Hypnosis in Media

“Love and Passion Under Hypnosis” (1956) by Walter Hale, published by Playgirl.

“Are Helpless Girls Betrayed By Hypnotists?”

“Stranger Than Bridey Murphy”

This 48 page maza­gine promis­es a lot but does not deliv­er. The enclosed arti­cles on hyp­no­sis are pret­ty gener­ic, the pho­tog­ra­phy aver­age or worse, and the lay­out and pro­duc­tion is low quality.

There are sev­er­al arti­cles, almost all deal­ing with the main top­ic in gen­er­al terms with anec­do­tal and con­trived sto­ries. There is the req­ui­site arti­cle on hyp­no­tiz­ing peo­ple, and one arti­cle on stage hyp­no­sis that appears to be clipped straight from a newspaper.

The pur­port­ed pic­tures of hyp­no­tized women are, with a cou­ple of excep­tions, just show most­ly or entire­ly naked women, with­out any way to actu­al­ly tell they are hyp­no­tized, as there are no induc­tions shown; the excep­tions show the women in which could be in some form of a trance, lay­ing with their eyes closed, or extend­ing their hand and arm as in a catalep­sy test. How­ev­er, the pho­tographs are of poor qual­i­ty and poor­ly print­ed. There is also a copi­ous amount of bad clip art, too.

Last but (not) least is the eight pages of the typ­i­cal kinds of ads of all men’s mag­a­zines of the peri­od: books on how to improve your sex life, movies and stills of beau­ti­ful women, health nos­trums, etc. There is anoth­er such full-page ad on the inside of the front cover.

Basi­cal­ly, it looks cheap, with slop­py lay­out in gen­er­al. The mid­dle eight pages are print­ed on a light blue paper stock, as opposed to the white paper of the rest of the pages, for no appa­rant rea­son. This is a hodge­podge of var­i­ous arti­cles past­ed togeth­er (with the indi­cia typed on an old type­writer and clum­si­ly past­ed at the bot­tom of the last page of text, so as not to cov­er any of the ads.