The Hypnotist

Chapter 16

Erik watches Daniella Richards walk down the corridor, red coat flap-ping behind her. Joona looks in at the patient. Erik goes to the washroom, locks the door, washes and dries his face. He takes out his phone and calls Simone, but there is no reply. He tries his home number and listens to the phone ringing, but when the answering machine kicks in, he no longer knows what to say: “Sixan, I… you have to listen to me, I don’t know what you’re thinking, but nothing’s happened, maybe you don’t care, but I promise I’m going to find a way to prove to you that I’m- ”

Erik stops speaking. What’s the point? He knows his assurances no longer have any meaning. He lied to her ten years ago, and he still hasn’t managed to prove his love, not sufficiently, not enough for her to begin to trust him again. He ends the call, leaves the washroom, and walks over to where the detective is gazing into the patient’s room.

“What is hypnosis, actually?” Joona asks, after a while.

“It’s just an altered state of consciousness, coupled with suggestion and meditation,” Erik replies. “From a purely neurophysiological point of view, the brain functions in a particular way under hypnosis. Parts of the brain that we rarely use are suddenly activated. People under hypnosis are very deeply relaxed. It almost looks as if they’re asleep, but if you do an EEG the brain activity shows a person who is awake and alert.”

“I see,” Joona says hesitantly.

“When people think of hypnosis, they usually mean heterohypnosis, where one person hypnotizes another with some purpose in mind.”

“Such as?”

“Such as evoking negative hallucinations, for example.”

“What’s that?”

“The most common is that you inhibit the conscious registration of pain.”

“But the pain is still there.”

“That depends on how you define it,” Erik replies. “Of course the patient responds to pain with physiological reactions, but he experiences no feeling; it’s even possible to carry out surgery under clinical hypnosis.”

Joona writes something down in his notebook. “The boy opens his eyes from time to time,” he says, looking through the window again.

“I’ve noticed.”

“What’s going to happen now?”

“To the patient?”

“Yes, when you hypnotize him.”

“During dynamic hypnosis, in a therapeutic context, the patient almost always splits himself into an observing self and one or more experiencing and acting selves.”

“He’s watching himself, like in a theatre?”

“Yes.”

“What are you going to say to him?”

“Well, he’s experienced terrible things, so first of all I have to make him feel secure. I begin by explaining what I’m going to do, and then I move on to relaxation. I talk in a very calm voice about his eyelids feeling heavier, about wanting to close his eyes, about breathing deeply through his nose. I go through the body from head to toe; then I work my way back up again.”

Erik waits while Joona takes notes.

“After that comes what’s called the induction,” says Erik. “I insert a kind of hidden command into what I say and get the patient to imagine places and simple events. I suggest a walk in his thoughts, farther and farther away, until his need to control the situation almost disappears. It’s a little bit like when you’re reading a book and it gets so exciting that you’re no longer aware of the fact that you’re sitting reading.”

“I understand.”

“If you lift the patient’s hand like this and then let go, the hand should stay where it is, in the air, cataleptic, when the induction is over,” Erik explains. “After the induction I count backwards and deepen the hypnosis further. I usually count, but others have the patient visualize a grey scale, in order to dissolve the boundaries in his mind. What is actually taking place on a practical level is that the fear, or the critical way of thinking that is blocking certain memories, is put out of action.”

“Will you be able to hypnotize him?”

“If he doesn’t resist.”

“What happens then?” asks Joona. “What happens if he does resist?”

Erik studies the boy through the window in the door, trying to read the boy’s face, his receptiveness.

“It’s difficult to say what I’ll get out of him. It could be of very variable relevance,” he says.

“I’m not after a witness statement. I just want a hint, a clue, something to go on.”

“So all you want me to look for is the person who did this to them?”

“A name or a place would be good, some kind of connection.”

“I have no idea how this is going to go,” says Erik, taking a deep breath.