Soul Slavishness

"Freud saw that transference was just another form of the basic human suggestibility that makes hypnosis possible. It was the same passive surrender to superior power, and in this lay its real uncanniness . What, after all, is more “mysterious” than hypnosis, the sight of adults falling into instant stupors and obeying like automatons the commands of a stranger? It seems like some truly supernatural power at work, as if some person really did possess a mana that could enmesh others in a spell. However, it seemed that way only because man ignored the slavishness in his own soul. He wanted to believe that if he lost his will it was because of someone else. He wouldn’t admit that that this loss of will was something that he himself carried around as a secret yearning, a readiness to respond to someone’s voice and the snap of his fingers. Hypnosis was a mystery only as long as man did not admit his own unconscious motives. It baffled us because we denied what was basic in our nature. Perhaps we could even say that men were all too willingly mystified by hypnosis because they had to deny the big lie upon which their whole conscious lives were based: the lie of self-sufficiency, of free self-determination, of independent judgment and choice. The continuing vogue of vampire movies may be a clue to how close to the surface our repressed fears are: the anxiety of losing control, of coming completely under someone’s spell, of not really being in command of ourselves. One intense look, one mysterious song, and our lives may be lost forever. "

E. Becker