Chapter Twenty-Six
Valerie Girard walked into her waiting room when her receptionist told her that Francine Horan and the two detectives had arrived. The psychiatrist could see that Francine was very nervous, so she smiled in an attempt to put her at ease.
“Thanks for coming to see me, Mrs. Horan. I imagine that it hasn’t been very pleasant for you since your husband disappeared.”
“It’s been a nightmare.”
“I hope I can help him.”
“How exactly are you planning to do that?”
Valerie looked at Remington and Packer. “I hope you don’t mind, but I’d like you to wait out here while I talk to Mrs. Horan. Is that okay?”
“That’s fine,” Audrey said.
“Then why don’t you come back to my office,” Valerie said.
When they were seated on a sofa in the doctor’s office, Valerie asked Francine if she wanted a cup of coffee or tea.
“No, thank you. What I do want is to learn how you think you can help Tom. The detectives said that you want to hypnotize him.”
“I do.”
“All I know about hypnotism is what I’ve seen on TV shows. Can you explain what you want to do and why it will help?”
Valerie could see that Francine was tense, and she thought of a way to relax her.
“You know, the way hypnosis was discovered as a tool for helping people is a strange tale.
Franz Anton Mesmer was a Viennese physician who believed that the planets influenced the human body.
In 1776, he wrote a paper stating that this action occurred through the instrumentality of a universal fluid in which all bodies were immersed.
He believed that the fluid, which was invisible, could be withdrawn by the human will from one point and concentrated in another.
Mesmer theorized that an inharmonious distribution of these fluids throughout the body produced disease.
Health could be attained by establishing harmony of the magnetic fluids.
Mesmer believed that a force, which he called animal magnetism, emanated from his hands directly into the patient, thereby enabling him to adjust the internal imbalances in the fluids and eradicate disease in the patient.
“Unfortunately for Mesmer, he effected a startling and rapid cure in a young girl suffering from an imposing array of physical symptoms through the use of magnets the first time he put his theory into practice.
This led him to spend his career trying to convince the medical community of the soundness of his theory.
“The Vienna medical fraternity thought Mesmer was a fraud, and he was forced to flee to Paris. In 1781, he founded a clinic there. Mesmerism became a fad among the wealthy, but he was discredited by a commission appointed by the French government, and he retired to Switzerland.
“However, mesmerism did lead to an interesting discovery. The Marquis de Puységur noticed that mesmerized subjects could hear only what the magnetizer said and were oblivious to everything else. They accepted suggestions without question and could recall nothing of the events of the trance when restored to consciousness. Puységur called this condition artificial somnambulism and explained that a subject in this state could accomplish amazing feats like reading sealed messages, suffering needles to be jabbed into their skin, and permitting without flinching the application of a red-hot poker to their bodies.”
Valerie smiled. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to stick pins in your husband or jab him with a red-hot poker, but I am going to use hypnosis to put him in a state where he is open to suggestion. Then I’ll try to get him to remember the incident that caused his trauma.”
“How do you do that?”
“Good question. I just suggested that you have a cup of coffee. You weighed the suggestion and turned me down. However, if I suggest that everything I am going to suggest is reasonable, and you accept that suggestion, you will stop evaluating, and you will depend on me.”
Valerie placed a piece of paper on the coffee table and placed a dot on the top of the page.
“Think of this point as a state of complete alertness. You are alert now. You can see and hear everything that is going on in my office. You can listen to our conversation and think your own thoughts. But there are other states of awareness that are not total.”
Valerie drew a straight line down the paper and ended it with another dot.
“You know the expression dead to the world? A person is so sound asleep that their mind is almost totally at rest. That’s what this dot represents.
“Along this line, we’re going to get various stages of alertness.
Somewhere on the line is a point where a person is in a state where he is susceptible to suggestion.
This might be at a point where a person has been in bed for thirty minutes.
His eyes are closed, he’s lost contact with the general sounds around him, but he’s still aware of important sounds, like a baby crying.
If you ask a person in this state a question, the answer will be accurate.
“If a person has been in a situation that was so frightening that they have repressed the memory of the event to the point where they deny they were even there, I may be able to use hypnosis to get them to talk about the event, to relive it by developing a hypnotic state to relax the individual. When the person is relaxed, the repressive mechanisms that watch over the frightening memories are off guard. The relaxation allows the repressed memories to be brought from the subconscious to the conscious. But it’s not an easy process, especially when you’re dealing with amnesia that’s due to a terrifying experience. ”
“If I can convince Tom to see you, will you try to help him?” Francine asked.
“I would like the chance.”