# William Joseph Bryan

William Joseph Bryan, Jr. (1926–1977) was an American physician and a pioneering hypnotist. He was one of the founders of modern hypnotherapy and his work notably found use in psychological warfare during the Cold War. He was a distant relative of United States Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan.

## Early life

Bryan was origially from the Midwest, the seventh-generation M.D. in his family. Bryan was a first cousin twice removed of United States Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, who was his grandfather's cousin. Bryan claimed to have once worked as a drummer for Tommy Dorsey.

## Career and work

William Joseph Bryan Jr. held an MD, JD, and PhD. He started his career as a military psychiatrist, claiming to have been the "head of survival training" for the United States Air Force. He was involved in research for the CIA, including the Project ARTICHOKE and its successor, the Project MKUltra (popularly known as the CIA's mind control program), a research project into behavioral engineering of humans. As part of his work for the CIA, he developed techniques of what he called "hypno-conditioning." His published research from the era focused on the forensic and military range of psychological research. He would later focus on legal hypnosis.
On May 4, 1955, Bryan founded the American Institute of Hypnosis, and was editor of the institute's Journal of the American Institute of Hypnosis.
Bryan is recognized as one of the two central figures in the field of hypnosis during the 20th century (the other being Milton H. Erickson), and was the first full-time medical practitioner of hypnosis in the USA. He developed his own system of hypnoanalysis called the 'Bryan method'. In 1970, Bryan claimed to have hypnoanalzyed more than 15,000 patients and was earning in excess of a quarter of a million dollars per year. He operated out his organization's headquarters at 8833 Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, and had branch offices in San Francisco, San Diego and Atlanta. Bryan was described as being a "huge man, three hundred pounds of flesh and a great booming voice".
Bryan publicly claimed that he was the technical advisor for John Frankenheimer's film The Manchurian Candidate (1962). He was officially credited as technical advisor on Roger Corman's Tales of Terror (1962) and on Francis Ford Coppola's Dementia 13 (1963).
At the invitation of F. Lee Bailey, Bryan subjected Albert DeSalvo to hypnosis, under which DeSalvo confessed to the Boston Strangler murders.

## Controversy

In 1969, the California State Board of Medical Examiners found Bryan guilty of "unprofessional conduct in four cases involving sexual molesting of female patients", and he was given five years' probation.
William Turner and Jonn Christian hypothesized in The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy that Bryan was responsible for inducing Sirhan Sirhan to fire blanks at Robert F. Kennedy with posthypnotic suggestion. British author Peter Evans, in his 2004 book Nemesis, also identified Bryan as being the one who hypnotised Sirhan. In a 1974 interview, researcher Betsy Langman asked Bryan whether he believed Sirhan used self-hypnosis, to which Bryan responded, "I'm not going to comment on that case, because I didn't hypnotize him."

## Death

Bryan was reportedly found dead in a Las Vegas hotel room on March 4, 1977, of a suspected heart attack, and buried in Hollywood. He was survived by his wife and two daughters. Melvin Belli was a pallbearer at his service.