No controllable
force for good ever existed that was not used, at times, for
evil, simply because man has a free will.
- (Melvin Powers’ Foreword to Hammerschlag’s Hypnotism
and Crime, 1957 edition, p. 5)
“Zebediah” Kantor
sat in jail, in shock, his life in tatters (his left elbow
also in fragments), trying to comprehend why he had “confessed.”
A jail guard, killing time on the other side of the bars,
was chatting with the depressed former school teacher. The
guard was talking about Zebediah’s friend and next-door-neighbor,
Adam. He said Adam had told police that he robbed Zebediah’s
house and set it on fire because Zebediah had caused him to
do so using hypnosis. Zebediah. puzzled., insisted to the
guard that he had never hypnotized anybody in his life; He
did not know how and never had any interest in learning. The
officer left to tend to duties.
Zebediah sat and thought about
hypnosis. He remembered that one night the hands of the big
old clock in his living room had suddenly, inexplicably leaped
forward several hours. He recalled the times he had met with
Adam and let him empty his wallet—and afterwards he couldn’t
understand why he had allowed it. He remembered other mysterious
events. As Zebediah reviewed the past seven years of his life,
inserting hypnosis as the missing piece, all those formerly
inexplicable incidents made sense. Now Zebediah knew: Adam
had victimized him using hypnosis!
Zebediah Kantor
At college, Zebediah had been a conscientious student. He
enjoyed sports and was popular with the other students. After
graduation, he took a teaching job in the German province
of Thuringia. He looked forward to a secure, comfortable,
respectable life as their village school teacher. As was the
custom, he lived in the school house.
It was the best time of his
life. He liked his job; his students liked their teacher;
the community respected him. He gave piano lessons on the
side and soon fell in love with one of his students, the station
master’s young daughter. She cared for him also, and
they became engaged. In the meantime, he had inherited a little
house and a general-goods store, which provided additional
income from house rental and sale of merchandise in the store.
He handled his money well and invested spare income in stock.
Being sensible, practical,
happy, friendly, and in love, Zebediah seemed to have a good
life ahead. He made one big mistake, however, that destroyed
his life. The mistake was his friendship with Adam.
Missing
Time
Two
early European research hypnotists considered the missing
time of amnesic hypnotic subjects and said:
The
subject is unable to measure the length of time she has
slept, and if she attempts to do so she makes the gravest
mistakes...The hypnotic subject has no land-marks by which
to measure the void which this sleep produces... (Binet
and Fere, Animal Magnetism, p. 365
Years
later, an experimental subject in the U.S., like Zebediah,
figured out he was missing time. He also reasoned from his
discovered circumstances something of what had been done
to him during that missing time:
When
I sat down for you to hypnotize me I pulled out my watch
and it said 6 o’clock. I started to put it back,
and then I took a second look at it and it said 10 o’clock.
But before I could figure that out, I noticed that it
was dark outside, my coat and tie were off, my sleeves
rolled up, and I was just about exhausted, and it really
was 10 o’clock...I could lose consciousness like
that, and it’s happened lots of times... (In
M.H. Erickson, 1938, “A Study of Clinical and Experimental
Findings on Hypnotic Deafness: I,” p. 144)
Adam Begins the Hypnosis Adam
was Zebediah’s next-door neighbor. Adam was a 38-year-old
groundskeeper for an adjacent estate. He had no formal education,
no wealth, and no morals. He was “a primitive, vulgar
criminal type from a low social level” (Reiter, 1958,
p. 60). He had been in prison several times, and he was on
his second marriage. Unknown to Zebediah, one of Adam’s
areas of criminal expertise was hypnotism.
Adam started out with small
acts of seeming kindness. He began to drop by Zebediah’s
house, on some pretext or other, almost every evening. The
bachelor schoolteacher always welcomed him, treated him like
a prince, and shared the best he had (wine, cigars, liqueurs).
Zebediah lived alone, but he kept his home neat, and he enjoyed
company. It helped to pass the time after work in that era
before radio, television, and tapes. Zebediah was also a gentleman,
and, as such, did his best to enjoy and to respond politely
to the older man’s conversation.
To Zebediah, Adam seemed only
to be a rather long-winded and boring speaker who droned for
hours on obscure and confusing subjects. The teacher, weary
after his hard day’s work, and sated with dinner and
wine, tended to fall asleep during his guest’s monotonous,
meandering monologues.
Adam noted Zebediah’s
developing habit of falling asleep while he talked. Every
time Zebediah fell asleep in his presence, he began to murmur
specific suggestions designed to further transform the teacher’s
normal sleep into an operator-managed hypnotic trance. Adam
had combined two methods of disguised induction. One was his
typical boring, confusing monologue, a conversational induction,
which would literally put Zebediah to sleep. The other technique
took advantage of the natural light hypnotic state all people
pass through when in transition from waking to sleeping, a
sleep induction.
Zebediah happened to have
inborn susceptibility to suggestion. His unconscious responded
to Adam’s persistence and coaxing and it became ever
more trained and more vulnerable to further training. Adam
suggested that Zebediah would have amnesia for all time under
hypnosis. Each time that Adam hypnotized Zebediah, he reinforced
the amnesia by repeating that suggestion.
When he tired of giving suggestions,
Adam would go home, leaving Zebediah asleep, and/or hypnotized,
in his chair. Zebediah would wake up later, alone in the house,
with no idea that anything unusual had happened.
After the fourth successful
sleep induction, Adam gave Zebediah a posthypnotic suggestion
that he would wake up the next time his clock struck the hour.
Zebediah did that. He did not remember falling “asleep.”
He had no awareness of missing time. It seemed to him as it
the hands of the clock had simply leaped ahead several hours.
He saw that Adam had gone home.
Zebediah now was Adam’s
unknowing hypnotic subject. He was a trained somnambulist.
Adam no longer had to go to the trouble to bore him to sleep.
Now Adam could instantly drop Zebediah into an amnesic trance,
at any time, simply by presenting a pre-determined cue.
Exploitation
Adam’s hypnotic exploitation of Zebediah began in 1921.
It continued for 12 years, until 1933. When Adam first exploited
his secret power over Zebediah, he started with small things.
If Zebediah noticed, it probably did not seem very strange
to him to be giving, or “lending,” money, wine,
cigars, and so forth, to his neighbor. Adam never paid Zebediah
back. The hypnotist demanded ever harder and crueler amounts
of money from his subject. Once Adam got his hook into Zebediah’s
unconscious, he extracted every possible dollar from him.
Adam also made Zebediah shoot
himself using posthypnotic suggestion. The hypnotic instruction
was: if Zebediah heard Adam say “Herr Kantor: Machen
Sie keine Dummheiten!” (“Mr. Kantor, don’t
do anything stupid!”), then Zebediah was to rush home,
get his gun, and shoot himself in the left hand. Ten days
later, Adam actually sple that cue sentence to Zebediah.
It was a Sunday. Zebediah
was happily strolling through the town streets, with his sweetheart
on his arm, when he happened to encounter Adam. We all have
cues we respond to. In Adam’s case, perhaps it was the
sight of Zebediah being respectable, successful in his occupation,
and happily in love--despite all Adam’s predations so
far. The sight led to the thought, and the thought is parent
of the deed. In a joking tone, Adam called out to Zebediah
as they passed, “Herr Kantor: Machen Sie keine Dummheiten!”
When Zebediah heard the cue
phrase, his response was automatic. The reflexive level of
his mind began to carry out the sequence of tasks as specified
(go home immediately, get the gun, and shoot himself in the
left hand). Zebediah told his fiancee that he needed to change
clothes (a rationalization). He then he rushed home, leaving
her standing, bewildered and alone, in the middle of the road.
When he got home, however,
Zebediah did not change clothes, because getting home cued
the next step in his unconscious instructions. Instead, he
searched for his revolver, found it, and took it out of the
drawer. Then “the gun went off and he was hit in the
left elbow joint.” (Reiter, p. 61) The bullet shattered
his elbow. From then on, Zebediah’s left arm was crippled.
After the incident, Zebediah
again rationalized. He said that his hand cramped, and that
the cramp had caused him to release the safety and pull the
trigger. He believed it was just an accident.
Zebediah’s unconscious,
however, knew the whole story. It was becoming overburdened
with painful experiences repressed by Adam’s amnesia
suggestions. As a result, Zebediah “became nervous and
irritable and carried out his work absentmindedly and automatically.”
(Reiter, 1958, p. 62) All the teachers had to take—and
pass—a standard examination given by school authorities
every year in order to keep their job. In the spring of 1925,
Zebediah, unable to concentrate, failed the test. He now had
no teaching job. He could not do manual work because of his
crippled left arm.
The next time Adam visited
Zebediah, he suggested that Zebediah sell his home (Zebediah
still owned the house and store) and share the money with
him. Adam made that suggestion to Zebediah without first hypnotizing
him.
Zebediah said “No.”
He was not consciously aware of his hypnotic victimization
by Adam, but he sensed intuitively that there was a problem.
He felt controlled by him, and had tried, unsuccessfully,
to end their relationship.
Again without hypnotizing
Zebediah, Adam next proposed that they should together set
fire to his house and collect the insurance money. Despite
his financial problems, Zebediah also indignantly rejected
this proposal.
Adam then hypnotized Zebediah.
He compelled him to draw a house plan to be used as proof
to the insurance company of the house’s interior design
and its valuable contents. Later, Adam set Zebediah’s
house on fire. Zebediah did not know that Adam had done that.
When Zebediah received his insurance payment, Adam used his
hypnocontrol to acquire the larger part of the money from
Zebediah. He let Zebediah have just enough cash to repair
his scorched house.
It is the nature of things
that greed is never satisfied. Adam hypnotized Zebediah and
caused him to write a household inventory which included non-existant
possessions and which greatly over-estimated the values of
his real household goods. Then Adam gave Zebediah a posthypnotic
suggestion to take a vacation trip.
When Zebediah returned, he
discovered that his house had been burglarized and some belongings
stolen. He reported the thefts to the police. He gave the
false inventory to the insurance company. He had no conscious
knowledge that the information was false. He did not know
that Adam had committed the thefts. The insurance company
paid and Adam ended up with the money.
Adam decided to repeat the
scam. He again hypnotized Zebediah, caused him to write an
inflated, false inventory of his household possessions., and
gave a posthypnotic suggestion for an out-of-town trip. While
Zebediah was gone, Adam again broke into his house. Zebediah
came back, saw what had happened, and again called the police
and the insurance company. The insurance company again paid
out a large sum. Again the money ended up in Adam’s pocket.
Arrests and Jail
It came to the attention of the police that Adam had much
unexplained prosperity--and goods stolen from Zebediah’s
house in his house. The police accused Adam of the two burglaries
of Zebediah’s house, arrested him, scheduled a court
date, and then turned him loose until the trial. Adam then
went to Zebediah’s house, hypnotized him, and gave a
very complex posthypnotic suggestion.
The cue for enactment would
be Adam saying, “Herr Kantor! It’s no use any longer—tell
them everything!” Upon hearing that cue, Zebediah was
to “confess” that he, himself, had thought up all
the criminal schemes. He was instructed to declare that he
was the guilty one. And he should be the one on trial. Zebediah
was to explain that his criminal idea was caused by money
problems and that he had persuaded Adam to help him carry
out his plans.
Adam figured that, after Zebediah
confessed to setting up the whole thing, and to tempting and
entangling his poor, ignorant neighbor with money to commit
the burglary--the law would come down hard on Zebediah and
lightly on him.
Mr. Kantor (amnesic, as usual,
for the hypnosis), knowing nothing of the self-incriminating
posthypnotic suggestions awaiting cue in his unconscious,
went to visit his fiancee’s parents. They told him of
Adam’s arrest and court date. Zebediah believed the police
were mistaken. He told his hosts that he hoped the real thief
would soon be identified and arrested.
While Zebediah was visiting
with his in-laws-to-be, Adam returned to the police station.
There he announced that he had decided to confess the whole
story. He said they were right: he committed the burglary--but
only because Herr Kantor had persuaded him to do it. The police
then found and arrested Zebediah. They said that his accomplice,
Adam, had fully confessed. Zebediah, now with a felony charge
against him, was astonished. He indignantly protested to the
police that he was innocent.
The police then brought Adam
into the room to confront Zebediah, as Adam (having experience
with the judicial system) knew they would. Adam then...
...confidently, almost
triumphantly, brought out the cue. It caused a lightning
change in Zebediah, as if he received a shock. He collapsed
completely and confessed, exactly as he had been ordered
to do under hypnosis. (Reiter, 1958, p. 62).
Zebediah was held in jail.
Adam was allowed to return home. Before he left, Adam thought
of a way to make Zebediah look even worse and himself look
even better. He told police that Zebediah had been hypnotizing
him and had used hypnosis to make him commit the crimes.
After the jail guard passed
that information on to Zebediah, he finally recognized what
his problem really was. From his jail cell, Zebediah then
wrote letter after letter to both the authorities and to his
defense attorney. He passionately begged for a careful investigation
of his case in the light of his new understanding. He obtained
an examination by a medical doctor with some training in hypnosis,
hoping that the doctor would offer the court proof of his
victimization by Adam, but the doctor refused to get involved.
Karl
du Prel
Karl
du Prel was a German hypnosis researcher. In an 1889 book
(Das hypnotische Verbrechen und seine Entdeckung), he predicted
that the developing technology of hypnosis might create
a new and very dangerous type of criminal. He said it, in
such a case, it might be very hard to find evidence because
of hypnotically-suggested amnesia, suggested false memories,
and/or hypnotic manipulation of the testimony of witnesses.
He said that suggested amnesia for events under hypnosis
would be the biggest problem for criminal investigators.
Du Prel also worried about the possibility of sealing suggestions,
which would prevent easy rehypnotization of the victim.
Du
Prel felt that the growth of hypnotic technology required
a parallel increase in knowledgeability on the part of lawyers
and jurists. He suggested that police authorities should
be prepared to use hypnotism to detect crimes involving
hypnotism. He urged that the public be warned that anybody
who allows himself to be hypnotized takes a chance. He wanted
to prohibit hypnotism, except with clear safeguards.
Trial
Zebediah went bravely to his trial, secure in the knowledge
that he was innocent. He now knew what had really happened
and he felt that he could explain it. He trusted that the
truth would be enough.
But the judge did not believe
him. Even his own defense lawyer did not find Zebediah’s
version of the facts credible.
It was unthinkable that
a primitive and uncultivated type of person such as Adam
would be able to hypnotize an intelligent, educated man
such as he and, what is more, turn him into a slave and
automaton for his own criminal ends. (Reiter, 1958,
p. 63).
Furthermore, even if it were
true that Adam had hypnotized Zebediah, everybody in that
courtroom believed in the “dogma of moral integrity.”
According to that legal concept, it was the subject’s
fault if he obeyed a self-injurious or criminal suggestion
given by a hypnotisto because only an evil person obeys an
evil suggestion. Not all hypnotists believed the dogma of
moral integrity, but no disbelievers testified at Zebediah’s
trial.
Losing on the dogma issue,
Zebediah then pinned his hopes on his legal right to confront
the accuser. He demanded a face-to-face confrontation with
Adam in court. He was sure that he, now knowing the truth,
could force Adam to tell the truth to the court.
He did not realize that conscious
awareness of being a hypnotic subject and conscious profound
determination to never again be hypnotized are easily overpowered
by unconscious hypnotic conditioning. He did not know that
a conditioned hypnotic subject--who has realized his situation--tends
to respond to the hypnotist’s presence with fear, guilt,
and confusion.
...though his existence
was at stake, as soon as Adam was brought in, he was so
influenced by his presence that his manner became uncertain
and confused, and when he saw Adam’s mocking look and
self-confident bearing he began to stammer. Nobody believed
what he said. (Reiter, 1958, p. 63)
Adam whined to the judge during
his testimony that he was just “an ordinary fellow.”
He said that he had no idea what hypnotism was, but that he
had been persuaded, by the cunning and deceit use of it by
Zebediah, to assist in those criminal projects. The court
rejected Zebediah’s statement and believed Adam’s.
Zebediah did not give up.
He proved that the insurance money from both burglaries ended
up in Adam’s pocket. The court, however, still refused
to believe his statements about hypnosis. At the trial’s
end, Zebediah was sentenced to thirteen months in jail. Adam
got eight months, and everybody’s sympathy, for being
the ignorant, honest man who was deceived and taken advantage
of by Zebediah, using hypnosis.
While in jail, Adam pursued
a new money-making scheme. He attempted to blackmail Zebediah’s
family, threatening to tell police about Zebediah’s house
being torched and the old insurance swindle based on that
(which had not come up during the previous trial)--unless
they paid him hush money.
Confident of their son’s
innocence, however, Zebediah’s family refused to pay
Adam. Instead, they found a better lawyer to defend Zebediah.
His new lawyer took Zebediah’s version of the case history
more seriously than the previous one had. He obtained a ruling
from the judge that Zebediah and Adam should not again be
in the courtroom at the same time. He asked the judge to have
both imprisoned men “put under mental observation.”
Showing their prejudices,
the police kept Adam in a regular facility, but sent Zebediah
to a mental hospital for the evaluation. The hospital’s
director had no experience with hypnotism, and he firmly believed
that a hypnotic subject could not be made to do anything against
his will. The psychiatrist stated that Zebediah was “weakwilled
and vacillating, a psychopath and a neurotic who had no understandable
motive for his criminal actions.”1 He interviewed Adam
in jail and described him as “purposeful, energetic,
and resourceful, a typically brutal and callous blackmailer...”
(Reiter, 1958, p. 63)
Dr. Kroener Learns
the Truth
The lawyer could not get Zebediah out of jail. After his client
served the time and was released, the attorney sent Zebediah
to be evaluated by the skilled psychiatrist and experienced
hypnotist, Dr. Kroener. In the beginning, the doctor assumed
that Zebediah was lying. However, as he worked with Zebediah,
session after session, under hypnosis, during two months of
1927, the doctor gradually changed his mind. He concluded
that Zebediah’s crimes actually had been caused by Adam’s
hypnotic suggestions.
Perhaps Kroener also implanted
a suggestion that blocked Adam from ever hypnotizing Zebediah
again. For, either by that blocking, or by total avoidance
of Adam, Zebediah managed to never be victimized by his neighbor
again. The doctor’s belief in Zebediah’s story must
have been a precious comfort in this difficult era of that
unfortunate man’s life. For, his fiance had rejected
him and the school district would not hire anybody with a
criminal record, even if he could pass their test.
But Zebediah’s lawyer
and Dr. Kroener were working on a plan which they hoped would
exonerate the school teacher. In 1929, Kroener hypnotized
Zebediah again. This time, seven witnesses and a stenographer
(who recorded 126 typed pages) were present. One of the witnesses
was Professor Arthur Kronfeld, another noted German hypnosis
expert. Both Kroener and Kronfeld wrote reports stating their
professional opinion, that Zebediah had been victimized by
Adam using hypnosis. The lawyer enclosed those reports when
he applied to reopen the case.
The court of appeal agreed
that new facts had come out, but refused to allow a full-process
appeal. They based that verdict entirely on the dogma of moral
integrity: if Adam could cause Zebediah, by means of hypnosis,
to do immoral things, it proved that Zebediah was an immoral
person.
Kroener’s
Book
Dr. Kroener wrote a book about Zebediah’s case, seeking
to present the case to the higher court of public opinion.
His manuscript would have been the first modern psychiatric
study of a victim of unethical hypnosis, and the first recorded
memory recovery, by rehypnotization, of a survivor of unethical
hypnosis. However, nobody read it because, immediately after
its printing, the German government banned it. Whoever put
up the substantial money for his publishing venture lost it
all.
In 1936, another case of unethical
hypnosis went on trial in Germany. That time, two hypnotists
went to jail, not their victim. After the trial, Dr. Kroener
contacted Dr. Ludwig Mayer, the psychiatrist who had managed
to discover the truth and cause the hypnotists to be the losers
in court. Dr. Kroener told Dr. Mayer about Zebediah’s
case. When Mayer wrote a book about his client (published
in 1937), he included in it a summary of Zebediah’s case
history.
Post-War Events When Germany
sank into the dark maelstrom of Naziism. Dr. Kroener, a Jew,
emigrated. When he returned, 17 years later in 1952, he searched
for Zebediah and his lawyer. He learned that both still lived,
and contacted them. Zebediah soon traveled to Berlin (it was
the summer school holiday) to, once again, be hypnotized by
Dr. Kroener. Zebediahwas now age 56. He long since had been
working again as a school teacher. His current job was in
a large city school in the province of Franconia. His behavior
record, since release from jail in 1928, was spotless.
Zebediah had 15 more sessions
with Kroener—all tape-recorded, transcribed, and annotated.
Although Zebediah’s conscious memory of those old happenings
was now fuzzy, but under hypnosis he remembered it all clearly.
His story, remembered twenty years later, was unchanged.
During the Christmas holiday
that year, Kroener visited Zebediah in Franconia. The psychiatrist
asked Zebediah’s permission to publish the book about
him. Zebediah hesitated. He knew that publicity could compromise
his job, yet he deeply yearned for the truth to be known and
his innocence to be, at last, firmly established. He said,
“Yes.” A few days later, somebody circulated printed
matter referring to the old charges against Zebediah. The
old teacher immediately was fired from his job.
Then Dr. Kroener heard of
another successful prosecution (in the Danish court system)
of a hypnotist who had given a subject criminal suggestions.
The court psychiatrist was an old friend of his, Dr. Reiter
. Reiter told Kroener that he was working on a book about
his case. It would be published in the United States as well
as Europe. Aging and unwell, Dr. Kroener delivered his manuscript,
tape recordings, and notes on Zebediah’s case to Reiter.
Dr. Reiter added Zebediah’s
case to his book about Palle Hardwick. The detailed synopses
of Zebediah’s case history made by Dr. Mayer and Dr.
Reiter provide the only remaining public record of Zebediah’s
sufferings and the struggle of good Dr. Kroener to make public
the truth about his case.
Z
CANTOR
|
MRS.
E
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PALLE
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CANDY