The Amazing Kreskin – Posted: February 11, 2010 11:10 AM
Love And Hypnosis
Actually, my equating equating hypnosis with love is not of my own origin. I have simply amplified on something that the legendary psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud espoused over a century ago. Namely that people in love, in deep love, in passionate love, have a pretty similar relationship to people who are under hypnotic influence.
In the early days of Freud, he was introduced to hypnosis by Breuer, who felt that people in this special mystical state could remember details better from past experiences, and therefore help Freud and the analyst get to the early seat of the emotional problem. But there were some unnerving experiences of the analysts, doctors, and therapists. Sometimes these patients, particularly women, would lunge forward out of their hypnotic condition and try to embrace the therapist, like they became “in love” for that moment. Or more, it was suggested that there were sexual factors involved in the relationship, and the “transference” of a special quality was building up between the therapist and the patient who was starting to feel the way that patient would with a person in their private life that they were deeply involved with. As Freud abandoned hypnosis, because he found it not necessary, the same relationships built up between the patient and the therapist.
When you fall in love, you set aside many of your barriers. You don’t really stop to analyze the assignments tomorrow and what you’re going to do about that chronic post-nasal problem, how you will get your homework done if you’re going for your education. No, you find the person you’re with is beginning to take on a mysterious and, yes, rather unscientific relationship with you. After all, would simply being touched arouse erotic feelings? Not necessarily, except look at the induction that you’ve gone through. Oh, you are not told to gaze into the eyes of the hypnotist. You are not told to relax and listen to slumberous words. You are not watching a rotating disc. There are other tools that are helping to bring about an extremely romantic, non-critical frame of mind and body. The quietness of eating dinner with soft lighting, the occasional touching of two glasses that may symbolize unconsciously something that’s clicking between you.
Even across the table, the occasional touch, long before one has left for a private living room or bedroom, because this is beginning long before outside circumstances have been completely removed, after all people can respond to the power of suggestion on stage if the hypnotist is unusually skillful, in spite of the noise and distractions. There’s something bringing you closer to your increasingly passionate companion. You may even take advantage of another way to harmonize with your partner by dancing with them, especially to romantic music, the swaying, the motion, the fact that the bodies are in synchronization. This, along with the thoughts between each other, and the words, tend to magnetically draw a person closer. What is interesting is unlike traditional hypnosis, both partners are becoming mesmerized, but I’ve said for many, many years, “it’s a wise hypnotist who knows who is hypnotizing whom”; and my opinion, in many cases the hypnotist is as much hypnotically influenced as the subject.
THE KEY IS SUGGESTION. People who are apparently hypnotized are responding to the power of suggestion. They really are not in a trance. They really are not asleep. In fact, they’re not in any special altered condition, in spite of what most stage hypnotists might suggest, let alone doctors, psychologists, etc. who propose to put people in a trance and activate some psychotherapy. The trance is BS. There is no trance. It is the fact that under certain conditions we could be so convinced of a set of ideas that it can bypass our reasoning. The people who are described as hypnotized are responding to ideas without analyzing the way so that their impact disappears. Remember, when mommy kisses Billy on the forehead, Billy having just walked in crying because he hit his head, mommy simply said ‘let me kiss the booboo’ and it will go away. Suddenly Billy stops crying and goes out to play. He is so reassured by his remarks, trusting them, that he ignores the pain that is still there, but by ignoring it he lessens the pain.
In the same way, is it not remarkable that we can watch a horror movie or read a Stephen King novel in a warm room and get goose bumps? Do we ever stop to think how remarkable it is that the way we think can alter even the surface of our skin? If we watched the movie and kept dissecting it, thinking about the camera men behind the camera, the people off to the side, the way the movie’s structured, we would not envelope ourselves in the story, and horror or fear would not touch us.
But then again, a fictional story has caused us to cry. You watch a tear-jerker motion picture. I, myself, can think of An Affair to Remember, and could not help but be in tears at the end of the movie. So in spite of common sense telling you that this is only a movie, it’s not really happening, no one had died, no one has left their loved ones, no one has been gravely hurt or incapacitated, because thinking that out would cause no reaction to the story, but by enveloping ourselves within it, we don’t even stop to analyze and we’ve trapped ourselves sufficiently with the dialogue, the movement of the characters, and the music, and we’re responding similarly to a supposedly hypnotized person who’s been told that they’re watching a movie that’s very sad, and within a minute the subject is crying on the stage.
Again, when you’re falling in love, you have dropped many of your guards, including your critical thinking. Of course, you can consciously strengthen the bond, and not by trying to observe or interpret some body language in all this new fangled, modern psychological clap trap. Psychology and its therapists and teachers go in cycles. It’s not dreams these days, it’s not childhood experiences, it’s body language. Leave that to the experts. Don’t drive yourself crazy trying to interpret or remember what certain movements mean, because taken out of context they mean beans and BS. It will only tend to interrupt your true rapport with someone.
Know if you’re going to get more deeply involved between the two of you, speak the person’s language, move the way they do, use some of the key words that they like to use when they’re expressing themselves. Not overly so, but from time to time, as it touches on greater meaning within them if you find that when you touch them, their expression is comfortable. And you get the feeling that they’re comfortable, then that area of touching can be repeated from time to time.
And if you’re really a master and fully at home with this process, you can remember the music that was played either at dinner or some particularly meaningful moment and reuse that music, play it again. After all, it tends to reawaken some of those same feelings, like a post-hypnotic suggestion. Let yourself move with the flow, and neither of you really leads the other. You guide each other simultaneously, until you really experience a true romance, where for the minutes and hours reasoning and analyzing are not important. But if you don’t feel that way, or you don’t feel the way your partner does, you’re only conning yourself. No, you don’t need any pendulums or watches or rotating discs, or a glaring eye, but sometimes you do need a hypnotic focal point. In this case, take advantage of what has a romantic symbolism, something in the shape of a heart, a box of candy, a broach, or a simple picture. Oh, yes, I repeat there is a gigantic similarity between hypnosis, true hypnosis, and love, true love.
Regarding if one can determine if someone is lying when he or she says ‘I Love You.’
Because you are in an uncritical frame of mind the same way the person you are enraptured with is, you tend not to think about this in a critical way. After all, if you’re going to analyze whether a person’s lying to you or not when they’re in love, you’ve got to change your framework, and you, yourself, at that point will not be any where near the same frame of mind that they are in. That’s a price to pay, because love is an expensive experience. Oh, you might later on when it is all over and you are not with the person, look back and remind yourself and relive mentally some of the experience listening if you can to the sound of the voice of the person when they spoke, and note if you detect something strangely different, or something when you look back upon it gives you an uneasiness when they said they loved you. That could be a signal when all is not what it’s cracked up to be. Keep in mind the next time you’re hypnotizing your partner, if it’s really working, that partner is also mesmerizing you…such is love.
ESPecially,
The Amazing Kreskin
