AMANDA BARNIER INTERVIEW
As one of the few women in a mostly male academic field, she has hypnotised thousands of people, edited and contributed to one of the leading, current hypnosis books, created fantastical delusions in people, and knows a thing or two about magick.
I first heard of Amanda when The Oxford Handbook of Hypnosis was recommended to me and Anthony back in 2010 – a book that Amanda did not just co-edit, but for which she also co-authored three of its chapters. And as Amanda also co-authored a chapter for The Clinical Handbook of Hypnosis, and co-authored two chapters for The Highly Hypnotizable Person, she became quite a significant figure in our understanding of hypnosis. Indeed, one of her chapters in The Oxford Handbook was written with Zoltan Dienes and featured cold control theory (which obviously had a huge impact on me!). So finally getting to virtually meet her and ask her questions was quite a privilege.
I asked Amanda how she found herself in this field and she explained that she didn’t initially go to university to study hypnosis, or even psychology. “So I went to [Macquarie] university [in Sydney, Australia] to study journalism, and the people who studied journalism were much cooler than me. You had to stay up all night and go and work at the student radio station, but I had a night job to pay my way through uni because I came from a pretty working-class family, so I couldn't do that.” But this opened another, more interesting, door for her.
Amanda told me her job was as the “change girl” in an RSL club – a kind of pub with gambling machines for serving military personnel, veterans and other members, operated by the Returned and Services League of Australia. This position gave Amanda a unique view of some aspects of human behaviour: “People would come in and they'd have their pension cheques, and they would cash them and then put all their money through the poker machines, and then say, ‘Oh, my God, I've put my whole pension cheque through’. And you're just saying to yourself, ‘What is going on?’”
To answer this question, Amanda started to study psychology, learning theory and reinforcement, which led to the revelation that “psychology has got the answer to real-world problems!” As a result, she switched her major to psychology. In her third year, she enrolled in a course on psychopathology taught by Kevin McConkey, a very influential figure in the field of hypnosis both in Australia and internationally. Amanda was interested in post-traumatic stress disorder, and approached Kevin with a view to study this topic for her Honours-year project. But this turned out to be unrealistic: “Well, the challenge of that, and it was an early lesson for me about setting up experiments, is you've got to do a plausible experiment that you can achieve in a year (at least for Honours); it’s a complicated and sensitive process to access people with trauma for research, and something you have to have particular training for.”
Kevin instead suggested a project based on hypnosis and memory. At that time, he and another important figure in Australian hypnosis, Peter Sheehan, were working with Australian police forces on a project assessing the value of hypnosis for victims or witnesses of crime. So he suggested to Amanda that for her Honours project she test if it’s possible to implant a pseudomemory – a false memory – with hypnosis.
A few years later, when it came to choosing a topic for her PhD, Kevin suggested posthypnotic suggestion: “He said ‘This is a very theoretical topic, but nothing's been done on it for 30 years’, so I did eight or nine experiments with Kevin over the course of the next few years.” And it was at a hypnosis conference – where Amanda met Ernest Hilgard, Kenneth Bowers, John Kihlstrom, Mike Nash among others – that it all made sense: “I thought, ‘Man, I’ve found my people!’.”
Amanda explained that hypnosis was often treated as being on the fringe of cognitive psychology, but she was fine with that, “like living on the outskirts of town”; Amanda pointed out that many of psychology’s greatest figures have conducted research on hypnosis or been fascinated by hypnosis: Janet, Freud, James, Hull, Hilgard, and Loftus, to name just a few.
Following her PhD, Amanda spent a six-month post-doc with John Kihlstrom at UC Berkeley, who had inherited all of Ernest Hilgard’s card filing index system and lab books from his hypnosis laboratory at Stanford University. She told me that she spent those six months mining this amazing resource for everything she could find on posthypnotic suggestion and posthypnotic amnesia.
I asked Amanda what she thought of the various models of hypnosis and she explained that “the Australian way of doing hypnosis was that it wasn't at the extremes”. While other research groups may have focused on arguments and evidence for whether hypnosis is a special state or not, her approach – consistent with her supervisors and mentors – was focused on how it felt internally. “I have always cared, having been trained by Kevin and Peter, about the phenomenology of hypnosis: What does it feel like to people? What are the abilities that they bring with them? And what advantages and vulnerabilities does it confer?”
Amanda expanded: “The questions that I think remain unanswered by any theory, almost every theory, is where does hypnotisability come from? What are the sources of the individual differences in hypnotic ability? And why is it that only some people can experience certain suggestions? That's what I'm interested in.” Amanda also explained that the other reason she wasn’t so focused on theory was that, for the last couple of decades, she had mostly been “using hypnosis instrumentally … to recreate [and study] delusions in the laboratory, working with clinical neuropsychologists, philosophers, and others”.
When pushed for a favoured theory, however, Amanda mentioned Joseph Barber’s 'locksmith’s model': “He talks about finding the right key to unlock [hypnotisability], which foreshadowed, 20 or 30 years earlier, the personalised approach to medicine that a lot of people talk about now. That is, different people have different capabilities. As a therapist, you find the key to unlock that capability for therapeutic success. I thought it was very ahead of its time.”
We talked briefly about automaticity and the sensation of involuntariness, which Amanda phrased as a “break in authorship” – a neat way of expressing the feeling that some hypnotised people have of the suggested response just happening to you, rather than you being the cause of it. Kenneth Bower, she said, called this “happenings not doings”.
To illustrate, Amanda described one of her PhD posthypnotic experiments, which was a recreation of one by Esther Damaser and Martin Orne 30 years before:
“During hypnosis, I gave highly hypnotisable people a posthypnotic suggestion to mail me back a postcard every single day, and I gave them a huge stack of 150 postcards. For half of them, I specified, ‘keep doing it until I call you on the phone again’; and to the other half I just said ‘keep doing it’, because I wanted to see if a specific cancellation would make a difference to the efficacy of the posthypnotic suggestion. Well, some of those people sent me postcards for three months; they just kept doing it and doing it. Some of them were really annoyed when they came back, actually, because they felt that I'd made them post a postcard every day. Like, you know, they went out in the rain, and they did it even when it was inconvenient because they felt they couldn't help themselves.”
While this appears to be fantastic evidence for the power of a posthypnotic suggestion – just the sort of thing a hypnotherapist might want to lean heavily on – Amanda then undertook a follow-up study that somewhat undermined it:
“I did it again where I gave some highly hypnotisable people a posthypnotic suggestion; but then for others – people I didn't hypnotise, I didn't even select them for hypnotisability – I just said, ‘could you do this for me? I'm a PhD student. And this would really help me’. There was no difference in how long those who got the posthypnotic suggestion and those who I just asked mailed me postcards for; they did it equally as long. What was different, however, was how the people who were hypnotised and given the suggestion felt about it. This is an important difference. They felt compelled to mail the postcards. Those I just asked to mail postcards said, 'Oh, well, I did it because you asked me and I promised’.”
I asked Amanda what she thought the ramifications of this were, and she replied: “I think you can accomplish every bit as much, at least for some things, without hypnosis as with it. But what can change with hypnosis is people’s external attributions about it, to feel that this behaviour or experience comes from outside myself.” I found this interesting because it implies that the power of a posthypnotic suggestion is that it feels automatic and involuntary – and not self-authored – rather than the actual details of what it is possible to get people to do. And while this fits entirely with any modern perspective on hypnotism, I just didn’t expect it to be that easy to get people to send a postcard every day for months on end.
Amanda described a few of the hallucinations and delusions that she has created with hypnotic suggestion, which included a cold metal ball that people believed was getting so hot in their hands that they literally threw it across the room; and a mirror that people looked into and saw, not themselves, but someone who they believed was a stranger.
This, obviously, led us to the topic of the biggest followers of our blog, the CIA in Langley, Virginia, USA! Amanda told me that one classic experiment that Martin Orne carried out in Sydney involved participants putting their hands in a tank with a poisonous snake, and throwing acid in the face of an assistant. This work was part of a large programme of research that Orne conducted for US Defense forces on the impact of hypnosis on human behaviour and experience. Some people have since claimed that these experiments were conducted on behalf of, and paid for by, the CIA, perhaps under the MK-Ultra (or a subsequent) programme! While this feeds into our love of the incredible (and I mean that in the ‘unbelievable’ sense) reports by George Estabrooks in his book, Hypnotism, Amanda went on to explain that Orne didn’t think these feats read across into everyday life:
“Orne later said that there's no evidence that you can use hypnosis to control people’s behaviours and experiences in extreme ways, and that the demand characteristics of those situations are clear enough to people that they may respond in certain ways, not because of hypnosis, but because they know that it's not real in some way, shape, or form.” I’m sure the CIA were particularly upset by that, and that this isn’t just misinformation spread by them via academic luminaries!
Before we had to wrap up, I asked Amanda for her favourite hypno-fiction book and film, and she put forward the same movie that Martin S Taylor recommended, Dead Again. But on books, Amanda is actually planning on writing a ghost story that features a hypnotist! “Well, hypnosis has an interesting history alongside the Spiritualist movement, doesn't it? I mean, hypnosis is just so interesting, because of intersections of the history of psychology, psychiatry, cognition, consciousness, and the paranormal.”
Indeed it is; not only that but Amanda told me that she actually teaches a lecture at Macquarie on the psychology of magick (within a course on the history of magick), which would surely be an amazing thing to watch.
It was a wonderful experience to interview Amanda, and I learned so much that can’t be included here, partly because of length and partly because our time doubled as an informal guest-supervision session for my MRes; and while that’s interesting to me, I’m not sure every reader here needs to witness me being schooled by one of the living greats. Amanda now works full-time in university administration as the Pro Vice-Chancellor, Research Performance and Development at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, where she supports other researchers in their research journeys!