[bbgapril]

And the biggest untruth: hypnotism is a power of the mind and only certain people can hypnotize others. This is exactly backward. Hypnotism is a power of the subject's mind, and virtually anyone can induce a trance in someone willing to be hypnotized. You aren't "projecting your will" or engaging in any other mysticism. The first time I hypnotized someone I did it more or less as a joke, with no knowledge of technique. I was in junior high school. The subject went into a deep trance in a matter of minutes.

An early and well-known hypnotist, Franz Mesmer, put forward the idea that hypnotism (then, mesmerism) was a force or invisible substance that flowed from him into his subjects. How much he believed this (the science of the 1700's was shaky on magnetism and biological processes), and how much he was cashing in on the erotic payload of domination and manipulation, isn't known. Contemporizes corrected deduced that hypnotism was a phenomena happening entirely in the subject's mind, but it's Mesmer's views (and the phrase "animal magnetism") that have come down to us, as the fiction that hypnotism is an external force.

But post-hypnotic suggestions are real things, and with the right subject they can have dramatic effects.