A TRULY PSYCHOLOGICAL DEFINITION
Psychology – Graham Davey
Hypnotists read hypnosis books. Some hypnotists also read popular science books (eg, Being You by Anil Seth – review coming soon!). And very few hypnotists read actual psychology texts, like this one, edited by Davey, but containing numerous chapters by individual experts and groups of experts.
I guess the three questions that a hypnotist might ask are: Why read a psychology text? Why read this psychology text? And what can you hope to get from it that you wouldn’t get from anywhere else?
Ultimately, hypnosis is a psychological endeavour – whether you think there is a trance or not, or whether you think mesmeric fluids are involved (like ectoplasm in Ghostbusters?). I think we are all of the opinion that hypnosis and suggestions affect the mind, and that tends to be the dominant topic of psychology. Academic hypnotists are typically psychologists, and therefore their knowledge lives within a broader domain of which they are already an expert. For a hypnotist to ignore the rest of psychology would be like a journalist ignoring all other kinds of writing – it would make literally no sense (!).
So, given that I think a broad psychology text is a good recommendation for a hypnotist, why this one? Well, among a number of other great chapters, it contains one co-authored by one of my hypno-heroes, Professor Zoltan Dienes; co-authored, that is, with the aforementioned hero of consciousness, Professor Anil Seth. In discussing ‘conscious vs unconscious processes’ they provide a great couple of pages on hypnosis, from its possible evolutionary basis in the supernatural, spiritual and in possession, through Kirsch’s response expectancy theory, to Dienes and Perner’s Cold Control Theory.
The idea of cold control is simply that hypnotic responding is caused by a lack of HOTs – that is a lack of Higher Order Thoughts, or thoughts about thoughts. The theory suggests that we usually articulate our intentions to ourselves as higher order thoughts*, and that, when responding to a hypnotic suggestion, we exhibit inaccurate or incomplete HOTs. It fits perfectly with the ‘thinking style’ of the social-cognitive theories, implies it is something that could be trained (fitting with the evidence that response to suggestion can be modified), and yet promises to satisfy (to some degree at least) all those pesky state theories that were born out of Hilgard’s neodissociation theory.
Hilgard suggested there was an amnesic barrier between the part of the mind that responded to a hypnotic suggestion and the part of the mind that observed the action being carried out, permitting the participant to conclude that it ‘happened by itself’, and that it felt automatic and involuntary. Ignoring Hilgard’s ‘hidden observer’ for a moment (that Spanos truly destroyed through experimentation), the crux of this theory rested in the amnesic barrier that hid the truth of one part, from another part of the mind. This fell out of favour because it relied on all hypnotic participants having to achieve hypnotically-induced amnesia in order to carry out any hypnotic suggestion; and we know that some people can achieve hypnotic arm levitation or fingers twitching without any chance of them forgetting things on demand.
But that didn’t stop the state theorists – they developed Hilgard’s neodissociation theory into a number of other contemporary theories (neoneodissociation theories, if you like) where different executive functions were separated from one another and failed to be aware of what each other was doing (dissociated control, for example). Cold control theory has a semblance of this but without having to postulate the existence of special parts of the mind, and how those parts become disconnected when responding to suggestions. Instead, it simply says that those responding to suggestions simply think differently. Amazingly simple and elegant.
So what do you get from reading this book on psychology? You get wider knowledge; you get context in which to place your pet ideas; you get to learn about neuroscience, learning, memory and emotion; and you get to learn all of that, not from some pop-science book, aimed at those with short attention spans and minimum investments, but from a book that takes no prisoners (Stanford experiment or otherwise), and delivers a coherent, and relatively complete, background. Oh and it is part of the only series of books approved by the British Psychological Society. And on top of that, a third of the contributors are academics at one of the best universities for psychology study, the University of Sussex! All that sea air makes for far better thinking.
*Amy is editing this and is troubled that ‘higher-order thoughts’ isn’t hyphenated as a compound adjective. But apparently this is “correct”. Hmn. Academics: take note!
