A HIGHLY CREDIBLE BOOK?
The Highly Hypnotizable Person – Michael Heap, Richard J Brown and David A Oakley
After the huge impact of the book of my last review, here are my thoughts on what I believe to be the most popular academic book among lay hypnotists.
It’s the one that I hear people mention when they say they’ve read a book on the science of suggestion – well, at least those who can accept that Bandler and Grinder aren’t/weren’t real psychologists, even if they have a soft spot for NLP.
Like Clinical Hypnosis and Self-Regulation, it’s another compilation of chapters from different authors, but in this one they aren’t all on the same page, as it were – making for a wild ride.
The editors, Heap, Brown and Oakley, open with a chapter stating that the social-cognitive theorists have a strong argument – they acknowledge that hypnotic inductions cause little change in response to suggestion and that a ‘hypnotic context’ can achieve the same anyway; they also acknowledge that response to suggestion is a modifiable characteristic – again, the sort of thing that strongly indicates that hypnotic responding is more likely a thinking style than anything relating to a biological mechanism.
But then, in their own chapter later on, Brown and Oakley appear to weasel the special process of hypnosis back in, by suggesting an ‘integrative’ cognitive theory of hypnosis. Integrative, in this setting, means a meeting of the state theories with the non-state theories. In the same way that you can’t be a little bit pregnant, you also can’t have a theory of hypnosis that is a ‘little bit state’: it either assumes some biological process that results from an induction (a trance by any other name) or it doesn’t. In their case, it does, even if they are at pains to agree with Kirsch, Lynn, Sarbin, Spanos, et al, because their evidence is very powerful, if not incontrovertible.
Still, Barnier and McConkey describe hypnotic scales in their chapter and attempt to appraise the Carleton Skills Training Program (CSTP), developed by Gorassini and Spanos, which claims to increase responsiveness to suggestion. They cite three of their papers (from 1986, 1993 and 1999), and then contradict them with citations from Bates (1988 and 1992) and Bowers and Davidson (1991), claiming that the results are in dispute, and that modifiability of response to suggestion is controversial and far from proved.
What they probably didn’t count on was a chapter by Gorassini later on in the same book explaining how to ‘enhance hypnotizability’, where he sets the record a little more straighter. “The CSTP is the most studied of cognitive-behavioural procedures. Its success at enhancing responsiveness has been shown in ten different laboratories”, he states, before citing 28 papers from 16 different sets of authors. Spanos himself (who died in an aeroplane crash in 1994, well before The Highly Hypnotizable Person was published in 2004) had already addressed the concerns of Bates et al in his chapter of the 1991-published Theories of Hypnosis (reviews of that coming sometime in the future, hypno-fans!).
It was almost as if Barnier and McConkey had a theory, wanted to stick to their theory, and didn’t want evidence, or arguments supported by evidence, to get in their way. Similarly Horton and Crawford appear to suffer the same in their chapter on the neurophysiological aspects of the supposed hypnotic state. They report numerous EEG changes following participants ‘entering hypnosis’, leading to the suggestion that a state exists and is a biological function. However, a review of the pertinent evidence was summarised in the 2010-published Handbook of Clinical Hypnosis as: “No specific physiological markers of the hypothesized hypnotic states have been found”.
So what were Horton and Crawford claiming? Who knows, but their short chapter reporting on EEG outputs clearly had a limited time span. I can only assume that they were wrong in what they thought they had discovered, but they got their chapter published anyway. And so it goes on; Wagstaff contributes a chapter urging readers to “avoid endowing [highly hypnotizable people] with magical or peculiar brain characteristics” as yet more reviewed evidence indicates that the effects of suggestion, and the induction itself, can be explained by “mainstream psychological processes” alone.
Like The Oxford Handbook of Hypnosis and the aforementioned Clinical Handbook of Hypnosis, it feels much more like a massive bunfight in a college refectory than a co-ordinated and accepted set of explanations. The evidence, as we’ve seen before and will see again, is very much in the court of the social-cognitive theorists, as it is much easier to show a thousand ways why Santa can’t exist, than it is to produce his coat, sleigh and jingle bells. The reasons are obvious – because Santa is magic, of course!
