WE WILL BEGIN THE HYPNOSIS PROCEDURE NOW
Hypnotic Induction: Perspectives, Strategies and Concerns – V K Kumar and Stephen R Lankton (editors)
If you’re going to take, and stand by, the bold socio-cognitive position that there is no hypnotic state, or (in my opinion, childishly named) ‘trance’, and that the hypnotic induction is nothing but flare, mysticism and revelling in self-importance, then you kind of have to read books and papers that say the opposite, in order to check your own biases.
And that’s where the 2016 book, Hypnotic Induction comes in; its chapters were originally published in a special edition of the peer-reviewed American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis (Volume 59, Issue 2, fact-finders) and contains a range of views about – you’ve guessed it – the hypnotic induction and, by inference, ‘traaaaance’.
To start with the good, it is particularly non-biased, representing views from across the academic spectrum, and is edited by one author who represents one edge, and another who represents another. But to go to the bad, there is literally a chapter on Ericksonian approaches, plus authors picking and choosing their evidence to support their claims of a hypnotic state.
To put this into context, when I raised the ‘state debate’ with Zoltan (Dienes – my supervisor, famously interviewed here), he indicated that he thought that it was pretty much all over; so I pointed to the argument between two chapters in the Clinical Handbook of Hypnosis (edited by Lynn, Rhue and Kirsch, 2010), which I believe is the most recent round-up of hypnosis theories (at time of writing).
Chapter 4 of the Clinical Handbook, ‘Psychophysiological Foundations of Hypnosis’ (Oakley and Halligan) claims all sorts of potential, suggestive, possible (but, note, not actual) evidence for markers of the hypnotic state. It concludes that: “There is a need for more direct comparisons of the effects of exactly the same suggestion under both hypnotic and nonhypnotic conditions to elucidate the necessity for the hypnotic induction in producing these effects.”
Chapter 7 of the same book, ‘The Cognitive-Behavioral Model of Hypnotherapy’ (Wagstaff, David, Kirsch, and Lynn) states clearly, “No specific physiological markers of the hypothesized hypnotic states have been found (Lynn, Kirsch, Knox, & Lilienfeld, 2006; see also chap. 4, this volume)” (my emphasis). Wagstaff et al point to that chapter as evidence that no such markers have been identified.
It’s true, of course. Chapter 4 was reviewing the wealth of fMRI, PET, EEG, etc, evidence gained by scientists seeking to find a marker, a pattern, or even a hint, that the hypnotic state was A Real Thing™ that could be measured and recorded. They reviewed all the evidence they could find at the time and their conclusion was: “We anticipate that further refinements in imaging technologies (e.g., MEG, MSI, fDTI), and experimental designs will offer a greater understanding of both hypnosis and the wider aspects of modulating conscious awareness.” So, basically no evidence using any current technologies, then. (Note, when the authors write ‘hypnosis’, they mean “hypnosis (i.e., trance)”, not just the subject area, a hypnotic session or any other vague term.)
So, my suggestion was that the debate was still raging in 2010 and there hadn’t been an update to the Clinical Handbook nor the Oxford Handbook of Hypnosis since then; but still, maybe it was all over? Maybe the socio-cognitive theorists had won the argument and the statists had come round? Well, imagine my surprise when I read Hypnotic Induction (2016) and found the debate not only alive and well, but kicking at the walls and doors.
David Reid argues that if hypnosis (whatever it is) is something done by the participant (rather than to), guided by the hypnotist, then ‘induce’ is the wrong word and something like ‘elicit’ or ‘evoke’ would make more sense. He asks, “Are hypnotic induction techniques nothing more than contemporary bells and whistles akin to Mesmer’s baquet and mesmerized trees, intended to promote the power of the hypnotist at the expense of the true source of trance production: the patient?”. While acknowledging (correctly, according to all the science) that it is the participant’s mind that creates the hypnotic effect, he still talks of trance like it’s a real thing.
Erik Woody and Pamela Sadler quote Michael Nash from 2005: “There is no need to mention an induction because, as Ernest Hilgard stated many times, an induction is a suggestion”, yet go to some lengths to argue (without evidence, I might add) that: a) the induction supports the mystique of hypnosis; b) individualising the induction is important; and c) “neurophysiological research shows that the hypnotic induction … may have important effects on brain functioning” (my emphasis), while quoting much of the same kind of lacking evidence as Oakley and Halligan in 2010.
The desperation to believe in the state and therefore the induction, or to believe in the induction and therefore the state by virtue, is distinctively ‘up in your grill’, taking on all-comers head first. Why should hypnosis be mystical? Why, in contradiction to the evidence (see Nicholas Spanos’s ‘Hypnotic behaviour: A social psychological interpretation of amnesia, analgesia and trance logic’, 1986, for example), is it important to individualise the induction? And why, given no markers of a hypnotic state have been found so far, may neurophysiological research be likely to find them?
Glossing over the following chapters that all suffer the same hallucination that the-hypnotic-state-must-be-a-thing-and-therefore-the-induction-must-matter, we come to the chapter by Stephen Krystek and V K Kumar, ‘A Comparison of Hypnotic Induction, Task Motivation, and a ‘Cold Start’ Control Group on Hypnotizability’. Here, the authors describe a study where they divided participants into three groups: one group got a hypnotic induction; another got task motivation statements; and the remainder got the statement: “We will begin the hypnosis procedure now”. All participants were then assessed using an induction-agnostic scale, the Creative Imagination Scale (CIS), which aligns with other popular scales of responsiveness to suggestion.
Guess what? No significant distinctions were discovered between the three groups. It turns out that you don’t need an induction to cause participants to accept hypnotic suggestions (previously shown by multiple separate studies), but you also don’t need task motivation statements either. You just need to establish the hypnotic context, something the socio-cognitive theorists have been claiming for decades, and you can do that with a single sentence.
If the induction is unnecessary (as the Krystek and Kumar study shows) then what of the traaaaaaance? If you don’t induce it, does it happen anyway? Well, no, of course not, especially when we have no objective measures to check whether it has arrived. It’s a bit like Santa or Jesus in that respect – you have to believe in it for it to be real.
I’ve been operating under the assumption that the induction was just a suggestion to enter an imagined hypnotic state, but I had to read this book to realise the ferociousness with which some academics still (and I mean still) imagine that state to be real. As a final thought, if there isn’t anything magical going on during an induction, and an induction is just made up of words (no mesmeric fluid or invisible energy passing from hypnotist to participant), and practically anything can be used in place of an hypnotic induction (placebo pill, for example), then what else could the induction be, other than a series of suggestions? And what, other than a suggested state, could those suggestions suggest?
