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A GenePoool.com Essay
Hypnosis and the Trance That Wasn't
Hypnosis noun. A sleeplike condition psychically induced, usually by another person, in which the subject is in a state of altered consciousness and responds, within certain limitations, to the suggestions of the hypnotist.
In the late eighteenth century, a fellow named Anton Mesmer held French society in his thrall, more or less literally, with his radical performances of a phenomenon he dubbed "mesmerism." Proper ladies swooned, succumbing to odd, trancelike states, the effect of the mysterious "animal magnetism" Mesmer purported to have command over. The fad grew in popularity until, in 1784, it got the attention of the French Academy of Sciences. The French Academy organized a distinguished panel of scientists that included, among other famous names, American ambassador Ben Franklin. The panel tested Dr. Mesmer's theories somewhat more rigorously than before, and eventually concluded that "animal magnetism" did not exist, and "mesmerism" was nothing more than the power of suggestion in action. And so hypnosis was born.
What's astonishing is that we don't know a great deal more about this effect than we did over two hundred years ago. It might have remained nothing more than an interesting party trick had Freud not permanently married hypnosis to psychoanalysis. Now it's a therapeutic tool. But the conclusion of the French Academy of Science may very well be no less valid now than it was in 1784.
A Definition? Anyone?
The Webster's definition that introduces this article seems fairly thorough, but it actually has some holes in it. What's lacking is a decent definition of "altered consciousness." What does this mean? It refers to the hypnotic "trance," but that understanding doesn't improve mattters, because now we need to know what a "trance" is, and that's a major problem. Nobody knows what a hypnotic "trance" is, or whether it even exists.
When a subject is put into a "trance" he or she is at the mercy of the suggestions of the hypnotist, but only to a certain degree. As anyone familiar with it can tell you, the hypnotist cannot compel the subject do something the subject does not wish to do. This may be reassuring, but it also cast something of a shadow on the entire concept. The implication is that the subject has not yielded control to the hypnotist at all. If there is such a thing as a "trance," why does it only work when the subject wants it to?
The more damning problem is that, in order to be hypnotized, the subject has to already believe in it. In other words, if you want proof that hypnosis works, you're going to have to accept, a priori, that it does work, or you will not get your proof.
Put this in perspective. If I told you that I could levitate you with my mind, but I could only prove it to you if you trusted me enough to walk off the edge of a tall building, would you do it? Of course not. It's wise to distrust any phenomenon whose proof of success requires implicit acceptance of the validity of the phenomenon prior to the presentation of the proof.
Keeping this in mind, here are two possible definitions.
Definition #1: There is a mechanism within the human brain that allows the subject to willingly surrender control, during which time the subject can tap into hidden memories, discuss matters they would otherwise not discuss, confront old demons, and behave like a very different person. The subject in this state cannot be compelled to do what they would not wish to do outside of the trance.
Definition #2: There is no altered state involved in hypnosis, but the subject THINKS there is, and because of this they feel free to discuss events they would not be open to discuss otherwise. They willingly submit to the illusion that they are in a trance and are in fact acting the way they feel they ought to. They are play-acting.
Under normal circumstances-- and by this I mean the vast majority of therapeutic circumstances-- the distinction between these two definitions might be considered mild enough to be inconsequential. When taken to extremes, the difference is huge.
But first...
The "extreme" end of hypnosis is best represented by three well-known phenomena: Recovered Memory Therapy, Multiple Personality Disorder, and Past-Life Regression. But we're not ready to examine them yet; we don't have all the information we need.
There are two factors that are absolutely critical to any understanding of hypnosis: confabulation, and the desire to please.
Confabulation is the ability to invent without being aware you are inventing, "filling in the gaps," as it were. This is a normal, well-documented aspect of memory that has nothing to do with the honesty of the subject, and it's so common to our everyday experience it usually goes unnoticed.
Imagine, for example, you're telling a story to a friend. The story takes place in two different locations, but you don't remember what time you left the first location or arrived at the second location. Worse, you're not sure if you took the train or the bus. But good stories need precise information, so you hypothesize that you must have taken the subway, in the interest of improving the tale. Later, you retell the story to another friend, and the subway is now an integral part of it, without necessarily any acknowledgement on your part that you were once uncertain on this detail. Perhaps by the third time you remember something that happened on the subway that day, and you incorporate that as well. In fact, you're actually remembering something that happened on the train on a different occasion, but, it improves the story, and so it stays. With enough retellings, you have a seamlessly entertaining anecdote, with large portions of fictitious information that neither you nor anyone else hearing the story even recognizes as fiction. This is confabulation. We do this every day.
The desire to please is a bit more difficult to understand, because it's not as common, and because it stems directly from the therapist/patient dynamic.
Let's put ourselves in the position of the therapist. The patient in front of us wants to get better. We know that because, well, they're here with us right now. We bring to the table the appropriate credentials, and thus our patient believes that we are capable of helping them get better. So far so good. (Please pardon the obvious oversimplification for demonstrative purposes.)
To begin, we ask questions, questions that, it is assumed, will ultimately lead us to the answers that will help our patient get better. The patient, again, wanting to get better, very much wants to answer the questions, but more importantly, wants to give the answers the patient believes we want to hear.
If this sounds like out-and-out lying, consider a more benign example. Your boss asks you a question. You want to give the correct answer, but you also want to give the answer that will make your boss most happy and, more importantly, the answer that keeps you from getting into trouble. Rather than lying, you emphasize what you think your boss wants to hear and omit what you think might be detrimental to your career.
Understanding how the desire to please works in normal situations helps us understand how much it affects a hypnosis session. Because the boss may doubt you. The therapist, in a non-hypnotic session, may recognize your efforts to give the best answer rather than the right answer. By a hypnotized patient is supposed to be an honest one, so the therapist is more likely to believe the response of the patient, and the patient is more likely to believe their own response is an honest one.
With these two things in mind, we can proceed to examining the outer reaches of hypnosis.
Recovered Memory Therapy
People can repress memories. The question of whether it's possible to repress them to the point where they simply no longer exist in the conscious mind is debatable, but it's a debate we don't need to involve ourselves in before continuing.
What's less debatable is how people react when in a state of denial. I have a friend who, when upset about something she doesn't wish to deal with directly, has a tendency to eat a lot more than usual-- a fairly harmless response. Another person might become grossly overweight, or perhaps develop a facial tic, or become extremely irritable, or suicidal, or whatever. The point is, compulsive tendencies can indicate denial of past trauma, and the best way to combat those tendencies is to find out what it is that's being denied, and then deal with it. (Again, I simplify in the interest of clarity.)
More often than not, the traumatic memory surfaces on its own over time. It may have a trigger-- seeing a molestation-inclined uncle for the first time in twenty years, say-- and it may not. It may take a great deal of time to determine the nature and degree of seriousness of the trauma in question.
So far so good. We've established a cause-effect relationship between compulsive behavior and denial. Now we have a potential problem to consider. What if we identify compulsive behavior but can't find the traumatic event? What if the patient simply doesn't have any memory of anything having happened to them? Hypnosis becomes an obvious option.
It's been long assumed that hypnosis improves recall, and such a tool would be tremendously useful in uncovering lost trauma. The problem is, hypnosis doesn't actually have any such power.
There is no correlation between hypnosis and improved memory whatsoever, as manifold controlled tests confirm. The only thing that can possibly be improved by hypnosis is certitude on the part of the patient and the therapist, and only if both of them are operating under the belief that a hypnotic "trance" has the power to awaken hidden memories. We tend to think of the human memory as a giant computer recording everything as it happens, and we the unfortunate beneficiaries of inferior software to access that information. The truth is far more nebulous, as the above discussion of confabulation shows.
The three major modern phenomena that have been inextricably linked to the reegression hypnosis wave are: ritual satanic cult abuse, alien abduction, and recovered child abuse. Of the three, recovered memories of child abuse at least has a basis in reality, as child abuse does, of course-- and unfortunately-- take place every day. But when memories pop up only under hypnosis, it's time to step back and consider whether they're genuine.
Think about how dangerous this is. If a patient goes to a therapist complaining of, say, depression, it is of course the therapist's responsibility to help the patient ferret out the source of that depression. What if the therapist is predisposed toward a specific cause? The symptoms for our three regression hypnosis categories are identical, so the only real distinction between them is the choice of therapists. There have been no reported cases of, say, an alien abduction expert unearthing satanic abuse, or an expert in recovered memories of child abuse instead discovering repressed memories of alien probes. Why is this? One would think this would be impossible with a genuine phenomenon.
The right questions will cue the subject toward the expected response. This is called unconscious cueing. The therapist no doubt doesn't even realize exactly how loaded his or her questions are, but the very fact that he or she is already anticipating unearthing a specific trauma makes the discovery of that trauma a foregone conclusion. All it takes is willingness to please on the part of the patient, a healthy dose of confabulation, a therapist with an agenda (whether acknowledged or not,) and about a year's worth of sessions before a potentially dangerous false memory is a part of the psyche of the patient, an undeniably detrimental outcome.
Multiple Personality Disorder
Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) is an iatrogenic-- physician-caused-- disorder. The symptoms are the same, an innocuous cocktail of character traits that could describe nearly everybody at one time in their lives, and MPD also requires a therapist who is already looking for the condition. But MPD is a "disease" to be diagnosed rather than a specific traumatic incident waiting to be unearthed. With MPD, a childhood trauma-- real or imagined, extreme or minor, singular or repetitive-- is the cause, the trigger that results in the condition that is then treated. In that sense, it goes one step further than repressed memory therapy. MPD has its own set of unique behavioral fingerprints, but-- and here is what identifies it as iatrogenic-- none of the behavior associated with MPD surfaces until after the patient has been diagnosed and treatment has begun.
The theory goes that whenever there is an extreme
childhood trauma, the child, in order to cope with the trauma,
dissociates by creating an "alter." Subsequently, the
alter is the one who experienced the trauma. For every trauma
a new alter is created.
This is an interesting variation on the repression of memories.
Rather than argue that any memory is being repressed, MPD forwards
the notion that the memory is intact, but only in the "mind"
of the alter.
There are an abundance of problems with this. To begin with, there's no clear-cut definition of what an alter is, and the method used to recognize the existence of one varies from therapist to therapist. There are almost no reported instances of MPD in children (which seems rather contrary to the claim that it begins in childhood) and the childhood claims that actually do exist are described as "incipient MPD." In other words, the child doesn't have it now, but given that they've experienced a trauma, they WILL get it.
Most tellingly, there appears to be no indication that patients who are treated for MPD get better as a result of the treatment. In fact, in the bulk of the cases the patients get worse. This makes sense if one considers that treatment of an imaginary disorder does nothing to help what really is the patient's problem.
Pretend for a moment that you are a person who has some psychological issues you need to address. You find yourself unaccountably short-tempered, or perhaps you aren't sleeping well. Maybe you're having some thoughts that you simply don't like. Or you're just depressed. You go to a therapist. The therapist hypnotizes you and, over many sessions, concludes that you have MPD. It turns out the thoughts you've been having, the ones you didn't like, weren't your thoughts at all. The depression you were feeling isn't your depression. Your short temper is the manifestation of an angry alter. As the therapy continues you find that the only part of you that is "you" is the part that you like. Everything you dislike is the work of your alters. There are bound to be some people for whom this is an appealing notion, especially when handed down under the auspices of professional therapy from a trusted source.
In MPD circles there are routinely reports of patients with over 100 different alters, and one particular report of nearly 4,000. If MPD were a legitimate disorder, these would be disturbing numbers. As an iatrogenic condition, they're more than disturbing, they're horrifying.
Past Life Regression
This is where hypnosis crosses over into the realm of mysticism and pseudoscience, where the human capacity for confabulation really stretches its legs.
Given the trusting atmosphere of a hypnosis session, with the patient's willingness to please coupled with the trust in the therapist and the hypnosis process itself, what do you suppose happens when the therapist asks the patient who they were in a past life?
Essentially, the patient is being "regressed" past their childhood and right on to before they were born. (By the way, it's possible to "progress" a patient as well, and ask them what will happen to them in the future. The certitude of the patient remains unchanged in the process.) For the television show Nova, psychologist Robert A. Baker hypnotized a subject and then asked her to describe a past life. She proceeded to provide, in great detail, the chariot race scene from Ben Hur. If Dr. Baker had not explained to her, after the session, that she had described a scene from a film, she might have left the session sincerely believing she once led the life of a Roman gladiator.
Perhaps the most famous instance of past life regression was the Bridey Murphy case. In 1952 a woman named Virginia Tighe of Denver was apparently revealed through hypnosis to be the reincarnation of an Irish woman named Bridey Murphy. In a heavy brogue, Mrs. Tighe recounted, in great detail, the life she lived as Ms. Murphy in Cork, Ireland, including details a housewife from Denver in 1952 supposedly could not have known. Subsequent investigations by the Denver Post, the Chicago American, and the writer Melvin Harris proved otherwise. Mrs. Tighe had evidently grown up across the street from an elderly lady named Bridie Murphy, who had recounted to a young Virginia what life had been like for her as a young girl growing up in Cork, Ireland.
It is possible, of course, that this was a case of intentional fraud. More likely, Mrs. Tighe believed the story as much as her hypnotist did.
Like the Bridey Murphy case, past life regressions offer one major benefit over other hypnotically-induced phenomena: testable predictions. Whereas in, say, accusations of child abuse, it's impossible to prove it did not happen (it's logically impossible to prove a negative,) a past life memory can involve specifics that can be verified. The first questions any investigator of such a claim has to ask are: are the historical claims accurate, and if so, is there any way for the claimant to have found this information through normal means? To date, no claim has stood up to these two questions successfully.
Am I Really Being Fair?
I grant that reviewing hypnosis by examining it at its most extreme is almost unfair, but one of the important things to keep in mind is that we're trying to establish the validity of our "trance" state. With the "trance" comes the improved recall, and with it the absence of confabulation. The attendant consequence is, with all this honesty, the willingness to please becomes almost irrelevant. What we are left with, then, if we have a genuine "trance," is genuine alien abduction, multiple personality disorder, real satanic cults, past life experiences, and recovered child abuse. Since the validity of all these claims flies in the face of a great deal of fundamental logic, it's difficult to accept the genuineness of our "trance."
But again, these are extremes. Do we need to throw away hypnosis altogether because of the abuses of a very small group of-- and there's no other way to say it-- highly irresponsible individuals? Hypnosis might reasonably be considered a benign relaxation exercise to get a reluctant patient to open up. Concluding that hypnosis is dangerous based on these examples, some might say, would be like banning cars because of an accident at a race track.
Maybe. Maybe not.
Consider this. By nature, a hypnosis session is an exercise in belief. The patient believes the therapist and has an active desire to please. The therapist believes what the patient has to say and is actively searching for a "cause." Because of the nature of the process, neither of them will know whether the uncovered trauma is genuine.
The professional therapist can claim that they do not lead their patients or contribute to the creation or propagation of false memories, but the truth is, there is no way for them to know if they are doing this or not. Unconscious cueing is both verbal and non-verbal, it can be given through body language or vocal inflection, and it is so much a part of how we as a species communicate it's simply impossible to avoid. Likewise, body language and vocal inflection are also what enable an observant therapist to identify dishonesty on the part of the patient. But how do you tell when your hypnotized subject is lying? Even they don't know they're lying.
Say I have a memory of an event that took place many years ago. It's a disturbing memory, and the fact that I have never adequately confronted it is causing me problems now. I seek the aid of a therapist who elects to hypnotize me in order to give me the opportunity to "relive" the event so as to confront it.
Is this an appropriate use of hypnosis? The memory exists prior to my hypnosis, so we know it's genuine. Where's the harm?
But once hypnotized, how much of the "relived" event is genuine and how much is confabulation? I don't know. My therapist doesn't know either. I could be creating a nearly complete fiction out of a half-remembered event. But now that I've undergone regression hypnosis I'm remembering every detail vividly. Now, under the guise of coming face-to-face with a traumatic event I have actually added to the details of the trauma. Not only do I now have to deal with what happened, I have to learn to cope with what quite possibly never took place.
This is not healthy.
Even doing away with memory reclamation, it's
difficult to accept hypnosis as a valid therapeutic tool. Does
it relax the patient? Sure. But so does meditation and deep breathing
exercises. Use of hypnosis here is effectively co-opting a lie.
As it is, the therapist/patient dynamic is fundamentally about
establishing-- albeit temporarily-- a codependent relationship.
Granting the therapist the "power" to put the patient
into a "trance" only adds to that codependency. In the
long run it may take the patient longer to progress to the point
where therapy is no longer needed.
Hypnosis, at its heart, requires nothing less than the complete
suspension of disbelief in order to work. The patient is completely
unskeptical about what is uncovered, and the therapist cannot
distinguish between truth and confabulation, which is essential
in a profession that relies entirely on the self-reporting of
the patient. If hypnosis is nothing more than elaborate play-acting--
and I strongly believe it is-- then it is harmful. Period. I see
no reason to think otherwise.
Bibliography
Baker, Robert, A "The Alien Among Us: Hypnotic Regression Revisited" 1987 reprinted in The Outer Edge: Classic Investigations of the Paranormal Edited by Joe Nickell, Barry Karr and Tom Genoni, 1996, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, Inc.
Baker, Robert, A "Studying the Psychology of the UFO Experience" 1994 reprinted in The UFO Invasion Edited by Kendrick Frazier, Barry Karr and Joe Nickell, 1997, Prometheus Books
Baker, Robert, A "No Aliens, No Abductions: Just Regressive Hypnosis, Waking Dreams, and Anthropomorphism" The UFO Invasion Edited by Kendrick Frazier, Barry Karr and Joe Nickell, 1997, Prometheus Books
Gardner, Martin "RMT: Repressed Memory Therapy" 1993 reprinted in Encounters with the Paranormal: Science, Knowledge, and Belief Edited by Kendrick Frazier, 1998, Prometheus Books
Gardner, Martin "The Tragedies of False Memories" Weird Water & Fuzzy Logic 1996, Prometheus Books
Goertzel, Ted "Measuring the Prevalence of False Memories" 1994 reprinted in Encounters with the Paranormal: Science, Knowledge, and Belief Edited by Kendrick Frazier, 1998, Prometheus Books
Harrington, Evan "Conspiracy Theories and Paranoia: Notes From A Mind-Control Conference" 1996 reprinted in Encounters with the Paranormal: Science, Knowledge, and Belief Edited by Kendrick Frazier, 1998, Prometheus Books
Loftus, Elizabeth, F "Remembering Dangerously" 1995 reprinted in Encounters with the Paranormal: Science, Knowledge, and Belief Edited by Kendrick Frazier, 1998, Prometheus Books
Piper, Jr., August Hoax and Reality: the Bizarre World of Multiple Personality Disorder 1997, Jason Aronson, Inc.
Piper, Jr., August "Multiple Personality Disorder: Witchcraft Survives in the Twentieth Century" Skeptical Enquirer, May/June 1998 edition
Randi, James An Encyclopedia of Claims,
Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural St. Martin's
Griffin, 1995
© 2000, Gene Doucette
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