CURIOUS, BUT NOT SO MUCH AS TO CHANGE MY MIND
Hypnosis For The Seriously Curious – Kenneth S Bowers
Take your time machine back 50 years right into the heart of the state vs non-state debate. Sarbin and Coe have just released Hypnosis: A Social Psychological Analysis of Influence Communication, which makes what could be the definitive argument for hypnosis-as-role-enactment – a particular non-state position that suggests a) there is no hypnotic state; and b) that the whole pantomime is a form of role-play.
Now, Sarbin and Coe wouldn’t say, as their detractors might have done, that they solely meant conscious acting (and one day we’ll get to what they actually said), but in their book they dug a huge chasm between the orthodox views on hypnosis and their own. In steps Bowers, a state-theorist if ever there was one, to holler back. And holler back he did, but not necessarily always with a fair hand.
Bowers states helpfully that the field of hypnosis is full of contradictions and empathises with the reader about how confusing and frustrating this must be. He does believe, however, that these apparent paradoxes arose because experiments that undermined the state position were themselves flawed; or, if not flawed, that they didn’t tell the whole story. As a result he wrote this book to explore whether hypnotic behaviour is faked, whether hypnotic effects are genuine, whether hypnotisability is a trait and whether it can be changed, how the hypnotic state fits in, and whether the whole thing is all a form of dissociation.
The most interesting of these questions is really the last one, and I’ll come to that in a bit. But for the rest, another phenomenon is at play which I find more interesting than these questions. And that is how Bowers goes about answering them. Not the actual answers he gives, you understand, but the way he approaches them.
You see Bowers took a position I’m sure he thought was entirely reasonable, and one I’m sure was (is?) shared by many a statist. And that’s that either all the magic depends on a hypnotic state – or trance – and everything related to suggestibility only happens within the hypnotic state. Or that the whole thing is made up and everyone – and he means everyone – who has ever responded to a hypnotic suggestion, large or small, is a charlatan, playing some game to deceive honest academics like he and his colleagues.
Now, I think Sarbin, Coe, Wagstaff, Barber, Spanos and Chaves (all on the socio-cognitive side of the debate) took this position far too seriously and, instead of exploring all the amazing things possible with suggestion, set out to show that the trance proposition was silly and unsupported by evidence. This, of course, upset the state theorists, and so battle lines were drawn over the reality of the hypnotic state, and history was written.
And while the non-statists might have been right, and it might have been fun showing how right they were, it encouraged the perspective that Bowers took in writing this book. Everything presupposes that the hypnotic state exists and is a Very Real Thing. Where the evidence shows it’s unnecessary, Bowers says that doesn’t preclude it being a thing, and looks for evidence that the state makes suggestions more effective. Where the evidence shows suggestions are just as effective without a state, Bowers seeks to undermine the experiments or interpret them in a way unsupported by the evidence.
In a classic case of seeking the evidence that he wanted, he reports on experiments that show that hypnotism (which should really be ‘suggestion’, but hey) can cure warts; reporting that in some cases this was done by hypnotically restricting blood flow to the warts, and in others by hypnotically increasing blood flow to the warts. He confusingly concludes that, regardless, hypnotism can control blood flow, rather than addressing the contradiction highlighted by the evidence. (In none of the cases was blood flow actually measured – it was just naively assumed that it must have been controlled because a) the suggestions demanded it; and b) the warts went away.) A more reasonable conclusion might have been to simply accept that suggestion can affect warts, without making big claims about hypnotism controlling blood flow (ignoring the low power in those experiments, and any number of other potential reasons why the warts might have gone away, of course!)
And so it goes on. The presumption that hypnosis is real and therefore any evidence to the contrary needs to be reconsidered through this lens is paramount and all pervasive. Maybe it’s because it’s 50 years old, but it’s hard to read without chuckling at the bias exhibited throughout. It’s nowhere near as terrible as many of the other books we’ve read from 50+ years ago, however. At least this is well referenced and written by an actual academic.
On reflection, I think the non-statists should have focused on what was possible with suggestion instead, and explored how and why that worked. Had they done so, they might have concluded that it was made up of voluntary actions that were experienced as involuntary. And in explaining that, they might have had to conclude that this was a form of dissociation – the exact thing that Bowers concludes towards the end of the book. As my supervisor, Zoltan Dienes, pointed out many years ago, if the two sides of the war had accepted that the induction was a ritual and that the state was imaginary, they’d have realised their two positions were so close to each other as to be almost indistinguishable.
And that, dear reader, is a way of appreciating this book as a good read, even if you don’t particularly agree with either how it was written or most of the conclusions it draws!
