlated with pathology. The abnormal neurological condition that causes hypnotizability and hysteria is what enables our suggestibility. Hypnotizability and hysteria are expressions of the same underlying abnormal neurological condition. Hysteria is a generalized degeneracy of the nervous system. Its root cause is genetic, and it is progressive. Hysteria grows out of the ability to integrate and interconnect memories and ideas in the normal way. In fact, Charcot and Janet theorized that all post-hypnotic suggestions were performed by a dissociated consciousness.
• Bernheim (Nancy): Provoked sleep was simply a consequence of suggestion. This was the exact opposite of the belief held by Charcot that suggestion was due to provoked sleep from the disorder of hypnotic neurosis. The proof: automatic execution of suggested acts could happen while awake and without somnambulism. Sleep, which suspends the power of will and reasoning, merely facilitated the brain’s natural proclivity to accept suggested ideas.