You went to dinner with this person and had the most divine meal. He is time and space, sensation, touch, sound, he has a context, a background, he is part of a social setting. How has it worked? If you forget a person successfully, what impact does this have on the rest of your memories? A person isn’t a discrete unit.
My next question revolves around the idea that you have been hypnotised to forget a person and this has worked. If it comes down to it, maybe you are a scumbag and he isn’t. Must there not also be some chance that this is a fabulously wonderful person and that trashing them as being undeserving in some way is a terrible thing to do? I find it hard to believe this is seen as the healthy option. So, my first question is, but what if you don’t think that? I know the answer is supposed to be that you are a sucker who hasn’t gotten over a bad person in your life, but that can’t possibly always be true. There seems here to be a presumption that if you do want to forget them, they deserve to be trashed – ie it isn’t an artificial construct to get you over somebody who doesn’t deserve to be thus treated in your head. The uneasy reply is somewhere between a reluctant ‘yes’ and ‘this isn’t the right thing to do.’ What the experts want you to do, apparently, is trash the person you want to forget. Not so! The most asked for thing is this – can I be hypnotised to forget a person? If you’d asked me I would have thought the most likely reasons people want to be hypnotised is to give up smoking and to lose weight. In fact this is not exactly how hypnotism works, but never mind that, the idea is fascinating. Alas at one performance he is incapacitated and as Trilby tries to sing, but cannot - to the disgust of the audience – she is in a strange situation where she is aware of her life with Svengali but has no conception at all of her singing career. In brief he takes a tone-deaf girl and turns her into a great diva, as long as she is hypnotised before she sings.
Such was the power of Svengali to mesmerise the world that his name became a word.
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