Tuesday, July 26, 2011

On Hypnosis (Part 11/20)


Views of Suggestion

While suggestion is necessary for trance, it also occurs outside of hypnosis. Most of us respond consciously and unconsciously to suggestions on a daily basis and throughout our lives. For instance, we buy certain products and choose certain brands for reasons we are not aware of, having been influenced by hypnotic suggestion used in advertising. Most children's personalities are shaped out of direct and indirect parental suggestion. The parent tells the child to "be good" or "keep quiet," or throws her a look to the same effect. The child obeys "if she knows what's good for her." Trying to please her parent or to avoid punishment, she cooperates. She is no longer spontaneous; instead her behavior adheres to the parent's instructions. Many of us grow up "not ourselves," more intent on "not making waves" and catering to other people's desires than on expressing our own individuality.

Barber contends that the fact that suggestion operates in everyday life is precisely the point which invalidates the concept of a special hypnotic state. Yapko agrees: "The trance state is a state differing from everyday mental experience only by degrees and not kind...there are no clear demarcations from the usual state to the trance state."[1] "Trance logic," or the hypnosis subject's unquestioning acceptance of suggested reality, no matter how illogical it may be, also occurs outside of hypnosis. It happens when a person lacks the critical thinking ability to objectively analyze whether something is "real" or not, such as when someone fervently believes in Heaven or in his guru's prophecy that Armageddon is coming.

According to Barber's research, trance is not necessary to elicit hypnotic-type responses – but suggestion and credibility are:

"When hypnotic induction procedures are helpful, it is not because the subject is in a "trance" or "hypnotized" in the popular sense of these terms. Instead the evidence indicates that they are helpful when they reduce the subjects' critical attitudes toward the suggestions and thus help them accept the suggestions as believable and harmonious with their own ongoing cognitions. Although hypnotic induction procedures are effective in reducing critical attitudes in some subjects, more ordinary procedures are often equally effective. Non-hypnotic procedures that have been shown to produce a high level of responsiveness to suggestions, presumably by reducing critical attitudes, include (a) exhorting subjects to try their best to imagine those things that are suggested ("task motivational instructions") and (b) urging subjects to put aside their critical attitudes and to let themselves "think with" the suggested themes."[2]

For Barber the essence of suggestion as a behavior-shaping force is credibility, and credibility requires a reduction in critical and evaluative abilities. Thus, any technique which achieves this – be it exhortations, urgings, or mild advice – could be called a hypnotic induction technique. Charismatic politicians, among others, can induce a sort of waking trance in some people, making them feel hopeful when a sober analysis of reality might lead to very different emotions. Barber additionally reports that suggestion has been shown to successfully block the skin reactions normally produced by poison ivy-like plants; to give rise to localized skin inflammation that had the specific pattern of a previously experienced burn; and to cure warts and stimulate breast development in adult women. He hypothesized that "'believed-in suggestions,' which are incorporated into ongoing cognitions, affect blood supply in the localized areas" to produce the above phenomena. Here the key term is "believed-in suggestions." I shall discuss the role of ideas in altering behavior in subsequent chapters.

For Erickson, suggestion was an important element in inducing trance. He agreed with Barber that suggestions had to be believed in and incorporated in order to be effective. But he focuses not so much on getting the subject to believe as on evoking and utilizing the subject's own innate potentials. In contrast to Barber, Erickson viewed hypnotic suggestion as something qualitatively different from non-hypnotic suggestion – a means of communicating new, therapeutic ideas that would block or alter old, non-therapeutic ideas:

"Ordinary, everyday, non-hypnotic suggestions are acted upon because we have evaluated them with our usual conscious attitudes and found them to be an acceptable guide for our behavior, and we carry them out in a voluntary manner. Hypnotic suggestion, by contrast, is different in that the patient is surprised to find that experience and behavior are altered in a seemingly autonomous manner; experience seems to be outside one's usual sense of control and self-direction."[3]

For Erickson, trance is a special state that facilitates the acceptance of suggestion. For Barber, trance is a fallacious term for procedures that reduce critical faculties and thereby facilitate the acceptance of suggestion. However, both view the acceptance of suggestion as a process involving the reduction of conscious mental processes in one way or another. Suggestion, therefore, is a matter of the mind, of suspending the subject's critical thinking. The trick is to word and present suggestions in such a way that they are accepted by the mind and then acted upon by both mind and body – so that the hypnosis subject will begin salivating as she gets ready to take imaginary pieces of divinity fudge from an imaginary tray.


[1]Trancework, p. 140.
[2]T.X. Barber, "Hypnosis, Suggestions, and Psychosomatic Phenomena: A New Look from the Standpoint of Recent Experimental Studies," American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, 1979, _____, pp. 13-25.
[3]Erickson, et al., Hypnotic Realities, p. 20.
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7 comments:

  1. PaulJuly 26, 2011 at 12:36 PM

    Hi,

    Excuse me but where does one draw the line between "client lead". . . "free association" and "re-creation" (of a new fantastic self) and particularly when a mentor is guiding you on the way?

    The mentor could be your psychotherapist.

    It seems to me that the reason why Art is so persistent in his presentation of the facts of our neurological evolution is because the fantasising process can be manipulated through the willingness of the 'patient' to receive loving and growth-full suggestions.

    Not the doors of perception but the doors of suggestibility (through the "counter-transference"; y'know, the way the therapist has to defend himself from the projections of his clients. . . ., all in the interests of interpreting the clients' needs)?

    Thus if Art didn't keep banging on about this truth till he drops, he might give some of us the impression, or do I mean the suggestion that he didn't believe in his convictions as a scientist.

    I mean, when we are in that trance we will believe what our mentors tell us until they stop and then in the absence of a mentor (feeding our beliefs) we will find others to replace the feeling of being cared for. We will allow ourselves the flexibility of a modified belief system to accommodate the new supply.

    Love is a food and we need to eat.

    Who runs the supermarkets of love?

    Paul G.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Richard AtkinJuly 26, 2011 at 5:54 PM

    "Barber additionally reports that suggestion has been shown to successfully block the skin reactions normally produced by poison ivy-like plants; to give rise to localized skin inflammation that had the specific pattern of a previously experienced burn; and to cure warts and stimulate breast development in adult women."

    we need more studies. we need more neurological evidence. we need to define the difference between a neocortex that shuts down during a primal, and a neocortex that shuts down during hypnosis. what are the long term effects of hypnosis? where is the evidence? who cares?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Arthur JanovJuly 28, 2011 at 12:07 PM

    An email comment:
    " dear dr. janov, hello!

    i am enjoying reading your posts. due to your articles on hypnosis, i thought i'd let you know what i have experienced in my work and ask you a question or two.


    i am a hypnotherapist.... not really a hypnotist, for i don't really like the idea of hypnosis. i DE-hypnotize people... after all, we don't need MORE suggestions, we need to release the grievous suggestions we've internalized and we're fine again. living in a walking trance, believing we are mere human bodies and personalities, we merely need to release the past, specifically the trauma that anchored us into our bodies; the trauma that made us think we are bodies. what i have found is that often that trauma was often planted long before this lifetime.


    1) as i said, i am not a typical hypnotist. i never gave a client a suggestion that they were going to go to a past life. i would just help them relax fully and then ask them to ask their inner wisdom what it would like to show or tell them about the 'issue' they came with. i would use the words they used - anger, anxiety, sorrow. i tried to be as neutral as possible, to not color their experience, but to get out of the way.

    2) their 'inner wisdom' without prompting would show them a scene that i never asked questions about, but just accepted as if it was 'ordinary'. i never asked questions such as 'what year is it?' or 'what is your name?' or anything like that. i would just listen to their story, mirror a few of their own words occasionally back to them, and treat 'whoever showed up' as if they were the client. and they were always humble creatures - someone on a slave ship who escaped by starving herself to death, a child whose family lost their crops to a locust swarm, someone who was pushed over a cliff by men on horseback by the light of the moon, someone who lost their head in battle, etc.

    3) without my direction or help, they would simply recognize that yes, a trauma happened in the past and yet they were safe here and now... and they would simply be brought up to date - by their own inner wisdom. i was just the lucky observer of shift after shift, miracle after miracle.

    4) this worked on a physical level too. you wrote, "Something in the present resonates with her history, and then she becomes a prisoner of that history; a prisoner of pain." i would say, once we are free of that history, we are also free of the accompanying bodily sensations. i am convinced that the pain is an invitation to us to focus on the past trauma and release it.


    i wonder if you have had people in primal therapy relive their circumcisions? i think it is a hugely ignored early childhood trauma and much healing is needed in this regard. p.s. i was circumcised as a little girl in kansas so i have been studying the subject and have learned a lot about the differences between the mindsets of the circumcised and natural.


    this work never tired me; it always invigorated me. never wearied me or bored me. i think that's how you know you're doing it right, hmm? i suspect you know that already. :)
    "

    ReplyDelete
  4. PaulJuly 29, 2011 at 12:38 AM

    Hi,

    I'm sorry but I cannot buy into this hypnotherapists' menu of belief about her practical methods.

    -" release the trauma, release the past"-

    -"trying to be as neutral as possible"-

    -" brought up to date by their own inner wisdom"-

    -" shift after shift, miracle after miracle"-

    -" I think that's how you know you're doing it right, hmmm"?-

    I'm sorry but I am deeply suspicious of this rhetoric; all it does for me is show how it's possible to hear Arts' words and interpret a confirmation of something completely different about ones' own belief system.

    Here I sense some-one deeply traumatised symbolically 'recovering' from their own abhorrent abuse through the entrancement of her patients.

    Really I hope I'm wrong. Who am I to make such a damning denouncement? But after everything Art has said about hypnotism and suggestion all I sense is this poor womans' own self suggested hypnotic vision of wellness. Living through the pain of her clients.

    Paul G.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Arthur JanovJuly 29, 2011 at 12:30 PM

    Paul G: There is a very good piece in the latest Scientific American about the Rehabs and how they fail, written by a neurologist. art janov

    ReplyDelete
  6. PaulAugust 3, 2011 at 12:56 PM

    Hi Art,

    Tried to find this article, found lots of interesting stuff, but can you put a date on the piece with a title so i can be sure of what you are referring to?

    Paul G.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Arthur JanovAugust 3, 2011 at 1:22 PM

    Paul: I have no idea what you are referring to. AJ

    ReplyDelete

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