Negotiating Free Will: Hypnosis and Crime in Early Twentieth-Century Germany

Abstract

Abstract:The history of free will has yet to be written. With few exceptions, 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. The following paper seeks to redress the balance by tracing the debate on hypnosis in Germany from 1894 to 1936. Examining responses to hypnosis is tantamount to recording common understandings of autonomy and heteronomy, self-control and mind control, free will and automaticity. More specifically, it is possible to identify distinct philosophical positions related to the question as to whether hypnosis could surmount free will or not. The article demonstrates that the discourse often centered 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 (compatibilists) emphasized the resilience of the 'moral inhibitions', another group (henceforth called determinists) doubted that these were sufficient to withstand hypnosis.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

Cognitive warfare

“…For instance, hypnotic amnesia, a dissociative state during which incoming information is unavailable to consciousness and recollection [57,170], and the hidden-observer phenomenon, a dissociative state developed for pain management [174]. Applications of hypnosis in which crimes are committed towards self or others have been experimentally confirmed since the WWII period but remain controversial [25,103] Hypnosis can be applied not only to individuals but also to groups of individuals. In this application, the dynamics of mass behaviour render sensible individuals even more vulnerable to losing sense of self, and constituting a sense of mass which lacks of the critical reasoning constraints commonly found at the individual level.…”