Hypnosis
CONSCIOUSNESS
Chapter 8 Supplement
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The History of Hypnosis
In the eighteenth century, hypnosis was called mesmerism, after the Austrian physician Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815). Mesmer captured the imagination of many residents of Paris by claiming that he could cure everything from toothaches to paralysis. He believed that the atmosphere was filled with an invisible magnetic force that he could accumulate in his body and transfer to the bodies of sick people.
Patients who hoped to be healed sat around a tub filled with water, iron filings, and ground glass. Then Mesmer made a grand entrance and passed iron rods over the patients or touched them with a wand. The patients started shaking; their arms and legs moved involuntarily; some fainted. Mesmer assured them that several treatments would reestablish their bodies’ magnetic equilibrium and cure their ailments. Countless testimonials attested to the healing power of the magnetic fluid.
The medical and scientific communities viewed Mesmer’s treatments with skepticism and petitioned for an investigation. In 1784, Benjamin Franklin chaired a commission that concluded that the patients’ reactions were due to imagination, not magnetism. Mesmer was discredited, but his technique survived to be used by others. In 1843, James Braid, a Scottish surgeon, changed its name to hypnosis.
Hypnotic Induction
Psychologist John Kihlstrom (1985) defines hypnosis as "a social interaction in which one person, designated the subject, responds to suggestions offered by another person, designated the hypnotist, for experiences involving alterations in perception, memory, and voluntary action" (p. 385). Some theorists view hypnosis as an altered state of consciousness, called the hypnotic trance; others claim that hypnotized individuals are behaving in accordance with their expectations about hypnosis. To understand why these different views persist, we need to take a closer look at the phenomenon of hypnosis and how it is produced.
The responses of individuals to hypnotists’ communications led researchers to the concept of suggestibility, or "hypnotizability." People clearly differ in suggestibility, that is, in how readily they follow a hypnotist’s suggestions. About 5 to 10 percent of adults are so unresponsive to suggestion that they cannot be hypnotized.
A hypnotist needs to create a situation in which people are especially likely to follow suggestions, instructions, or requests. This process is known as hypnotic induction. Traditional hypnotic induction involves having individuals gaze at an object, inducing relaxation, fostering imagination, and encouraging drowsiness.
Suppose that you have agreed to be hypnotized. The hypnotist may tell you to "relax and concentrate" on an object such as a watch or a ring. "You are becoming more and more relaxed. You are getting sleepy; your eyelids are becoming heavier. You are becoming sleepy." Although the word hypnosis is derived from the Greek word for sleep, hypnosis is not sleep. The EEG of a hypnotized person indicates relaxation, not sleep.
After a brief induction like the one just described, the hypnotist uses a number of simple tests to judge your degree of suggestibility. You may be asked to "lock the fingers of both hands together so tightly that they cannot be separated." Can you separate your fingers? Tests like this allow hypnotists to determine whether you are susceptible to hypnosis. If you are, you are likely to be highly hypnotizable 25 years from now because susceptibility to hypnosis appears to be quite stable over time (Piccione, Hilgard, & Zimbardo, 1989).
Hypnotic Phenomena
A hypnotist cannot make you do anything you would not do otherwise. Hypnosis does not endow you with superhuman strength; you will not lift a car while hypnotized unless you can lift it while not hypnotized. Hypnosis does depend on establishing a positive relationship between the hypnotist and the hypnotized individuals (Levitt, Baker, & Fish, 1990).
In this section we examine some of the claims made for hypnosis. We begin with some of the more dramatic claims, those dealing with pain reduction and medical treatment.
Pain Reduction and Medical Treatment. Since the 1800s, numerous reports described the use of hypnosis to reduce the pain of surgery, childbirth, burns, cancer, and dental procedures. The lack of proper controls in the reported cases should make us skeptical, but it does not preclude the possibility that some people benefit from such treatment.
Several elements of hypnotic induction could help reduce pain. First, relaxation, which is typically included in the induction, can help reduce pain. Second, the hypnotist’s encouragement may help patients who are experiencing pain. Third, repeated presentations of the hypnotic induction are more effective than a single presentation in helping people withstand pain (Price & Barber, 1987). The multiple presentations may serve as relaxation reminders or may distract the person from the experience of pain.
Nicholas Spanos (1991) reviewed the effectiveness of hypnosis in treating medical conditions such as asthma and behavior problems such as smoking. There were few differences between treatments with or without hypnosis. Spanos concluded that the benefits that occurred were due to the clients’ attitudes and expectations rather than to any intrinsic effect of hypnosis.
Memory Effects. After a hypnotic session, some hypnotized individuals may report that they cannot remember events that occurred during the session. Perhaps these lost memories can be recovered when the hypnotist gives a particular signal. Hypnosis has been proposed as an aid to memory, which would be a major benefit to the police. Witnesses or victims of crimes do not have photographic memories, and the stress associated with traumatic events like observing a murder or suffering an assault makes it difficult to remember the event clearly.
However, serious concerns surround the use of testimony that has been hypnotically refreshed but not confirmed by physical evidence (Giannelli, 1995). When individuals undergo hypnosis to refresh their memories, their recall often contains distortions and false memories. Yet they tend to be more confident of the accuracy of those memories than individuals who have not undergone hypnosis (Spiegel & Scheflin, 1994; Steblay, Mehrkens, & Bothwell, 1994). As one expert observed, "Researchers in the field of hypnosis have known for well over a century that false memories can be implanted in individuals through the use of formal hypnotic procedures or even through simple suggestion" (Yapko, 1994, p. 96).
Perception. Among the various perceptual effects reported by people who have been hypnotized are positive and negative hallucinations. Positive hallucinations are reports of seeing an object that is not really present. For example, they may pet an imaginary cat. In negative hallucinations, a hypnotized person fails to perceive an object that is present. For example, he or she may walk into a chair in the middle of a room.
A clever approach to testing the validity of hypnotically induced perceptual changes is to give a hypnotic suggestion of deafness and ask the person to read aloud. Their words are played back into their ears a half second after they are spoken; this delay is confusing and annoying for the average hearing person. If hypnotic deafness had been induced, the delayed feedback would have no effect; however, studies have found that it has as great an effect on hypnotized individuals as it does on those who have not been hypnotized (Baker, 1990).
Age Regression. In the phenomenon of age regression, hypnotized individuals are given suggestions that lead them to relive events that occurred when they were younger, often during childhood, and to feel and act like a child of that age. The changes observed in adults who have responded to such suggestions can be dramatic and seem to offer convincing evidence that age regression has occurred.
Psychologist Michael Nash (1987) reviewed the literature on age regression for evidence that the changes attributed to hypnotic age regression were different from changes that could occur in someone who was not hypnotized. In one study, 92 percent of individuals who had regressed to their tenth birthday correctly identified the day of the week on which the event took place, and 84 percent of those who had regressed to their fourth birthday did the same (True, 1949).
The hypnotist-experimenter who conducted this study had a perpetual calendar on his desk. As he questioned the participants, he could have subtly cued the correct answer when asking questions like "Was it Wednesday?" When other investigators corrected this methodological flaw, they could not replicate the finding.
Hypnotic regression has been used to take people on even more impressive journeys—journeys to previous lives. In hypnotic past-life regression, individuals are said to report prior lives as well as events from earlier times. However, such reports depend in part on suggestions by the hypnotist. If the hypnotist expresses little belief in past-life regression, participants report few such experiences (Spanos et al., 1991). Past-life reports are also sprinkled with errors of historical fact that people from the relevant historical period would be unlikely to make. For example, one individual claimed to be Julius Caesar, emperor of Rome, in 50 b.c. Do you see the problem? The designations b.c. and a.d. were not used until centuries later (Spanos, 1987-1988).
Explanations of Hypnosis
As noted earlier, researchers are divided in their explanations for hypnosis. According to the cognitive-social view, the phenomena that we label hypnotic occur when individuals enact the role of a hypnotized person. This view suggests that hypnosis is not an altered state of consciousness.
One of the problems in viewing hypnosis as an altered state of consciousness is that it is difficult to know when a person is hypnotized. Veteran hypnosis researcher Ernest Hilgard (1991) admits that "it would be more comfortable for the investigator if there were some precise indicator of the establishment of a hypnotic condition, but so far that has eluded investigators" (p. 39). Moreover, some of the feats attributed to hypnosis can be accomplished by people who have not undergone hypnotic induction.
Robert Baker (1990) asked several students to undergo hypnotic induction prior to making an instructional videotape. When he found that he needed more volunteers, he asked studio personnel to fill in, although they were not hypnotized. They all behaved so similarly that the audience could not distinguish the fill-ins from those who had undergone hypnotic induction. They all sat with their eyes closed, looked sleepy, and complied with requests to lower and raise their hands. When told that their chairs were burning hot, everyone got up. This demonstration reveals that individuals easily conform with their perceptions of what hypnotized individuals do, which is respond automatically to suggestions (Lynn, Rhue, & Weekes, 1989).
One of the most striking aspects of hypnosis is the pain reduction reported by some people during dental work or childbirth. Ernest Hilgard (1991) has proposed an explanation of hypnotic phenomena that originated in studies of individuals experiencing painful stimuli.
Hilgard suggests that hypnosis involves a dissociation, or splitting of the mind. Examples of dissociation can occur in ordinary activities. Have you ever been reading a book and suddenly found that you had no idea what you had read for several minutes? Your eyes were following the text, but your mind was daydreaming; the act of reading and the memory of what you read were dissociated from the experience of daydreaming.
Hilgard proposes that some people, facing painful stimuli, can dissociate the experience so that one part of the mind is aware of the pain while another is unaware of it. These parts of the mind are separated and have no knowledge of each other. But what type of person is capable of dissociating consciousness in this way? Researchers have found that an excellent predictor of hypnotizability is a tendency to become heavily involved in imaginative activities and to have exceptionally vivid images that occur without much deliberate effort (Wilson & Barber, 1983). These fantasy-prone people spend about half their time absorbed in fantasy. In fact, their sexual fantasies are so powerful that they are capable of achieving orgasm without physical stimulation. Their very vivid imaginations can serve a useful function by enabling them to alter consciousness in ways that are adaptive—for example, by using dissociation to deal with pain.
There are competing explanations for hypnosis; in fact, experts disagree as to whether hypnosis is a phenomenon that needs explanation. Obviously, more research will be done in this area.
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