There is no precedent for a case like this:
Johnson, then a senior at Hercules High School, volunteered with several other students to be hypnotized by Cady. But he and his mother allege in a negligence suit filed earlier this month that toward the end of the performance, “while still in a hypnotic trance, [he] proceeded to run out of the building, jump two flights of stairs and continued running through the campus in an incoherent state.”Six police officers were required to handcuff him and strap him onto a gurney for the ride to the hospital, where a psychiatrist “‘reversed’ the effects of the hypnosis and brought Louis Johnson out of the hypnotic state.”
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{ 2 comments }
You can’t sell people on the idea that is a powerful tool and then plausibly discount the possibility of harm.
That is apparent whether you believe it to have be a powerful tool in manipulating human behavior, or a mere stage trick only as dramatic as the imagination of the persons involved.
Did hypnosis “cause” the behavior? Or was he only taking advantage of the social sanction of what was believed to be an altered state to unleash some infantile aggression with the luxury of externalizing blame? If the hypnotist claims the latter, then he confesses to being merely a showman.
“you can’t sell people on the idea that is a powerful tool and then plausibly discount the possibility of harm.”
The “hypnosis” used in stage performances is more akin to social pressure to perform as expected. “Confessing” to being a showman isn’t, I think, problem for stage hypnotists.
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