I’ll admit to being (intellectually) triggered by the Hellier Season 2 episode where the team decided to use hypnosis to “induce” an abduction experience. Seeing filmed evidence of how easily a willing hypnotic subject can move into an emotionally upsetting experience opened my eyes to the possibility of how this could have happened in many of the cases that form the backbone of UFO and abduction research. In researching the use of hypnosis in the earliest case to reach a mass audience, that of Betty and Barney Hill, I came across the term that had caught my attention - Folie a Deux. The idea of a “shared madness” or the psychological concept that describes:
“the transference of delusional ideas from one 'primary' individual to one or more 'secondary' individuals (Lasègue & Falret, 1877.)”
I am on the record as a skeptic of using hypnosis to retrieve memories because of my work as a past lives practitioner and researcher, so watching this be accomplished in Hellier kicked my skepticism into high gear. Researching Folie a Deux only confirmed my suspicions.
“Even though folie a deux is an influence from the leader (primary), it also requires a lot from the secondary individual. Not only does it require them to be susceptible to the leaders influence, it requires them to essentially give themselves up as well. ..The secondary individual…must also be a more dependent person who is highly suggestable (sp?), compared to their leader who is more autonomous and dominant.”(Freeman, Cox, & Barnier, 2013).
What better description of the hypnotic process than that the client, the secondary individual, be highly suggestible; in fact, it is the main requirement for a successful hypnosis session. Just last week I heard the Mysterious Universe crew, Ben and Aaron (I’m not a barnacle, I’m a subscriber) mention that the subject of their next to last interview of 2019, film maker Patty Greer, had booked a session with a well known abduction researcher (OK, it was Mary Rodwell.) They said Patty went in to the session curious but left believing that she’d been abducted. That’s a classic case of “shared madness” or the transference of delusional ideas.
Jack Brewer in his excellent “The UFO Trail” blog examined the Betty and Barney Hill case in 2016. Without going into that case as he did, he describes a radio interview where a caller, hypnotherapist and social worker Donna Killeen, expressed her professional opinion of hypnosis being used for memory retrieval. Here is her emailed response after the show:
“My thoughts/opinion about hypnosis as a tool for memory include the following.
A. The process of hypnosis is often regarded as a truth serum type therapy. It is NOT.
B. While hypnosis can bring about a state of relaxation and focus to possibly aid in memory, hypnosis is not a particularly reliable method of memory retrieval.
C. Everything stated with hypnosis is not necessarily factual. Corroborating evidence is needed to establish facts.
D. Subjects can distort and misinterpret "memories" and confabulation can occur.
E. Subjects in the state of trance can be in a highly suggestible state creating a situation where an unskilled therapist might lead the subject potentially creating "false memories”.
(http://ufotrail.blogspot.com/2016/04/hypnotherapist-discusses-hill-case-and.html)
From another paper that figures prominently in internet searches for this subject :
(Transmitting delusional beliefs in a hypnotic model of folie à deux, Freeman, Luke P., Cox, Rochelle E,. Barniew, Amanda J.):
“Folie à deux is the transference of delusional ideas from one 'primary' individual to one or more 'secondary' individuals (Lasègue & Falret, 1877). However, it is difficult to investigate experimentally because often only one patient is identified as delusional. We investigated whether hypnosis could model the experiences of the secondary in this delusion. Our primary was a confederate, who displayed two delusional beliefs and attempted to transmit them to hypnotised subjects. We manipulated the status of the confederate so that they were portrayed as either "credible" or merely “interesting". Many high hypnotisable individuals adopted the confederate's beliefs and confabulated evidence in support of them.”
Milton Erickson adopted his confusion induction method of hypnosis precisely because it made the subject want to cooperate with the therapist. So it is not surprising that research has shown that highly hypnotizable subjects can adopt the beliefs of the person hypnotizing them. And I am giving credit to the well-meaning hypnotist who sincerely desires to help their patient who they believe has been abducted and is experiencing emotional difficulties as a result of their abduction experience. Imagine what a self-serving attention seeking therapist could do (no names, I’m in enough trouble already.)
For the record, I am not doubting the reality of abduction experience for some people who have had experiences outside of our physical world frame of reference. I firmly believe that we as a species interact with “the other” in sometimes confusing and upsetting ways. I also believe that hypnosis is a powerful technology for modifying behavior. But I have grave doubts about the use of hypnosis to retrieve memories, as Donna Killeen stated in the closing comments of her email to Jack Brewer:
Regression hypnosis is at the core of the alien abduction phenomenon.
Why am I so obsessed with this topic? Because regression hypnosis is also the most commonly used method of accessing past lives in mainstream awareness. At the risk of insulting some people I highly respect, I see hypnosis as a 19th century technology put to brilliant use for behavior modification in the 20th century. But we are 1/5 of the way though the 21st century. It is time to acknowledge our growth in collective consciousness and open ourselves to the realization that we do not have to give our Selves up, to be highly suggestible or surrender our individual Consciousness to access past life experiences and access the wisdom we can learn from our personal histories.