HOW TO REPLACE YOUR TAPE RECORDER WITH A FRIEND
Hypnosis with Friends & Lovers – Freda Morris
I was quite disappointed by this book, but not for the usual reasons. Yes, it talks a load of nonsense at times (actually for quite a lot of the book), but it had real promise at the outset, and it introduced me to a concept that I hadn’t come across – mutual hypnosis – which I’ll describe later. Oh, and for a book that promises ‘hypnosis with… lovers’, it is quite devoid of sex. I actually bought this for Amy as yet another troll, but ended up reading it at her suggestion as a lighter-weight break between some heavier academic books.
Interestingly, Freda Morris has a PhD in psychology and was a professor at UCLA. But she also – and hold onto your hats for this one – gave away all of her possessions in order to remove all the ‘power’ relationships from her life. “Californian resident gives away all her possessions?”, I hear you cry! “So hippy, so what?” She gave away her car – her car! – and some land(!) to her 16-year-old daughter! She gave away her house – her house! – including an additional separate cottage(!), to her 11-year-old son! Her 11-year-old son! Apparently, that did them both the world of good, and Morris bummed around swapping hypnotherapy for rides and sofas, before eventually setting up a hypnotherapy training company with country-wide domination plans.
But enough of that; the promise that I saw in it at the start was the relatively fresh approach to understanding hypnosis. Morris states: “The hypnotic state has no known physical correlates and cannot be defined by any outside criteria, only by your own subjective experience. It is not an alpha state. It is not a REM state. It is not a state that can be delineated by any brain wave measurements that are now known or by skin resistance measures or electrical potentials on the body. Experts cannot judge whether a person is hypnotized by any tests that have yet been devised.”
This was in 1979, a few years after Bandler and Grinder made waves about trance with what became NLP, but also several years after Barber, Spanos and Chaves destroyed trance in their book of 1974 (Hypnotism: Imagination and Human Potentialities). Rather than accept that trance is an illusion or a metaphor, Morris stated: “You will know when you are hypnotized” (her emphasis). She continued, “At some point, as yet undefined by science, you will be in a hypnotic state and will be able to use the suggestibility that state gives you in many desirable ways.”
Morris is in the same camp as Ericksonians, NLPers, and other hypnotherapists, in the sense that she believes that all sorts of things constitute a hypnotic trance: reading, driving, watching TV, etc. I imagine that this position arose because of two contradictory beliefs: first, that a hypnotic state is required to respond to suggestions; and second, that people appear to be able to respond to suggestions in all manner of situations, without a formal hypnotic induction. Taken together, the parsimonious conclusion would be that the hypnotic state doesn’t exist, and that people can just respond to suggestions regardless. The nonsense position taken, however (presumably because the notion of trance and state was so strong), was that everyone is in a trance all of the time (which actually results in ‘trance’ meaning nothing at all).
Our copy came complete with a handy Scottish coach time table from many moons ago.
So, in my opinion, Morris was a hair’s breadth away from departing from the notion of trance altogether, but unfortunately clung to it with all her might instead. And then it went downhill from there. Morris introduced her own model of mind/brain that features a left hemisphere, a right hemisphere, and ‘the rest’; the three being responsible for success, happiness, and health, respectively.
The problem with any of these pseudo-psychological models of mind/brain is really simple and is the same for all of them, whether they be Erickson’s, Freud’s, Elman’s, or whoever else’s – and that is that psychology is, unfortunately, a really big and complex topic. Whenever it is reduced to a simplistic model it will, literally by virtue of the model being simplistic, have to ignore the vast complexities that it intends to explain. And therefore it will be wrong and, as a consequence, be worthless. (My apologies to all pseudo-psychologists reading this.)
As an example, a model of mind/brain that explains how highly responsive participants respond to imaginative suggestions is of little use when considering someone with only low or moderate responsiveness. The model states, “Say these things, like this, and they’ll just respond.” But there’s no explanation for what to do when they don’t. The model is incomplete because it lacks consideration for the nuances and differences that apply to the population. And one thing we know from the complexity of psychology is that the population is diverse and individuals are distinct.
I therefore found it a little disappointing that Morris tried to reduce all of the complexities of people to a simple ‘three-brain’ model, but especially because she’s a psychologist, with real credentials. After that, most of the book descended into self-help, hypnotherapy, and strategies for life. But two things she discussed I thought were really interesting.
First is that the whole book is structured around learning self-hypnosis through heterohypnosis; an approach she took in her previous self-hypnosis book where she instructed the reader to record themselves on an audio tape, so that they could hypnotise themselves, in a heterohypnosis manner, with a recorded version of themselves as the hypnotist. This book was an approach to replacing the tape recorder with a friend.
And as an approach, I found it quite refreshing. Most hypnosis books tell the reader to be The Hypnotist, to seek out participants to practise on, and to get out in the world and start hypnotising. This book tells you to find a friend to hypnotise you. Yeah! Be the hypnotee first; learn to be hypnotised, and then, maybe, just maybe, try out the same techniques on your friend and learn to be the hypnotist. It’s nice because it shifts the loci of success. The one who’s bought the book and wants to learn is the one who has to do all the work (because all hypnosis is self-hypnosis, after all)! It reduces the concerns about failure and whether you’re doing it right, or whether it will work, and focuses on trying to make it work.
The other thing that Morris talks about that I liked is mutual hypnosis. This is where both people are both the hypnotist and hypnotee during a session. My thought was that if you drop all pretence of there being a hypnotic state, then you could actually have two people both giving imaginative suggestions to each other. Imagine the scene: two people relax and close their eyes; one, by prior agreement, starts describing an imaginative scene or journey; at some point, they ask the other a question about it, and then they stop talking and the other picks up the baton, and continues the description; later, they pass it back, and then forth, and then back again, until such time that one of them decides to end the scenario, and then they both open their eyes.
If you’ve ever played the storytelling card game ‘For The Queen’ (a favourite in our household), then it could feel a little like that, except you wouldn’t be constrained to talking about a journey with a queen, you wouldn’t be constrained by the randomly chosen queen picture (and what that might imply), and you wouldn’t be constrained or guided by the questions asked by the game cards. Instead, you would collaboratively create and enjoy an imaginative experience, together. It could be a fun game between friends; it could be something more intense between lovers, perhaps.
And that brings me back to the title. Whilst Morris wrote “& Lovers” in the title, lovers really only get about a page of consideration. Chapter 4 is all about relationships, apparently, but only its last page really talks about making luuurve, and even then the instruction is for each of you to enter self-hypnosis by yourselves, in separate rooms, and then come together for an eye-fixation-based shag. Morris tells you to read the whole book, then do all the exercises except for chapter 4, and then, and only then, and only when your partner is equally as good at self-hypnosis as you are, to embark on the sexy sex.
It’s almost as if ‘& Lovers’ was added as a marketing gimmick.
