TRANCE SHOULD BE DEAD
Hypnosis: A Scientific Approach – Theodore Xenophon Barber
Yet another book that is almost 50 years old, applying science rigorously to hypnosis, full of absolute gems of information. But, as it is so with anything speaking truth to magic, this book has been largely forgotten. It’s hard to come by second-hand – I guess all copies are treasured – but it is certainly worth the search, and certainly worth the cash, when you find it. Do not expect it to be cheap, unfortunately.
Even with my scientific disposition, it’s taken a couple of years to get around to reading this; I was hoping to get through Barber’s book on LSD first (yes, really) and, to be honest, the black cover and stencilled font did kind of intimidate me. And intimidate it will when you start reading. Barber felt that the field wasn’t particularly scientific and that it needed to change. This book, therefore, reviews many of his studies (and those of colleagues) that address the most basic of questions about hypnosis.
Now, I’d like to suggest that the world listened and took on board the evidence that he presented but, other than annoying some state-obsessed academics, it doesn’t seem to have had much impact. It’s kind of a description of how science should be applied to psychology. It starts by describing the existing views of hypnosis, that an induction is required to put someone in a hypnotic state, after which they are responsive to suggestions, and within which they might be endowed with some interesting and powerful phenomena, such as spontaneous amnesia for the period of “trance”, spontaneous analgesia, heightened memory when demanded, even heightened senses.
Rather than accept this altered state of consciousness on face value, he asks the (seemingly) obvious questions, such as how anyone would tell if someone was “hypnotised”. Through this he reveals the extant circular logic, still prevalent in the field today, that claims that a) a hypnotic state is required to respond to suggestions; and b) that someone can be deemed to be in a hypnotic state if they are responding to suggestions. While these could, theoretically, be true (they’re not) they don’t provide any way to test if someone is hypnotised without recourse to their response (or not) to suggestions.
And this is important, because if the definition of a “trance” is simply that someone is responding to suggestions, then we don’t need the word “trance”, and all the connotations it brings, at all. We can dispense with the altered state altogether – people are either responding to suggestions or they aren’t. But if we want to keep “trance” then we need a definition that is independent. We wouldn’t say someone was in a “reading trance” whenever they were reading but otherwise not; we would just say “they were reading”. Ditto driving, imagining, relaxing, eating, running, masurbating, whatever. So if there is a “trance” that results from inductions, then it should be identifiable regardless of whether the participant is responding to suggestions; “neutral hypnosis”, if you will.
But, equally, the question of what the induction does needs an answer beyond that it causes trance, determined entirely by whether participants respond to suggestions or not. We can’t use response to suggestion to define a trance, and then claim trance is required to respond to suggestions. So, instead, Barber looked into how else people define “trance”. The appearance of being in a trance is interesting, because a hypnotist can simply give a suggestion to NOT look like they’re in a trance and they’ll look perfectly normal, but still respond to suggestions just as they did before. And how participants report the feeling of trance is the same as how unhypnotised participants report their experiences if they simply sit still with their eyes closed for five minutes. Back in 1976 there wasn’t any brain scan evidence for trance. There still isn’t, but a lot of money has been spent looking. QED believers. (Obviously, that’s a joke. Still, if we don’t have evidence, maybe we should start behaving as if it isn’t real, just like we do with ghosts, God, and magpie ethics.)
Barber turned his attention to the experiments that compared hypnotised people with unhypnotised people – you know, the ones that supposedly showed that people don’t respond to suggestions until they are hypnotised. Well, first up they were comparing apples and oranges. If the hypnosis group is made up of highly hypnotisable participants who are then hypnotised, you would reasonably expect that the control group is made up of the same types of people (with them randomly assigned to groups) but simply not hypnotised. But no, of course not. They compared highly hypnotisable, hypnotised participants with low hypnotisable, unhypnotised participants. And guess what? Those low in response barely responded to suggestions! And those high in response responded really well to suggestions! Barber then reported on his own studies that recreated the experiments but with properly matched groups, and showed that the inductions made very little difference.
One of the distinct differences that Barber employed was to extract the “task motivational” statements from the inductions given to the hypnosis groups, and to give those to the control groups. These amounted to statements that these exercises required cooperation (“How well you do on the tests which I will give you depends entirely upon your willingness to try… What I ask is your cooperation”) and that they were easy to respond to (“Everyone passed these tests when they tried… you can easily imagine and do the interesting things I tell you”). His point was that maybe the task motivational statements, which were buried in most inductions of the day, caused the responses to suggestion, rather than the relaxation, eye-closure, or anything else in the inductions. Ultimately his point was fruitful – task motivational statements are all that is required! (Although these are aided to a small extent by suggestions for relaxation coupled with defining the situation as hypnotic.)
It really is an unmagic book, or an anti-magic book. It takes a magical topic and makes it unmagical by exposing the everyday words, thoughts, behaviours and imaginations that result in apparently magical results. Or at least that’s how most people see it. Personally, I find it more magical to reveal how it all works, without relying on magical components or invented energies. If normal cognitive processes can result in someone appearing to be in a hypnotic trance, or appearing to not remember something they were just told, or appearing to not feel pain when they probably should, then isn’t that magical in its own right? We shouldn’t be offended that we were tricked; we should instead respect and worship the trickery!
