Remembering André Weitzenhoffer, Ph.D.

American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, Jul 2005 by Frischholz, Edward J

André told both Dr. Yapko (see the Yapko interview in this issue) and me that he first became interested in hypnosis when he was about age 12. He had seen a summer camp counselor demonstrating hypnosis using mesmeric passes and postural sway tests and was intrigued by what he saw. Later, he went to a stage show and observed a magician doing hypnosis with participants from the audience. While André did not think that anyone had been "hypnotized," he was impressed that the subjects and other members of the audience thought that something special had happened. So André looked up hypnosis in the Encyclopedia and began reading books about it. He recalled contacting Edgard Berillon at this time in his life about hypnosis, but was disappointed that Berillon did not provide him with any information which offered any new insights about its nature. André was becoming fascinated with the occult, magic and the ability to cast spells on people to make them do things they would not ordinarily do. Also, he wondered whether he could use self-hypnosis to make himself into "some sort of superman" that would make him "more intelligent," "more able to figure out how to make things happen, and [to] get super powers that way" (Yapko, 2005, p.32). Finally, André also became interested in yoga and saw it as a form of self-hypnosis. These three early but central themes would consistently appear throughout his future career in hypnosis: 1) Could hypnosis be used to compel a person to behave in a specified manner? 2) Could hypnosis be used to induce a person to significantly perform above his normal waking (i.e., nonhypnotic) capacity? and 3) Were hypnosis and other cognitive/behavioral practices like yoga the same phenomenon, but identified by different social labels?

André came to the United States in 1938 at the age of 17, initially to study engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He went back to France in the summer of 1939, but when World War II began he returned to the United States. He would not return to Paris until nearly 40 years later. André later changed his major to Physics and earned his Bachelor of Science degree in 1943.

André then moved to Brown University during the beginning of the 1943-1944 academic year, where he began his studies toward a Master's Degree in mathematics. During this time, he worked as a research physicist and mathematician on defense projects for the United States Navy where he acquired experience with early forms of computers. He received his Master of Science degree in mathematics in 1944, but stayed on at Brown to pursue another Master's Degree in biology while he continued and broadened his areas of interest and research.

Although André's curriculum vitae states that he received his Master's degree in biology from Brown in 1949, this may be a typographical error and he probably earned it in either 1946 or 1947. For example, in André's interview with Yapko in this issue, he noted that after the war was over he moved from Brown "to Philadelphia for one year, and...worked for and studied under Heilbrun in his physiology department at the University of Pennsylvania." André further stated, "I ended up the next year in Iowa City in Kenneth Spence's department." (Yapko, 2005, p. 31). He also indicated that he was a "graduate student" at the University of Iowa during this period and that he was interested in becoming a psychologist. André's curriculum vitae also notes that he started working as a research physiologist at Wayne University in Detroit in 1949, and other information suggests that he had already begun his formal research on hypnosis by that time. So it seems probable that André did receive his M.A. in biology from Brown in 1946 or 1947.