“Story of O” by Anne Desclos, Dominique Aury, Pauline Réage (post 3): Svengali in “Trilby” by George du Maurier showed torture unnecessary.

At the beginning of Story of O, before O is handed over for bondage and torture, she is already as suggestible and compliant as a person in a hypnotic trance.

If you wonder how this could be, since she had not been hypnotized, then you don’t understand hypnosis, which is mostly based on the subject’s own ability to go into a trance. It is a cliché, but true, that ultimately “All hypnosis is self-hypnosis.”

This is illustrated in the novel Trilby by George du Maurier, whose character Svengali had no special powers, but was able to recognize and use Trilby’s high hypnotizability.

Hypnosis is something that fiction writing and multiple personality have in common.

In past posts, I have quoted a number of novelists as saying that getting into the right frame of mind to write is like self-hypnosis.

And self-hypnosis is one of the oldest theories to explain how people create alternate personalities.

So it is no accident that multiple personality has its onset in childhood, the time of life when the ability to go into a trance is at its maximum.