Adverse effects of hypnosis

Adverse effects of hypnosis are shown through two sharply different but connected crises: Rose’s loss of identity and self-injury, and Carl Mørck’s nightmares, resurfacing memories, and inability to think or move normally. At first, both cases are described as possible aftereffects; as Rose’s condition worsens, that tentative explanation becomes a warning about the session’s consequences.

Rose’s immediate distress

A colleague tells Carl that Rose is not well enough to join the planned trip. The account is concrete: on the cab journey home she shook continuously, and after being dropped off she sat rocking back and forth. She is no longer answering the phone. These details present Rose’s distress as observable and persistent, rather than as a vague unease or a reluctance to take part in the plans.

Carl is told that the hypnosis may not have been good for her. He responds that he also feels uneasy about it and reports having had nightmares, with images from years earlier returning to him. The contrast is already telling: Rose’s reaction is visible to other people, while Carl describes an inward disturbance that appears in sleep and memory. Neither reaction is treated as settled or fully understood at this point. The assurance that the effects will pass is reported as something the hypnotist had said, but Rose’s condition has not yet improved enough for anyone to know that.

Carl’s disrupted memory and perception

The next day, still feeling out of it, Carl calls Assad to cancel the trip. He had staggered to bed at four in the afternoon, and now finds his surroundings veiled in haze. Thoughts and movements seem to proceed in slow motion, and attempts to control them do not work. The account links the hypnosis not just to frightening recollections but to an impairment of ordinary mental and physical agency: he cannot make his mind stay with a subject or make his body respond as he expects.

When he tries to think about the Alberte Goldschmid case, memories of Ronny’s brother take its place: the brother racing along the dirt road to his parents’ farm. Trying to return to that episode brings up Hardy Henningsen and Anker Høyer going into the shed on Amager where their fates were sealed. The memories do not arrive in a chosen order. Each attempt to focus redirects him to another scene from his past, so that the present investigation becomes entangled with earlier events.

The sequence then shifts from remembered incidents to emotion and longing. As Carl tries to think more deeply about the fatal event involving Hardy and Anker, images of Vigga, Mona, Lisbeth, and Kristine surface, followed again by Mona. He cannot sort these thoughts into a coherent account. This movement—from a current case, through old events, to people associated with his personal life—shows the breadth of the disruption without explaining it away or claiming that the memories have one simple cause. The hypnosis has left Carl struggling to distinguish the subject he is trying to consider from the past that keeps intruding.

Rose’s identity crisis and self-injury

Rose’s condition is later reported by a sister who visits her for their occasional Saturday cup of tea. She finds Rose in the bedroom, where Rose does not recognize her. Rose says she has done what she had to do and now wants out of it all. Her sister also reports that Rose has cut one of her wrists with a pair of scissors. The scene turns the earlier signs of distress into an acute crisis; the effort to check on Rose reveals that she is isolated, injured, and unable to recognize a close family member.

Rose also says that she is Vicky, another sister, and claims that hypnosis made her believe she was Rose. She describes not wanting to be Rose because Rose was a bad girl, and says that the hypnosis went too deep. In her account, the hypnotist had told her he could not help because she was already a full cup. These are Rose’s reported explanations, not an independent account of what occurred during the session. Their importance lies in the way they convey her confusion: Rose speaks of herself as someone else and treats her own identity as something imposed on her through hypnosis.

Escalation and significance

The evidence gives the aftermath a disturbing progression. Rose first shakes and rocks, then becomes unreachable, and later is found confused and with a cut wrist. Carl, meanwhile, moves from nightmares and old images to a day in bed, a cancelled trip, slowed movement, and thoughts he cannot direct. The effects are not identical, and the account does not establish a clinical diagnosis or a complete explanation. It does, however, set the two reactions beside one another and make clear that the session has consequences extending beyond the moment of hypnosis.

Rose’s sister brings the crisis to Carl when he is already unwell. His phone battery has died, so he has not received the earlier calls; when he hears what happened, he looks to Assad, who shakes his head, and Carl concludes that the report cannot be true. That response emphasizes the shock of the disclosure, not evidence that Rose is safe. The episode therefore closes without a resolution to her condition. What began as an uncertain concern about an unpleasant aftereffect has become a reported act of self-injury and a rupture in Rose’s recognition of herself and others.