In December 1894, the Upper Bavarian Jury Court debated the nature of free will. Ceslav Lubicz-Cynski, a Polish-born teacher, hypnotist, and magnetizer, stood accused of having unlawfully seduced Hedwig von Zedlitz, a ‘respectable’ and ‘devout’ Saxon baroness. According to the state prosecutor, Cynski had employed suggestion to bring about a state of abulia (Willenlosigkeit) in his victim. Lacking free will, Zedlitz could no longer resist the defendant's advances. The court had to decide whether Cynski's skill as a hypnotist was responsible for a sexual crime (Verbrechen gegen die Sittlichkeit) or whether Zedlitz had simply fallen for the man's foreign good looks. The Cynski affair, as it would be sometimes called, was the first legal proceeding in Germany to adjudicate the power of hypnosis as a technique to suspend free will.Footnote 1
The history of free will has yet to be written. With few exceptions,Footnote 2 the literature on the subject is dominated by legal and philosophical works, most of which recount the ideas of prominent thinkers or discuss hypothetical questions far removed from specific historical contexts.Footnote 3 The following article seeks to redress the balance by tracing the debate on hypnosis from 1894, when the Upper Bavarian Court deliberated Czynski's culpability, to 1936, when the authorities considered a similar case in the Baden city of Heidelberg. Examining responses to hypnosis in this (and any other period) is tantamount to recording common understandings of autonomy and heteronomy, self-control and mind control, free will and automaticity.Footnote 4 The neurologists, psychiatrists, and jurists about to be examined put forward two distinct perspectives on the matter, both of which conformed with recognizable philosophical positions: one group warned that the hypnotic state threatened to undermine the self-control upon which middle-class identity rested; the other believed that men (and women) of a certain character would be able to withstand hypnosis on account of their free will. The popularity of the second judgement, it will be argued, owed much to the way in which it reassured middle-class sensibilities: those who had developed a morally sovereign personality would retain their free will, whereas those who had not done so would be helpless in the face of hypnotic suggestion.
To this day, philosophers refer to hypnosis – alongside drug use, brain stimulation, and, archetypally, holding a gun to someone's head – as a means of removing the capacity for free will,Footnote 5 although their allusions to hypnosis are usually based on older, very much disputed conceptions of the phenomenon.Footnote 6 German observers in the early twentieth century were often beholden to such conceptions. Hypnosis was dangerous, they believed, precisely because it could surmount free will. Cunning hypnotists used suggestion to seduce innocent women or force hapless victims to commit crimes in a post-hypnotic state. For others, by contrast, free will would invariably prevail, no matter how powerful the hypnotic suggestion. Given the nature of the question, with its wider moral and philosophical implications, the conflict caused divisions both within and without the professional fields of psychology, psychiatry, and law. Indeed, the discourse often centred on the perceived struggle, located within a particular ‘personality’, between an individual's ‘character’ or ‘soul’ and the infiltration by a foreign or hostile force. While one group (henceforth called compatibilists) emphasized the resilience of the ‘moral inhibitions’, another group (henceforth called determinists) doubted that these were sufficient to withstand hypnosis.
As will be noted, the above terms relate to the current scholarship on free will, which tends to distinguish between determinists, indeterminists, and compatibilists. Determinists profess that ‘a complete statement of the laws of nature together with a complete description of the condition of the entire universe at any point in time logically entails a complete description of the condition of the entire universe at another point in time’.Footnote 7 Put differently, determinists believe that every physical event is ‘completely caused by prior events together with the laws of nature’.Footnote 8 Determinists rely heavily on natural science (Newtonian physics in the past, neuroscience more recently) as well as (social) psychology.Footnote 9 Indeterminists dispute this view, because they avow that nature works in a probabilistic rather than a deterministic fashion;Footnote 10 or because they differentiate between reasons and causes;Footnote 11 or else because they believe in alternative possibilities (i.e. to act differently from the way one did) and therefore in free will. In this final instance, they also call themselves libertarians.Footnote 12 Compatibilists are situated somewhere in between, arguing that determinism and free will do not contradict each other. Compatibilists usually define determinism as being governed by our own preferences, personalities, or characters. Indeed, if we wish acts to be our acts, compatibilists insist, they have to be determined by us. As long as behaviour is unconstrained (by physical force from outside, for example), these acts are free.Footnote 13
At first sight, it would be reasonable to associate those who disputed the impact of hypnosis on free will with libertarianism rather than compatibilism. After all, the moral law, as defined by the most important German libertarian, Immanuel Kant, was to be unaffected by outside circumstances (i.e. the phenomenal world).Footnote 14 But as my discussion will show, the issue was more complex than such a conflation would suggest. For in highlighting the significance of ‘personality’, the ‘compatibilists’ were undermining the libertarian notion of an unencumbered mind freely willing rectitude, righteousness, and justice. Instead, they posited ‘characters’ that had been socialized either to embrace or to resist the allures of hypnotism. ‘Character’, it followed, determined the way in which persons responded to hypnosis, allowing for the compatibility of free will and determinism.
It would be equally reasonable to identify those who accentuated the dangers of hypnosis with compatibilism rather than determinism. Here too, however, the matter was not quite as straightforward as it might first seem. To be sure, the type of determinism I am about to elucidate stressed the impact of hypnosis on free will in a manner reminiscent of how ‘classic’ compatibilists such as David Hume stressed the importance of external constraints on human freedom. According to this view, freedom is ‘the absence of constraints preventing us from doing what we want’. The difference between Hume and the determinists we are about to encounter is not only that the former was solely concerned with external constraints on freedom like ‘physical restraint (being in jail or tied up), coercion or threats (holding a gun to someone's head), or physical disabilities (such as paralysis)’, whereas the latter contemplated constraints internal to human wills (of a psychological or psychiatric kind, such as addictions, obsessions, or delusions).Footnote 15 The main difference is that for the determinists hypnosis was not simply a constraint that undermined the full exercise of freedom through physical coercion or by seriously affecting rational behaviour. Instead, it had the force to extinguish the personality as such, invariably causing a certain kind of behaviour to take place.
I
Debates on the possibility of committing crimes under the influence of (post-)hypnotic suggestion had been heated ever since the 1880s, not least because of Jules Liégeois's interventions. Nancy's public prosecutor believed that ‘any individual placed in a somnambulistic state will become in the hands of the experimenter a complete automaton, both morally and physically’.Footnote 16 He therefore disseminated information on the dangers of ‘suggestive crime’, warning women to avoid the gaze of unknown men in train compartments lest the ‘weaker sex’ succumb to the powers of ‘fascination’. The French administrative lawyer also recommended that exceptionally suggestible women be ‘morally immunized’ against hypnosis – whether he was aware of the irony that this ‘vaccination’ was to be achieved through suggestion is another matter. Either way, the media coverage on trials related to ‘rape’ as a result of ‘psychic slavery’ and ‘sexual dependence’ was extensive, not least in the Bavarian capital in late 1894.Footnote 17
According to various press accounts of the trial, Baroness von Zedlitz had been suffering from severe head and stomachaches when she responded to a newspaper ad by the ‘healer’ Czynski. Zedlitz and Czynski became intimate during the course of the treatment. Czynksi asked that their subsequent engagement be kept secret from either side's relatives, ostensibly because he belonged to a princely Lithuanian family that would not appreciate such news. Eventually, Zedlitz's brother and father got wind of the marriage. Czynski was arrested and put on trial for forcing his ‘wife’ into a state of abulia (Willenlosigkeit). Lacking free will, the public prosecutor argued, Zedlitz had become the victim of sexual abuse.Footnote 18
During the proceedings, the court sought to identify the methods by which Czynski had gained control over the baroness's psyche. There was talk of magnetic passes, mediumism, somnambulism, and disease transfer. The defendant repeatedly denied having hypnotized the injured party. It further transpired that the latter had been interested in spiritism. Zedlitz made conflicting statements. While she claimed to have married Czynksi ‘so as to save his soul’, her decision to tie the knot also gave rise to feelings of being under his ‘ever-growing influence’ (which she also attributed to his strong love for her).Footnote 19 In the end, the public prosecutor failed to convince the jury. Czynski was acquitted of committing a sexual crime (Verbrechen gegen die Sittlichkeit) and sentenced to three years in prison for falsifying documents and soliciting the unlawful assumption of a public office during the wedding ceremony.Footnote 20
The trial gave the expert witnesses the opportunity to address the nature of hypnosis. Their observations, which were later published in book form, provide a glimpse of what future debates would revolve around, namely the power of hypnosis over different types of people (i.e. hypnotizablity or suggestibility) and the impact of hypnosis on morality (i.e. free will). Three of the four commentators were convinced that Czynski had hypnotized Zedlitz, although as we now know the jury refused to uphold their recommendations. None of the commentators were straightforward determinists or libertarians.
Professor William Preyer, editor of James Braid's works in German translation,Footnote 21 was the most outspoken determinist in the group. A well-known expert on child psychology, the former professor of psychiatry at the University of Jena conjured up the image of Czynski as a master hypnotist who managed to ‘fascinate’ Zedlitz through his ‘dark eyes’ and ‘manner of speaking’.Footnote 22 Still, Preyer described the baroness as an ‘emotional person’ (Gefühlsmensch) lacking will and intellect (Verstand). In fact, due to her substandard power of volition and poor judgement, he felt compelled to call her ‘somewhat inferior’ (etwas minderwertig).Footnote 23 In other words, as much as hypnosis was a powerful means to paralyse the will, it seemed to work better with some persons than others.
Hubert von Grashey, former professor of psychiatry in Würzburg and Bavaria's senior medical officer (Obermedicinalrat), offered a similarly deterministic account of the events. Yet he too qualified his stance by referring to the limitations of hypnosis, admitting, for example, that increasing the number of hypnotic sessions (called Dressur or memory training elsewhere) increased the likelihood of suggestibility.Footnote 24 Likewise, he repeatedly appealed to the accumulated experience (Erfahrungsschatz) of each person. Under normal circumstances (i.e. in a waking state), this know-how would produce ‘counter-perceptions’ (Gegenvorstellungen) capable of withstanding immoral propositions.Footnote 25 Nevertheless, Grashey made no bones about the general power of hypnosis, regardless of its relative depth or one's Erfahrungsschatz in the waking state. During trance, when the hypnotist assumed absolute control over the hypnotic, ‘counter-perceptions’ no longer succeeded. Indeed, all it took was a ‘single word’ or ‘single gaze’ for a medium to fall asleep. In the case of Baroness von Zedlitz, Czynski had evidently used certain terms (of an occult nature) and certain objects (primarily amulets) to induce hypnotic states, which, in turn, necessitated his ‘victim’ to fall in love with him. In short, everything Zedlitz had purportedly done ‘out of love’ was in reality the result of the diminution of her will.Footnote 26
Ludwig Hirt, a former student of Jean-Martin Charcot's in Paris and professor of neurology in Breslau,Footnote 27 questioned these interpretations of the Czynski case. Hirt explained that hypnosis was a technique that had to be studied carefully and developed over time. While he agreed with Grashey that repeated drill (Dressur) improved the chances of success, he insisted that only deep trance ensured a genuine susceptibility to suggestion.Footnote 28 Despite his training in the French capital, Hirt did not embrace the Charcotian standpoint that hypnosis worked predominantly with (hysterical) women, a stance that Preyer's and Grashey's gendered language implied. Rather, he adopted the approach connected with Bernheim, Charcot's main rival. According to the founder of the School of Nancy, docile and compliant persons such as soldiers and servants were particularly vulnerable to suggestion.Footnote 29 Hirt was convinced that individuals who had learned ‘not to think’ and to ‘obey orders’ were easier to hypnotize than most people. Since women seldom served in the army, for example, they were less likely to respond to suggestion.Footnote 30 The fact that many women served their husbands or worked as domestics in other households presumably did not count as the sort of submissiveness Hirt had in mind.
Even so, conflicting theories on suggestibility were not his primary concern. The Breslau psychiatrist told the court that love, pure and simple, accounted for the relationship between Czynski and Zedlitz. The middle-aged baroness, inexperienced with men, had merely capitulated to the ‘Mephistophelian’ charms of the Polish marriage swindler, Hirt asserted. Had she been fourteen and not thirty-nine years of age, Czynski would now be sent to jail. But to reason that the affair revealed something criminal or pathological meant that any behaviour intended to ‘make a girl and a woman (Weib) more generally fall in love’ would soon become illegal. The state Zedlitz had found herself in reminded Hirt of Gretchen's lament at the spinning wheel from Goethe's Faust – and not some devious plot to deny Zedlitz her free will with the assistance of hypnotic procedures: ‘My poor, poor head/Is all a-craze,/And my poor wits/All in a maze.’ And: ‘To see him only/At the window I stay,/To meet him only/From home I stray.’Footnote 31
The physician, psychotherapist, and parapsychologist Albert von Schrenck-Notzing was certainly the most prominent specialist to comment on the case. The co-founder of the Munich Psychological Society in 1886, Schrenck was not only one of Germany's best-known medical hypnotists, but also a socialite who invited the city's Honoratioren to psychic experiments that doubled as fashionable soirées. Upon discovering his skills as a hypnotist, Schrenck had come to believe that he was capable of ‘curing’ homosexuality and ‘undoing’ the effects of suggestion through counter-suggestion.Footnote 32 His expert opinion during the trial betrayed both a belief in the immense potential of hypnosis and the resolve to sustain a common morality. Unlike the other experts, however, he spelled out these contradictory elements in his expert opinion to the court.
On the one hand, Schrenck acknowledged the power of suggestion. Like Grashey, he spoke of the way in which hypnotic Dressur could weaken and ultimately overcome ‘ethical feelings’ (sittliches Gefühl), not least in connection with the ‘drives’, where it proved especially effective in surmounting ‘the resistance against sexual temptations’.Footnote 33 Von Zedlitz had therefore been ‘artificially (through hypnosis, the aftermath of hypnosis, and suggestion in a waking state) prevented from exercising her otherwise highly developed moral counter-conceptions (Gegenvorstellungen)’.Footnote 34 On the other hand, he relativized the extent to which suggestions of a ‘disagreeable’ (unsympathisch) and ‘immoral’ nature might hold sway over human beings, insisting that a person's entire upbringing – and, in the case of the baroness, decades of ‘cultivated ethical counter-conceptions of normal individuality’ – could not be so easily uprooted.Footnote 35 As a result, a struggle would ensue, the outcome of which depended on the ‘strength of the counter-forces in comparison with the psychical force of the immoral intervention’.Footnote 36 Schrenck-Notzing found it difficult to take sides. Although he sympathized with the determinists’ appreciation of hypnotic power, he wished to establish a much stronger role for what Grashey had called Erfahrungsschatz and what later commentators would call the ‘moral inhibitions’. It was for this reason that he invoked an imaginary battle within the psyche, setting two formidable adversaries against each other and envisaging ‘free will’ as the exercise of a steadfastness grounded in ethical values accrued over a lifetime. Schrenck-Notzing's battle metaphor pointed to future compatibilist arguments regarding free will and hypnosis. Grashey and Preyer, on the other hand, were determinists in the face of what they perceived to be the psychological constraints imposed on the ‘victims’ of hypnosis. Once in place, these constraints functioned like a natural law, resembling the automaticity that current determinists associate with the workings of the unconscious.Footnote 37 There was no room for libertarianism in these debates, however. Even specialists less perturbed by hypnotic power, such as Hirt, distinguished between simple ‘fascination’ and ‘serious’ deep trance.
II
These debates intensified in the late Wilhelmine empire and even more so in the Weimar Republic. At a time when an ‘occult fever’ was supposedly engulfing German society,Footnote 38 the relationship between hypnosis and crime consumed the nation in two separate areas: in the first, state authorities and the police began to resort to unorthodox methods (so-called ‘criminal telepathy’) by employing clairvoyants in the fight against crime. Many of these men and women with ‘paranormal’ abilities relied on hypnosis to bring about their telepathic states.Footnote 39 In the second, a number of high-profile court cases involved claims about hypnotic influence, the most famous of which centred on the sexual exploitation of a chambermaid by a writer and hypnotist.Footnote 40
Much of this discourse turned on the question of free will and, more specifically, on the likelihood of hypnosis doing away with free will altogether. Before I outline the differences between compatibilists and determinists, mention must be made of a smaller group that neither espoused the optimism characteristic of the compatibilists nor the pessimism common to most determinists. Schrenck-Notzing belonged to this group. His battle metaphor drew heavily on Auguste Forel's Der Hypnostismus, whose language he employed liberally. Schrenck, Forel, and the Bavarian magistrate Alois Heberle, amongst others, displayed a sense of uncertainty as to the power of hypnosis.Footnote 41 Forel, Switzerland's most famous psychiatrist and one of the leading scholars in the field, wrote about an ‘intense struggle between the urge (Drang) of the suggestion on the one hand and the aesthetic or moral counter-perceptions of normal individuality, that is, the inherited and the acquired brain dynamics (Hirndynamismen) on the other’. Whoever had a less developed conscience than the rest of the population was bound to find it easier to abide by ‘criminal suggestion’.Footnote 42 At the same time, Forel mentioned somnambulists who were highly hypnotizable and who were unable to resist any form of hypnotic suggestion. Some of these persons, he added, were ‘pretty decent characters’ (recht ordentliche Charaktere).Footnote 43
Heberle, a lawyer from the south German city of Passau, was similarly undecided. A critic of Cesare Lombroso's deterministic theory of degeneration (which threatened to erode moral responsibility and free will),Footnote 44 Heberle resorted to the familiar trope of a battle waged between two equally mighty contenders, the suggestion to sleep emanating from without and the autosuggestion not to sleep emanating from within.Footnote 45 Like Forel and Schrenck-Notzing, he insisted that the degree to which a criminal would succeed with his hypnotic suggestions would depend on the moral character of the potential medium. The more drill (Dressur) was involved, the likelier the surrender to the evildoer.Footnote 46 All three commentators were therefore ambivalent about the abuse of hypnosis in a criminal setting. As much as they held on to the notion that moral standards could underwrite free will, they simultaneously feared that hypnosis could undermine these moral standards and, by implication, free will. Forel conducted oft-quoted experiments to prove this point.Footnote 47 Such ambivalence, however, was much less common after the First World War, whether in the Weimar Republic or the Third Reich.
The compatibilists focused on the authority of the inhibitions (Hemmungen) and counter-perceptions (Gegenvorstellungen), both of which, they believed, comprised the average middle-class ‘character’ as a kind of ‘overall matrix or frame of personal being’.Footnote 48 Before they could do so, however, they often felt obliged to dismiss the pervasive concern that hypnosis was responsible for all kinds of illicit acts.Footnote 49 Since the Czynksi affair of the mid-1890s, sexual assaults on ill-fated women had been the most talked-about ‘hypnotic crime’, possibly because few if any other cases had come to light that would have ‘documented’ further offences at the hands of master hypnotists.Footnote 50 But now, at a time when films such as Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari or Mabuse, der Spieler captivated (and, as some critics warned, mesmerized) cinema-goers,Footnote 51 there was an urgent need to dispel the ‘misunderstanding’ that hypnosis wielded colossal power.
So compatibilists maintained that ‘hypnosis’ was used as a pretext to explain events that could otherwise not be accounted for;Footnote 52 that, more concretely, it figured as an excuse for compulsive sexual acts (Triebhandlungen) that were embarrassing to admit, either because they seemed to disclose a depraved mind or because they could not be imagined to exist in the persons one loved;Footnote 53 and, finally, that when women or their husbands complained that they or their wives had been hypnotized, they often mistook hypnosis for sexual dependence (Hörigkeit), infatuation, or fascination.Footnote 54 In short, whenever Germans blamed hypnosis for these and other ills, they were giving in to what later historians would call ‘hypnotizzy’, rather than experiencing actual hypnotic suggestion.Footnote 55
Whatever the power of hypnosis, the ‘personality’ or ‘character’ of the average German usually sufficed to counteract suggestions that disagreed with the moral code of the individual in question. What is more, this personality was the very reason for being able to exercise free will in the first place. If the character did not conform to the standards of bourgeois probity, however, then the hypnotist could do his (it was always a male) malevolent work. None the less, he could do so not because of the hypnotic suggestion itself, but because of the existence of an inferior character. Put differently, just as free will vis-à-vis hypnosis was present in the case of morally upright mediums, so too was the absence of free will already in place in the case of morally corrupt mediums. Compatibilists assumed that, at one point in time, characters had been formed and could no longer be altered. But the dispute among philosophers as to the free will that went into forming these characters did not perturb them. Whether free actions were always implicated during the process of becoming who one was did not matter.Footnote 56 On the contrary, when confronted with the subject of hypnotic power, the compatibilists assumed that being good was synonymous with free will, as the ethical person could decide between accepting the criminal suggestion or not, whereas the unethical person did not enjoy this choice at all. In other words, the unethical person, however much he may have had the opportunity to make certain choices in the past, was now a helpless automaton insofar as he acted upon a foreign will.
This perspective anticipated Harry Frankfurt's distinction between first-order and second-order desires. Frankfurt discriminated between someone having the intention to perform a given action but then doing something different despite her erstwhile intention. In this instance, she decided as a result of a second-order desire or a volition of the second-order. For the American philosopher, having such volitions was the equivalent of being a person. Creatures lacking such desires, he called wantons. As he put it, the ‘essential characteristic of a wanton is that he does not care about his will. His desires move him to do things, without its being true of him either that he wants to be moved by those desires or that he prefers to be moved by other desires.’ So the difference between a person and a wanton is that where the person is moved to act either by a will she wants or by a will she does not want, the wanton does not reflect on whether his will is the will he wishes to act upon.Footnote 57
The group that championed a Frankfurt-like approach in the post-war period included lawyers, doctors, hypnotists, and psychiatrists. More importantly, their writings appeared before and after 1933, indicating that National Socialism in power did little to alter fundamental positions on the matter. Let me begin with the writer and lay hypnotist Paul Friede, for whom the ‘core of the soul’ was ‘unswayable’ (unbeeinflussbar).Footnote 58 Writing in the early 1920s, Friede explained that suggestions during hypnosis resembled the ‘extraction’ of ideas, perceptions, and thoughts that already existed in the unconscious. It followed that hypnotists and psychotherapists relied on the ‘essence of this unconscious’, whose contents they could bring to light, but never manipulate or overcome.Footnote 59 What would happen to the drives, impulses, and appetites uncovered during hypnosis depended solely on the patient. Since most ethical human beings could call upon a host of ‘inhibitions’ (Hemmungen) to rein in their drives, there was no danger in succumbing to the malicious intent of real or imagined criminal masterminds. Suggestions would only be accepted, the author noted, if they corresponded to the innermost contents of the medium's ‘soul’ (Seeleninhalt).Footnote 60 Friede was convinced that every ‘normal person endowed with moral inhibitions’ would refuse to carry out any act that he or she found unjust.Footnote 61
It appears that Friede was the only figure to locate the ‘moral inhibitions’ in the unconscious, although his conception of the unconscious derived not from Freud, but from Max Dessoir's Doppel-Ich, where hypnosis and the unconscious are analogous and where the latter is hardly associated with morality.Footnote 62 Most like-minded scholars did not attempt to discriminate between components of the psyche, being primarily interested in publicizing the significance of free will irrespective of where it might be situated.Footnote 63
Writing at about the same time as Friede, the well-known Freiburg neurologist and psychiatrist Adolf A. Friedländer averred that hypnosis did not threaten a person's ‘character’, ‘fundamental ethical foundations’ (sittliche Grundbegriffe), or ‘world view’ (Weltanschauung).Footnote 64 This statement applied to the morally steadfast and morally degraded alike. As was common during this time, Friedländer appealed to a tradition reaching back at least to Hippolyte Taine's The origins of contemporary France and Gustave Le Bon's The crowd, where the unconscious was not mentioned in name but existed in the ‘wild forces of nature’ released during the events of the French Revolution and the Paris Commune. The discharge of these wild forces, Le Bon had warned time and again, often depended on the skills of dubious figures.Footnote 65 In a similar vein, Friedländer believed that it did not require hypnosis for the masses to be ‘inflamed’, approximating as they did the emotional level of an immature child. Accordingly, whoever mastered the ‘art of mass psychology’ would be able ‘do with the masses as he saw fit’.Footnote 66
Other doctors and psychiatrists agreed.Footnote 67 But this position was not confined to hypnotists or the medical profession. The criminal defence lawyer Werner Lucas sounded very much like Friede when he asserted somewhat categorically that hypnotizing someone against her ‘express will’ was ‘out of the question’.Footnote 68 Referring to the soul (Seelenleben) rather than specific sections of the mind, he reiterated the argument that ‘character, custom, education, and under certain circumstances religious considerations (Rücksichten)’ could produce moral inhibitions (Hemmungen).Footnote 69 He juxtaposed persons with recourse to such inhibitions against ‘hysterical and morally feeble persons lacking character’ (characterschwach), who were inclined to commit crimes anyway – that is, with or without hypnosis.Footnote 70 Although he admitted that repeated suggestions (Dressur) and cunning lies could overcome even moral inhibitions associated with ‘shame’ (in women), Lucas clearly believed that these were exceptions that proved the rule.
Like many other compatibilists, the Berlin lawyer Hellmut Ivers did not deny the extent to which hypnosis was able to produce ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ perceptions that could, in turn, lead to delusional behaviour on the part of the hypnotic.Footnote 71 Agreeing with Lucas on the importance of ‘character’, he spelled out in even greater detail the differences between those who were at risk and those who had little to fear from hypnosis. The former group comprised people with ‘reduced intellectual independent-mindedness’.Footnote 72 The lower the level of education and the less developed the ‘ethical qualities’ attached to higher forms of education, the more difficult it would be to resist hypnosis.Footnote 73 It followed that the latter group was, if not immune to the allures of hypnosis, at least morally responsible to persevere in the face of the temptation. In fact, just as it would be near-impossible to induce a ‘normal’ person to commit murder, so a patriotic man would never commit treason. Suggestion might prompt a ‘well-behaved’ woman to ignore the pain of a needle or to believe that a non-existent bunch of flowers smelled beautifully, but it could not cause her to undress in front of an audience.Footnote 74 As a jurist, Ivers was not only concerned with delimiting the power of hypnosis, but equally interested in reminding ‘normal’ Germans that it was imperative to withstand particular suggestions. The ethical foundations common to most educated people, in other words, had to be activated in certain situations, as it was simply not enough to rely on a good upbringing only.Footnote 75 Even so, this upbringing distinguished the average middle-class person from her morally depraved counterparts, because she was moved to act either by a will she wanted or by a will she did not want.
The determinists did not describe the victims of hypnotic suggestion as wantons who were incapable of making decisions based on moral reflection. Rather, they argued that hypnosis was similar to a force of nature whose laws could not be changed. Some determinists held on to the hope that inhibitions in the unconscious might be tapped to uphold morality, but their general approach revealed a much more pessimistic outlook. Fritz Paas, whose legal dissertation on the subject appeared in 1933, was one of many who highlighted the risks of criminal activities in a state of post-hypnotic suggestion.Footnote 76 He rejected the view that experiments which had apparently confirmed the efficacy of hypnosis to provoke such acts were methodologically flawed on the grounds that the respective medium knew very well that he or she was ‘performing’ within an artificial setting. Yet his objection to this serious caveat, voiced repeatedly throughout the twentieth century,Footnote 77 was not particularly instructive, as he merely reminded his readers that in one such experiment the medium had dressed up all in red with chamois horns attached to his forehead.Footnote 78 Paas stood firm in his belief that the victims of hypnosis were in a state of unconsciousness, unaware of what they were doing, and therefore non compos mentis (unzurechnungsfähig).Footnote 79 More importantly, although he suggested that certain people, such as soldiers, children, and servants,Footnote 80 were more easily hypnotized than others, he did not stipulate that the rest of society remained unaffected by attempts to surmount their free will.Footnote 81 On the contrary, the notion that ‘character’ determined hypnotizability would have undermined his larger claim that hypnosis was a serious threat to society.
Like Paas, the physician Wilhelm Bergmann argued that certain traits or dispositions facilitated hypnotizability. People ‘too lazy to think’ (denkfaule), including soldiers and servants, were much more prone to accept suggestions than others.Footnote 82 Again, however, this supposed proclivity did not preclude the impact of hypnosis on the rest of society. Bergmann explained that a skilled hypnotist could outmanoeuvre any moral compunctions the medium might have. He brought up the possibility of making an odious deed appear to be completely ordinary. Asking an honest man to steal a pocketknife, for example, had no chance of succeeding, but convincing the same person that the knife on someone else's desk was her own did enable the potentially evil hypnotist to carry out his devious plans.Footnote 83 This argument relied heavily on experiments carried out by August Forel.Footnote 84
Once under the influence of hypnosis, a person's free will no longer functioned properly. According to Bergmann, this abdication of independence was a result of the single-mindedness that came with hypnotic suggestion. Normally, in a waking state, emotions, senses, and thoughts of all kinds existed side by side. In a trance state, by contrast, the focus was on one thing only, to the detriment of ‘counter-perceptions’ that would usually prevent the passive acceptance of certain ‘implanted’ desires or appetites.Footnote 85 Hypnotic suggestion, Bergmann contended, was tantamount to reducing or cancelling associative thought processes, leading to the ‘uncritical acceptance’ of specific ideas.Footnote 86
The neurologist Erich Kindborg agreed. Writing in Germany's pre-eminent journal of psychiatry, he maintained that the success or failure of post-hypnotic crime depended entirely on the technique at someone's disposal. An adept hypnotist could easily suggest that adultery was in someone's best interest, for instance. Relying on the good works of the so-called moral inhibitions, the psychiatrist warned, was rather careless, all the more so since, like dreams, the hypnotic state consisted of perceptions wholly unrelated to each other – the implication being that the nastier perceptions could not be held in check by the more benign ones.Footnote 87 Kindborg also referred to Forel's experiments. The latter's observations, although made under laboratory conditions, indicated that an ‘unconscious awareness’ of the artificial nature of the setting (and thus the inconsequential nature of one's actions during these experiments) was no guarantee that serious crimes could not be committed in a (post-)hypnotic state.Footnote 88
The dispute between compatibilists and determinists continued unabated after Hitler came to power. Despite widespread fears in the 1920s and 1930s that hypnosis was about to transform radically common perceptions about human volition, academic discourse did not follow suit. The parallel with the situation in late nineteenth-century France and Germany is instructive. During this period too, there were calls to curtail severely the use of hypnosis and confine its practice to trained physicians only.Footnote 89 Yet as the Czynski Trial demonstrated, the experts could not agree on the extent to which hypnosis did indeed pose an imminent threat to free will. While popular imagery shifted with the times – from vulnerable women in train comportments to vulnerable publics in the grip of advanced technology controlled by evil masterminds – the debate amongst neurologists, psychiatrists, and jurists did not change significantly. This is also true for the Heidelberg Trial of 1936, when for the first time a German court ruled that hypnosis had altered the character of a person and led her to commit a series of crimes. As much as the outcome of the trial differed from the one in Munich, it failed to convince the compatibilist faction that hypnosis could suppress free will altogether.
III
The circumstances of the case were reminiscent of nineteenth-century tales. Alice E., seventeen years of age and unmarried, met Franz Xaver Walter on a train ride to her future parents-in-law in 1927. When Ms E. mentioned she was suffering from a stomachache, Walter claimed to be able to heal her with the help of homeopathy and naturopathy. Upon departing the train at the next station, he invited her for a cup of coffee. In the course of their exchange, Walter suddenly held her hand, which, she later remarked, made her feel incapable of exercising her free will. In subsequent weeks and months, Alice was asked to meet him in Karlsruhe or Heidelberg, where he ostensibly treated her, although she could not recall any therapy sessions. In subsequent years, Alice paid Walter 3,000 marks in fees; began sexual relations with Walter as well as several other men, including his ‘accomplice’ Karl Hermann Bodner; attempted several times to murder her husband, whom she had married in 1929; and tried to commit suicide. Her husband eventually contacted the police in the late summer of 1934. Some two years later, Walter and Bodner were tried and found guilty of having sexually abused Alice E. in a state of abulia as well as having instigated crimes their victim failed to carry out successfully.Footnote 90 They received jail sentences of ten and four years respectively.
The case relied almost exclusively on the expertise provided by Ludwig Mayer. The Heidelberg neurologist had already published a standard text on hypnosis in 1934.Footnote 91 He subsequently produced two films on the subject for the Reich Office for Educational Films (Reichsstelle für den Unterrichtsfilm), one of which anticipated his central argument during the proceedings in 1937, namely that crime in a state of hypnosis was possible.Footnote 92 Mayer produced an account of the trial that reiterated this point in some detail.
Some of the key claims put forward in this work recall earlier pronouncements on the subject. Mayer's conception of the unconscious derived from Dessoir's distinction between an Ober- and an Unterbewusstsein, where the latter figured as a disconnected entity that led ‘a life of its own’.Footnote 93 Dichotomizing the two permitted Mayer to contemplate split personalities with distinct sensibilities.Footnote 94 In the case of Alice E., Mayer believed to have identified two ‘wholly separate wills (Willensgebiete), two memories, [and] two levels of consciousness’ that existed ‘side by side simultaneously’. She would therefore behave in one way in her conscious state and in another way in her unconscious state.Footnote 95 Mayer agreed with Paas, Bergmann, and Kindborg that, while a person's specific character indeed facilitated hypnotizability,Footnote 96 ‘character’ in and of itself was not sufficient to impede hypnotic suggestion. If suggestions were chosen in such a way as to conceal true intentions (recall Bergmann's example of the pocket knife and Kindborg's reference to adultery), then forcing people to commit crimes in a post-hypnotic state could not be ruled out, especially if they were subjected to ‘deep somnambulism’ during which they were no longer capable of resorting to residual inhibitions.Footnote 97
It might be assumed that Mayer's influence over the proceedings in Heidelberg and his role in the production of two educational films for a National Socialist state agency marked a break with the past. Yet most academic reactions suggest otherwise. Aside from Albert Hellwig, a well-known jurist and anti-occultist from Berlin, the majority of commentators doubted Mayer's version of events. Hellwig repeated Mayer's narrative according to which Alice E. was the first case to prove empirically (and not merely theoretically or experimentally) that hypnotic drill (Dressur) could suspend free will and induce a special post-hypnotic state, allowing the hypnotist to instigate criminal behaviour in otherwise morally impeccable people.Footnote 98 But even Hellwig had some reservations. Echoing Friede's compatibilist viewpoint, he wrote that the hypnotist could induce actions that were incompatible with someone's ‘conscious personality’, but never crimes that were irreconcilable with the ‘unconscious personality’.Footnote 99
Hans Bürger-Prinz, professor of psychiatry in Hamburg and Mayer's most prominent critic, questioned much of what the Heidelberg neurologist believed to be incontrovertible evidence. Some of his counter-arguments were hardly new. First, hypnosis was a ‘popular excuse for sexual acts (Triebhandlungen)’ that people found inexplicable or troubling. Invoking ‘hypnosis’ was thus a relief for men whose fiancées had been involved with other partners. Alice E., Bürger-Prinz explained, had behaved in a similar fashion: in order to appear innocent, unblemished, and irreproachable, she conveniently referred to hypnosis as the only possible reason for her sexual relationships and attempted murders.Footnote 100 Second, even if her story proved to be true, there was no indication to suggest that Alice had not in fact agreed with the procedures used ‘against’ her, since hypnosis could not succeed without the corporation of the hypnotic.Footnote 101 As a compatibilist, Bürger-Prinz assumed that Ms E.'s character had predisposed her towards accepting Walter's instructions. This interpretation prefigured later social psychological research that would emphasize patients’ expectations (i.e. understanding of task demands) in given hypnotic contexts.Footnote 102 Third, Bürger-Prinz wondered why, if Walter had hypnotized his ‘victim’ so successfully, Alice's many attempts at killing her husband or taking her own life invariably failed.Footnote 103 Although the Hamburg psychiatrist did not elaborate, this point reinforced his earlier compatibilist argument inasmuch as Alice not having committed murder or suicide, despite extensive hypnotic Dressur, testified to the resilience of her ‘virtuous’ character. Fritz Knigge, director of psychiatry at Hamburg-Langenhorn, supported his colleague, as did the Charité’s Johannes Kirchhoff. Where Knigge insisted that ‘criminal suggestions’ would hardly succeed without a hypnotic's ‘criminal proclivities’,Footnote 104 Kirchhoff reminded his readers that the Heidelberg case was a good example of ‘sexual dependence (Hörigkeit)’, a possibility that Mayer had refused to mention in his account of Alice E.Footnote 105 This final piece, published in 1944, put to a close the discussion of free will and hypnosis from the Kaiserreich to the Nazi years.
IV
Several reasons have been advanced to explain compatibilism's appeal to philosophers. Perhaps the most important one refers to the fact that compatibilism offers a combination of determinism (in the shape of personal preferences or traits) and freedom (especially from physical coercion). This coalescence, the argument goes, allows for both the human need to acknowledge causation and the human need to administer justice.Footnote 106 If, by contrast, characters and motives did not determine behaviour, it would be impossible to hold human beings responsible for their actions.Footnote 107
The German discourse on hypnosis and crime in the early twentieth century seldom involved philosophical reflection, but we can still detect an overall preference for compatibilist-like answers to the question of whether hypnosis could suspend free will. This preference was most evident in the writings of a group of neurologists, psychiatrists, and jurists who sought to preserve the notion of choice in the ‘contest’ with the hypnotic ‘challenge’. Members of this group associated choice with ‘good’ character and ‘good’ character with the ability to decide to act according to a will freely chosen. ‘Bad’ characters, on the other hand, had no recourse to this decision-making process. Unlike their exemplary counterparts, they had been determined in such a way as always to will crime, the potential effect of hypnosis notwithstanding. Even determinists for whom hypnosis resembled a force of nature whose power could not be resisted admitted that character could indeed play a role in regard to hypnotizability. Soldiers and servants, some determinists believed, were more suggestible than the rest of the population, although the rest of the population remained very much at risk from hypnosis. This qualification paid homage to the strength of the compatibilist view.
From an abstract, philosophical perspective, the concept of free will is crucial for underwriting responsibility. In the context of early twentieth-century Germany, negotiating free will was not only a philosophical question, but also an issue that touched on the very self-understanding of middle-class Germans. Both compatibilists and determinists demonstrated the way in which bourgeois norms affected their responses to hypnosis. Determinists warned that the hypnotic state, as an event outside human control, threatened to undermine the self-control upon which middle-class identity rested.Footnote 108 In claiming that servants, soldiers, and women were more prone to hypnotizability, determinists also relied on the familiar middle-class trope that identified ‘impassioned’ women and the ‘lower orders’ with the inability to exercise the necessary restraint associated with bourgeois composure.Footnote 109
Compatibilists were more optimistic. By establishing a connection between the continued exercise of free will and middle-class values, the compatibilist faction believed to vindicate the pre-eminence of morality and the rule of law in the face of the hypnotic ‘danger’. If hypnosis simply confirmed the moral degradation of certain people – whoever succumbed to hypnosis did so on account of a personality that had never developed the capacity for free will – then the threat posed by hypnosis could be confined to outliers whose characters were flawed from the outset. Like Harry Frankfurt's wantons, these persons lacked an interest in their wills because they had never cultivated a sense of being beyond first-order desires. Reponses to hypnosis, according to this reading, simply confirmed the extent to which free will depended on character. The character in question, however, was that of middle-class men whose impregnability in the face of the hypnotic challenge owed to their bourgeois training, above all the development of a ‘morally sovereign subjecthood’.Footnote 110
Despite the transformations of German society in the early twentieth century, including the upheavals of 1918/19 that would do away with the ‘bourgeois’ nineteenth century, the discussion on free will illustrates the tenacity of certain principles amongst middle-class elites. As much as the social model attached to Bürgerlichkeit had vanished and as much as the ‘staid’ politics of moderation and compromise were being called into question,Footnote 111 central aspects of the so-called ‘bourgeois value system’ (Wertehimmel, literally value heaven) persisted, especially the belief in the independent and self-regulated individual.Footnote 112 As this article has tried to show, negotiating free will in this period was also an attempt to reassure oneself that, no matter what the political persuasion and no matter what the political circumstances, free will belonged to those whose character had been formed in harmony with the very conditions that made free will possible.
