The hypnotic state might be used to get possession of property illegally. People can be induced hypnotically and post-hypnotically to sign promissory notes, deeds of gift, etc. I reported to the Society of Prussian Medical Officers a case of a man who in the post-hypnotic state promised a donation to the society, and carefully explained in writing that he did it of his own accord, after I had suggested to him that he should think so. Testamentary disposition might be influenced in the same way. A case of this kind occurred in England a few years ago. A lady left her doctor, who was a hypnotist, a large fortune. The will was contested on the ground that its provisions had been suggested by the doctor while the testatrix was under his hypnotic influence. But the validity of the will was finally recognized, because it was discovered that the patient had never been hypnotized at all! I shall speak later on of the significance of such acts in civil law, when quoting Bentivegni. As far as the criminal law is concerned it would be difficult to obtain a conviction in such cases.

The paragraphs dealing with fraud would probably apply in some cases, and occasionally those that treat of embezzlement - when, for instance, a certain sum of money is obtained by suggestion but is not returned - but in other cases it would be difficult to establish a punishable offence. The paragraphs that deal with coercion would hardly be applicable, although the idea of force here includes vis compulsiva. Many people will probably consider this a defect in the criminal law. Berillon in France, in a note dealing with a communication of Merlier concerning the influence of "waking suggestion" on testators, even describes it as a flaw in the law that suggestion so exercised entails no punishment on the perpetrator. But if we were to make the use of every suggestive influence in life a punishable offence, we should be even worse off than we are now.

The question has also been discussed whether it would not be considered an infringement of the rights of the individual to hypnotize any one against his will. In such a case § 239 of the Criminal Code would have to be considered; it prescribes imprisonment for any one who intentionally or unlawfully confines or deprives another of his or her personal freedom. Now, a hypnotic is deprived of his personal freedom, and therefore in any concrete case it would have to be decided whether the unlawful action of the hypnotizer was not punishable. A case of this kind was tried in Bavaria in 1905; a fourteen-year-old boy had been used for hypnotic experiments without his parents' knowledge, but the indictment for deprivation of liberty fell through. In an earlier case that occurred at Niirnberg a similar charge was brought against a commercial traveller who had hypnotized a waitress. He also was acquitted because the court "was not satisfied that the accused had been conscious of the illegal nature of his action; he might have been of the opinion that the waitress was fully aware of the consequences of hypnosis, since he had often carried out such experiments in her presence, and she was therefore a consenting party" (Heberle).

Every medical man who has had any considerable experience in the domain of hypnosis has probably come across laymen who endeavour to ascribe to hypnosis anything they find very peculiar, or for some reason or other unpleasant, or that they cannot quite understand. At times it is a case of seduction or a mysterious love affair, at others the provisions of a will or the exploitation of some business, that puzzles them. When any lady of rank - a princess, may be - falls in love with a man of the lower classes, there are always plenty of people ready to ascribe the episode to hypnosis, though it is precisely in such cases that ladies are led astray by the influence of sexual love. And we must make a careful distinction between cases of hypnotic or suggestive influence and those which have been so tellingly described by von Krafft-Ebing, and so aptly termed sexual bondage by him, in which an individual of the one sex becomes entirely dependent on one of the other through the influence of sexual impulse. As I have already mentioned, Hirt very properly opposed the notion that there was any question of hypnotic influence in the Czynski case.

The position seems to have been somewhat similar in the case published by Preyer under the heading, A Remarkable Case of Fascination, A young woman who was married to a Herr v. Porta was induced by a man named Pander, who was a friend and relative of her husband, to leave the latter and blindly follow her seducer. Unless we shift the line that demarcates hypnosis, a case of this kind can only be described as analogous to hypnosis, not as hypnosis itself. When we see that many a woman is .strangely affected by the foreign appearance of a man, by his broken speech and peculiar complexion, when we further observe that many women fall in love with bull-fighters and lion-tamers, that actors are dangerous to some females, and that the male sex affords analogous cases, we must be very careful how we ascribe such processes to the action of hypnosis. And the word "suggestion" must not be turned into a catch-word to be applied to any remarkable case in which influence may have been exerted. "To speak of waking suggestion in such cases would be to do away with the whole idea of hypnotism.

There would then only remain the old experience that there are people who are easily influenced, which would have to be considered in some criminal cases but could have no psychiatric significance" (Strassmann).

Some time ago the parents of a young girl came to me because their daughter was altogether under the influence of an unprincipled man, X., who knew how to get all her money from her. X. was not accused of sexual intimacy with the girl, but only of extorting money from her, and this the parents could only ascribe to hypnotic influence. Of course, when once such a suspicion crops up, every action, every movement of the person suspected is considered from that point of view alone. Directly the parents observed that X. was looking at their daughter they assumed he was exerting hypnotic influence. It is, of course, quite right to investigate the details of such cases, but we should not think that every striking case of influence is due to hypnosis. There are so many other forms of influence that one human being may bring to bear upon another that we must be very careful before we assume that hypnosis has been employed. And we must place even less reliance on those newspaper reports that are only written to produce a sensation. I recall a case that occurred in Paris, in 1894, in which a married woman was reported to have found her husband lying motionless at home, and it was said that a burglary had been committed by men who had first hypnotized the husband.