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I, realizing that the experiment performed on me will probably be published in a scientific journal, solemnly declare that I was not faking or imitating the hypnotic trance but that I was genuinely hypnotized and do not remember the events of the experimental periods.
[She voiced the idea that] she had not been ill at all and that the whole business had been simulated. Similar observations, as we know, have frequently been made. When a disorder of this kind has cleared up and the two states of consciousness have once more become merged into one, the patients, looking back to the past, see themselves as the single undivided personality which was aware of all the nonsense; they think they could have prevented it if they had wanted to, and thus they feel as though they had done all the mischief deliberately. (Breuer & Freud 1895, SE 2, 46)
‘You do see, my dear Mikkel, no one really understands anything about hypnosis. Nor do I, in fact.’
I can still hear the doctor's laugh at the other end of the line. Chertok was waging war on behalf of an enigma, a phenomenon without a theory. You need courage for that, certainly in a country like France, where facts call for a theory in order to claim an existence. Anywhere else, empiricism would have been altogether normal and acceptable; in Paris it was a sign of an unforgivable lack of taste. ‘How can one be a hypnotist?’ But Chertok refused to be intimidated. He dragged his colleagues to his seminar and showed them videos, insisted on confronting them with his unwashed, hardly presentable