Hypnosis and the 1951 Copenhagen Bank Murders: Can a Trance Make You Kill?

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In 1951 Palle Hardrup shot two people during a bank robbery in Copenhagen, then claimed his former cellmate Bjorn Schouw Nielsen had hypnotized him into doing it. The Danish court treated the man who planted the suggestion as the true murderer. This episode uses that case to ask what hypnosis really is, starting with James Braid, who popularized the word around 1841 to pull the practice away from Franz Mesmer's animal magnetism, and his eye fixation technique using a silver lancet case. It covers the ideomotor response, everyday trances like highway hypnosis, and the bell curve of hypnotic susceptibility.

The episode then lays out the state versus non-state debate. Ernest Hilgard's ice water experiments suggested a hidden observer that felt pain the hypnotized mind denied, and brain imaging points to changes in the anterior cingulate. Theodore Sarbin's camp argued that social role taking and compliance explain stage hypnosis. A 1966 CIA document from the MKUltra era concluded there was no evidence a hostile person could be hypnotized against their will, and the episode explains how prolonged manipulation inside a prison cell, not a magic command, fits the Copenhagen case.

The lemon exercise and how a vivid thought can trigger a physical response
Deirdre Barrett's two types of highly hypnotizable people: fantasizers and dissociators
Hilgard's finding that about 70 percent of subjects raised a finger to signal pain they said they did not feel
Why hypnosis is no longer trusted to recover memories, and the risk of source monitoring errors
Clinical uses alongside cognitive behavioral therapy for pain, phobias, anxiety, and sleep

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