Hypnosis
...through your body..., you have a great desire to sleep... your eyelids are getting heavy... heavier... and heavier... you hardly can keep them open any longer... now they are closed... with every word I am saying, you are getting sleepier.... and sleepier.... you are going to SLEEP... deep, sound sleep... deeper and deeper asleep... SLEEP!" These are the exact words of a hypnotist, using the classical technique of verbal suggestion. Verbal suggestion is used to hypnotize people. Because of this, people confuse hypnotism with verbal suggestion. Nowadays verbal suggestion is the most common way to hypnotize people.(Fabian) According to Ergün Ar?kdal who is the writer of ?pnotizm ve Telkin, “There are degrees of hypnosis which have been characterized as cataleptic, lethargic and somnambulistic hypnosis and, again, simply as light and heavy hypnotic sleep, with corresponding variations in suggestibility." As we can understand from here people are hypnotized from level to level. These levels are related with the depth of hypnosis sleep. The most important thing with hypnotism is, if the subject doesn’t want to sleep and resists to the sleeping she can not be hypnotized if the hypnotist is not an expert.( McGill 24) The first level of hypnotism is cataleptic level and the hypnotist reachs this level by verbal suggestions. Ar?kdal claims that in this level the subject doesn’t move and he does the things which the hypnotists says. The second level is the lethargic level which comes after the cataleptic level. As the Ar?kdal says “In this level the subject is a little like a death person. When you hold and leave her hand, it falls like dead.” Generally the subject does not feel anything in this level so the hypnotist should open her eyes in the light to exit her from this level and to return her to the first level, catalepsy. The last level is somnambulism level. According to Ar?kdal “This is the hardest level to reach and in this level the subject does everything which are said to him if they are not rubbish and nonsense. Also Ar?kdal is in favor of the idea that “ The subject can even kill someone if she is tend to killing, i.e. if she has a murderer side.” As we see, people are hypnotized from level to level but what is the reason of this? Why aren’t they hypnotized at the same level? Generally their hypnosis are not at the same deepness, because some properties of the people and some subjective factors during the hypnosis seance determine how effective that seance is. Healthy, old, young, men, women, children shortly all kinds of people can be hypnotized. We can not separate people like this, i.e. we can not say that young people can not be hypnotized. However we can separate people into groups according to the properties of the them. For example it may be thought that hysterical people are hypnotized but this is not true. You don’t need to be hysterical to be hypnotized. On the contrary hysterical people are hypnotized rarely.( O'Toole) The main reason for this is; the subject who will be hypnotized by the hypnotist, need to have a concentration, but hysterical people can’t concentrate easily. Most of the hypnotists (Crocq , Grasset, Liebeault, etc..) who are famous, say that women are more susceptible to be hypnotized than men, children are more than adults. Ar?kdal claims that if we look the Liebault’s experiments we can see that at the middle ages people can be hypnotized easier. Generally the people who are ill, tired or nervous can be hypnotized easier. Chronic habits (alcohol, cigarettes, heroin ...), infections, all reasons for sorrow and sadness, deep emotions cause people to be hypnotized easily.(Ar?kdal 149) In addition, the statistics show that the people such as employees, soldiers, etc... who are used to be ordered by other people can also be hypnotized...