Can a Hypnotist Make You Do Something Against Your Will?

There is no good evidence that a hypnotist can force an unwilling person to act against their will. The realistic danger runs the other way. A session involves trust, relaxed attention and sometimes a closed door, and people who used hypnosis as cover for sexual abuse have been convicted. Knowing both halves of the answer is what keeps you safe.

Where does the fear come from?

From more than a century of fiction. The Wikipedia article on hypnosis notes that hypnosis has been a recurring theme in literature and popular culture since the nineteenth century, a common way for writers to explain mind control, and that the vast majority of these depictions are exaggerated, focusing on control for criminal profit and murder or on seduction.

The most famous villain is Svengali, from George du Maurier’s 1894 novel Trilby, who turns a young woman into a kind of musical automaton. A 2017 history of hypnotic crime in Germany describes how he became a lasting cultural metaphor for manipulation and the submission of the will, alongside a wave of popular German plays and novels with titles such as Under a Foreign Will.

Did anyone try to test it?

Yes, in the 1880s and 1890s, and the experts disagreed. According to the same history, researchers at the Nancy school, including Hippolyte Bernheim and Jules Liégeois, claimed their experiments proved that hypnotic crime was possible. Jean-Martin Charcot and Gilles de la Tourette at the Salpêtrière in Paris argued back that the subjects knew the “crime” they were asked to commit was not a real one.

The question reached a German jury court in December 1894, in the trial of Czynski, a lay hypnotist accused of hypnotically seducing a baroness and staging a fraudulent marriage. Expert witnesses split: one concluded he was guilty of a crime against morality, while another accepted that he had hypnotized her but held that their relationship was not the result of hypnosis. The jury convicted him of fraud and forgery, but not of the crime against morality. The court never settled what hypnosis could compel.

What did later research conclude?

That the evidence for coercion did not hold up. A 1966 document on possible military and intelligence uses of hypnosis, declassified in 2006 and quoted in the Wikipedia article, concluded that there was no evidence hypnosis could be used for military applications. On the most direct version of the question, hypnotizing a resistant person under hostile circumstances, it said: “There is no good evidence, clinical or experimental, that this can be done.”

The same document cited Martin Orne’s finding that people who had not been hypnotized at all could be motivated to equal or surpass the supposedly superhuman physical feats seen in hypnosis. If ordinary motivation can produce the dramatic behavior, the behavior is not proof of control.

Social psychologists offered an explanation for what does happen:

• Theodore Sarbin described hypnotic responses as motivated attempts to fulfill the role of a hypnotic subject. He separated this from faking: the person identifies with the role and acts, thinks and feels “as if” hypnotized. He saw this as especially relevant to stage hypnosis, where peer pressure to perform is strong.
• Robert Baker and Graham Wagstaff argued that hypnosis is a form of learned social behavior, a hybrid of social compliance, relaxation and suggestibility.

So are you in control during a session?

You are an active participant. Responses to suggestions can feel automatic, which is part of the experience, but feeling that a movement happened by itself is not the same as being made to do something you reject. The role and compliance accounts describe cooperation within a situation you have agreed to, not a switch that hands your will to someone else.

That is also why stage volunteers seem to obey. They have stepped into a role, in front of a crowd, in a setting built for performance.

What is the real risk?

Exploitation of trust. The Wikipedia article lists cases in which people were suspected of or convicted for hypnosis-related crimes, including robbery and sexual abuse. Among them: in 2013 an amateur hypnotist who attempted to sexually abuse a weight-loss client was placed on the sex offender register; in 2015 a man was sentenced to 10 years in prison on several hypnosis-related sexual abuse charges, including against a woman he approached with a free therapy session; and in 2016 a lawyer in Ohio was sentenced to 12 years in prison after, in the article’s words, hypnotizing a dozen clients into committing sexual acts under the guise of a mindfulness exercise.

Whatever role hypnosis itself played in those cases, the pattern is the same: a person with authority, a private room and a client who had been told to relax and trust the process.

How to protect yourself

1. Check who you are seeing. Ask about training and any health license, and look for membership in a recognized professional society.
2. Agree on the plan before you begin: the goal, the suggestions to be used and how long the session will last.
3. Refuse any touching you have not explicitly agreed to, and any request to undress, and end the session if either happens.
4. Bring someone or ask about recording if that would help you feel safe, and notice how the practitioner responds.
5. Stop the session if anything feels wrong: open your eyes, say so and leave.
6. Report misconduct to the police and to any licensing board or society the practitioner belongs to.

This article is general information, not medical or psychological advice; talk with a licensed clinician about your own situation.