Believe it or not, hypnosis is fascinating. Quebec hypnotist Messmer has been the face of entertainment hypnosis in France for ten years. To push its limits even further and to offer TF1 a pretext to broadcast yet another hypnosis program in prime time, it is at the heart of the program Messmer, the world record, this Friday, April 7. He will try to beat his own world record – 854 people hypnotized simultaneously in 2017 – by hypnotizing 1,000 people in six minutes in front of more than 3,500 people at the Dôme de Paris, in a program recorded in early January and hosted by Arthur.
“Can you program him so he can’t dance anymore?” asks the facilitator to his hypnotist accomplice. “I just had the idea just now. See, that’s the great thing about hypnosis, you can do whatever you want. A sequence follows where the dancer of Dance with the stars, Christophe Licata, remains silent when Denitsa Ikonomova and Inès Vandamme ask him to dance a jive, a quickstep or a cha-cha-cha. Like the general population, the dancer is receptive to hypnosis. This state of consciousness is normal and necessary for the development of the human being. “Our state of consciousness fluctuates very many times during the day and gives us access to this particular state where we are “elsewhere”, “in the moon” or even more… During these multiple moments, our unconscious functioning takes precedence over our conscious functioning”, can we read on the site of the French-speaking Confederation of hypnosis and brief therapies.
This state allows both to make people laugh during impressive shows but also to heal themselves, the practice was also a healing therapy before being used for the show. Today, about twenty university degrees allow health professionals to learn about the practice of hypnosis in order to make it a technique for caring for their patients through the subconscious.
Hypnosis everywhere, all the time
Beyond a doctor’s office or a television set, we are all exposed to hypnosis processes in our daily lives. Hypnosis can be used for show, to heal, in a business to achieve difficult goal or in a sports competition. Trade also uses this type of method, which sometimes makes us come out of a store with an object that we did not necessarily need. So we spend our lives being hypnotized. The protocol mobilized by Messmer makes his show more impressive because he selects the most receptive people among his audience. They are put in a state of “hypnotic trance”, where they are more suggestible, that is to say inclined to be influenced by suggestions.
“These are different contexts”, specifies for 20 minutes Doctor Jean-Marc Benhaiem, hypnotherapist and creator of the first university degree in medical hypnosis at Pitié-Salpêtrière. “Messmer is clearly positioned in the show business. He must dominate, manipulate to put the hypnotized people in situations that make the rest of the public laugh. While it is the hypnotized people who make people laugh, the hypnotist takes advantage of the amazing situations he creates through hypnosis techniques to bring them back to himself. “The context of the show is always for the benefit of the hypnotist. It is he who must benefit from it to sell tickets and put on a show. »
In consultation, the practitioner says that it is the patient who benefits since the anonymity of a practice makes it possible to mobilize the means he has in him to get rid of a pathology or an addiction. Hypnosis is therefore a complementary skill for a caregiver. Knowing how to practice hypnosis does not make the person a caregiver, however, because being a therapist requires years of training.
“Demanipulating unconscious malaise”
If practitioners are sometimes confronted with reluctant people who ask them “to play the hen or the kangaroo” as in Messmer’s shows, entertainment hypnosis does not discredit the practice of therapeutic hypnosis. Especially since over time, the shows of the genre are better and better made, agree to say our speakers.
They specify that Messmer is far from being a charlatan. It uses techniques similar to those employed in the therapeutic setting. Caregivers, on the other hand, do not choose their patients according to their suggestibility.
When his patients ask him if he is going to “manipulate” them, Dr. Benhaiem replies: “Not at all, we are going to do the complete opposite, we are going to demanipulate you, free you from the processes of hypnosis, even less visible, to which you have been confronted with during your life and which can sometimes cause unconscious discomfort. »
“On TV, we only see the influence”
Are shows and treatments irreconcilable in terms of hypnosis? No, answers the specialist, “because musical hypnosis makes it possible to make hypnosis known to the general public and people become aware that a human being can be influenced”. He sees in Messmer’s shows an opportunity to do pedagogy. Opportunity missed by TF1. The channel remains focused on the spectacle and the wacky situations generated by Messmer’s influence. And the manipulation begins even before the cameras are on, since Messmer on stage is called Éric Normandin in town.
He pleads to frame this type of show with a didactic component. “It would be interesting for us to have a stage where we are shown the show, which is not problematic in itself, and a stage where we analyze the processes put in place by the hypnotist. “He specifies that this would allow viewers to come out of it more intelligent because in what television shows, “we only see the influence”.
It bridges the gap between a show hypnotist like Messmer and pathology. “What is shown on stage is the pathology, all these people are under the influence of Messmer for example. And if we identify this guy from the show with tobacco, alcohol or whatever we want to get out of, we better understand what hypnotherapy is for,” he concludes.