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Hypnosis, Memory and Imagination
Self-Hypnosis and Visualization
Conscious VS Unconscious Mental States
Hypnosis and hypnotic techniques have been employed since very ancient times in rituals, group dancing and drumming, and shamanism. Early civilizations used hypnosis to cure a variety of ills by inducing deep relaxation in their patients and offering healing suggestions. Usually the hypnotic techniques used by ancient peoples were tied to religious practices. The ancient Greeks had Shrines of Healing, and the ancient Egyptians had Temples of Sleep, both designed to heal and cure believers. In fact the word “hypnosis’ comes from the Greek word “hypnos”, which literally means “sleep.”
The first medical application of hypnosis is widely credited to Anton Mesmer (1734-1815). Drawing from a theory first put forth by the ancient Greek scholar Paracelsus, Mesmer asserted that illness was caused by a disturbance in magnetic fields that flowed through the human body. Mesmer established profitable salons where patients could come to have this magnetic field corrected. Mesmer placed magnets on his patients’ bodies in different locations, passed his hands and sometimes a magnetic wand over them, and even submerged patients in magnetized vats of water for prolonged periods. In the mid to late 1700’s, Mesmer’s authoritative manner and ability to create deep relaxation in his patients lead to the popular use of the term “mesmerism” to refer to his technique.
Though mesmerism was condemned by the medical authorities of the time, it continued to flourish in Europe long after Mesmer’s death in 1815. By the mid 1800’s, travelling entertainers were wandering Europe, appearing to “mesmerize” various animals, including rabbits, lions, and even salamanders. In 1845, a Scottish doctor named James Esdaile opened a Clinic in Calcutta, India, in which he performed successful operations removing tumours from patients using mesmerism as the only anaesthetic. India had a long tradition of hypnotic techniques tied to meditation and ‘fakirs’, Indian magicians who entered trance states at will, and also charmed dangerous snakes by understanding their subtle body movements and maintaining eye contact.
By 1866, doctors Ambrose-Auguste Liebaulte and Hyppolyte Bernheim established what came to be called “the Nancy School” of hypnosis because their clinic was located in Nancy, France. Over the course of their practice, they successfully treated over 30,000 patients using magnetism and techniques of mesmerism. Many doctors across Europe came to study their practices, including Sigmund Freud, the father of modern science of psychology, Jean Martin Charcot, a prominent neuroscientist of the time, and Joseph Breuer, a psychoanalyst who preceded Freud. Freud and Breuer subsequently published a famous Study of Hysteria, which theorized that hysterical illness in patients was caused by the repression of major trauma, and that hypnotic techniques could heal the patient by recovering and releasing traumatic memories linked to the patient’s symptoms.
Freud eventually rejected hypnosis in favour of psychotherapy, mostly because he found he was personally unable to hypnotize many of his patients. He continued to use many of the techniques of hypnosis however. By the time he rejected hypnosis as a therapeutic tool, his interest in the art had already legitimized it. In the early 20th century, hypnosis was widely used to help soldiers fighting in World War I ease the symptoms of shell shock and what is now know as Post Traumatic Stress. In 1920, former pharmacist Emile Coue published a still-popular book on self-hypnosis wherein he coined the well-known affirmation, “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.”
By the 1930s, hypnosis was being used to treat a wide variety of psychosomatic illnesses such as phobias, tics, stammering, and obsessions, as well as physical illnesses like influenza. In 1948, hypnosis began to be used in dentistry as an anaesthetic and aid to recovery. The use of hypnosis in dentistry came to be called “hypnodontia”. In 1858, the American Medical Association approved a report on the clinical uses of hypnosis, while pointing out that some aspects of the technique were still poorly understood and controversial.
Today hypnosis is used to successfully treat pain, help patients stop smoking, lose weight, and cure phobias. More controversial application include past life memory regression, recovered memories of sexual trauma, and memories of alien abduction. The more sensational applications of hypnosis, along with its wide use in stage magic and mentalism, continue to cast somewhat of a shadow on its legitimacy, but the healing applications and the medical applications of hypnosis have been well-documented and legitimized. It continues to this day to be effectively used in specialized practices worldwide.
Hypnosis is a method of deep relaxation during which positive suggestions are made to help the subject change problem behaviours or eliminate pain. Hypnosis is also used in popular culture in stage shows, magic, and mentalism as a form of entertainment. Hypnosis has been shown to be effective in helping patients stop smoking, lose weight, and alleviate pain.
What happens during a hypnosis session?
Different hypnotists use different methods, but in general, most hypnosis sessions start with the hypnotist explaining the procedure in detail to the client. Once the client is comfortable and understands what is going to happen, the hypnotist guides the client through a long series of progressive relaxation exercises. When the client is sufficiently relaxed, the hypnotist makes a therapeutic suggestion to the client that is designed to carry over into daily life after the session is over.
Does the hypnotist control the client?
A client under hypnosis cannot be made to do anything he or she would not normally be willing to do while in a normal conscious state. A better way to think of the hypnotist-client relationship is that the hypnotist ‘guides’ the client toward a goal the client already wants. Because stage hypnotists and mentalists often make suggestions that result in the subject doing ridiculous things like quacking or walking funny and so forth, many people assume that the hypnotist has undue control over the subject. In truth, many people are willing to do silly things in front of a crowd for entertainment purposes, as anyone who has ever attended at college party or gone to a bar knows. Since the subject of stage hypnosis volunteers to come on stage, and since everyone knows what is about to transpire including the volunteer, the silly behaviour is consensual before it is ever suggested in trance.
What is a trance?
The occult connotations of the word “trance” stem from the historical popularity of the Spiritualism movement of the early 1900’s, which was coincidental with the rise of hypnosis as a therapeutic practice. Trance is actually just a dramatic word for very deep relaxation and/or very intense focus. The deep relaxation experienced during a hypnosis session is similar to the twilight state between sleeping and waking. The subject is not asleep or unconscious, and he or she does have an awareness of everything that is transpiring during the session. However, that awareness happens in a very deep period of physical and mental relaxation. Like the images and thoughts that flit through the mind while falling asleep or waking in the morning, the hypnotic suggestion itself is often not remembered consciously when the session is over.
Can anybody be hypnotised?
Anyone can be hypnotized, though some individuals take longer than others. The degree of skepticism in the subject has no relationship to the ease or difficulty of guiding that person into a hypnotic state. Often highly intelligent, skeptical people make the best subjects because their powers of concentration are strong and their imaginations are active. About one in ten people is extremely susceptible to being hypnotized. These people can be ‘put under’ very quickly.
Will hypnosis fix my problem instantly?
Results vary when it comes to using hypnosis for smoking cessation, weight loss, or alleviation of pain. Often a number of sessions are needed before the full therapeutic effect is realized. Success tends to be statistically about the same as or better than any other good method of smoking cessation, weight loss, or alleviation of pain, such as drugs, diets, will power, or exercise programs. Often, hypnosis is used in tandem with these methods to boost their effectiveness.
Hypnosis, Memory and Imagination
In the late 1890s and early part of the 20th century, women who were distressed or anxious were often diagnosed with ‘hysteria’. Classically, hysteria is a condition in which dramatic physical symptoms occur with no discernable physical cause. Hysterical blindness and paralysis are famous examples. One of the first clinical uses of hypnosis was the treatment of hysteria in women, popularized by Joseph Breuer at the turn of the 20th century and made famous by Sigmund Freud. Freud believed that hysteria was caused by deeply repressed trauma which, if remembered and released under hypnosis, would relieve the hysterical symptoms of the patient.
Freud had great success with his theories and his methods but soon became the centre of controversy because of the sensational nature of his ideas about human sexuality. For Victorians, the suggestion that all illness has roots in sexual desire, trauma, or dysfunction was scandalous, and at the same time, wildly appealing. Freud’s practice soon became world famous and incredibly lucrative. Early on he found that many women in his practice ‘remembered’ sexual trauma during their sessions. He had great success in reducing or eliminating their symptoms by addressing this trauma directly under hypnosis, but soon the social controversy became so great he retracted his assertion that such trauma had ever actually occurred. Ironically, this same drama was played out in therapists’ offices around the world in the 1980s and 1990s, when at first, it seemed that an epidemic of sexual abuse and incest was in progress, but later, these memories were denounced as false, the implication being that the memories themselves had been implanted by the therapists.
In fact, both poles of this debate are likely true to some extent. It is likely that some of the women Freud treated actually were suffering from sexual trauma, and that others were imagining it under his direction. The relationship between hypnosis, memory, and imagination is a fascinating one with deep historical roots. In recent years it has been shown that memory, far from being akin to data stored in a computer or a story written in stone, is more like imagination. Memory appears to be fluid and situational, and is profoundly influenced by suggestion. No two people remember the same event the same way, and more interestingly, memory appears to change over time.
The role of a skilled hypnotist could be described, in some situations, as the role of a skilled mediator in the realm of memory and imagination. Like any tool, it can be used for good or for ill. In negative situations it can conjure up nightmares of satanic ritual abuse or alien abduction. In positive applications it can alleviate Post Traumatic Stress, cure headaches and ease all manner of body aches and pains, remove phobias, help patients lose weight or stop smoking, and even replace anaesthesia in dentistry and surgery.
During World War I hypnosis came to be used frequently to treat ‘shell shock’ in soldiers, a condition that has since become a recognized psychological disorder referred to as Post Traumatic Stress. Soldiers, traumatized from negative memories of death and destruction, were reacting with extreme fear, amnesia, a sense of unreality, and dissociation. Though dissociation is often associated with sensational forms of pathology such as multiple personality disorder, it is actually a very normal part of everyday life, and a useful one. A common experience of dissociation is when a person drives home from work at the end of a long day, but upon arrive home, has no memory of the drive. Another example would be intense concentration on a project blocks out noise and other stimuli easily perceived by others. Dissociation becomes pathological when it is so extreme and hard to control that it inhibits a person’s normal functioning.
By hypnotizing soldiers suffering from dissociative symptoms, skilled hypnotists could replace the soldiers’ intense feelings of fear with relaxation and trust, making it possible for them to return to active duty instead of sending them home with a medical or psychiatric discharge. This is a positive example of a skilled hypnotist replacing or modifying a real memory to make it more bearable. Another application of hypnosis as a tool in mediating dissociation is found in law enforcement. Under hypnosis, victims or witnesses of crimes can often be helped to identify license plate numbers or other valuable information concerning a crime for which they have total dissociative amnesia, or partial memory fractured by strong emotion. Finally, hypnosis can also be used to induce amnesia in cases where traumatic memories of real events such as horrific storms, accidents, and or crimes intrude on the victim’s daily life and make keep the victim in a constant state of agitation and anxiety.
One of the most interesting uses of hypnosis as a tool for manipulating dissociation is past-life regression therapy. Essentially a hypnosis session in which the subject is encourage to ‘remember’ what happened before that person’s birth, past-life regression therapy has been recently shown to have to some success in treating phobic reactions in persons for whom other methods have failed. What is interesting about this is that it does not seem to matter if these ‘memories’ are real or not in terms of the therapeutic effect of relieving the phobia. By shining a light onto areas of the human psyche that are poorly understood by the medical and psychological professions, hypnosis has pointed out a number of fruitful areas for scientific research and experimentation, and has radically changed our current understanding of both memory and imagination.
A study undertaken at the University at Freiburg, Germany in 2006 showed that when highly hypnotizable subjects were shown pairs of words both while conscious and under hypnosis, different parts of the brain lit up on a PET scan of these subjects. The more visually strong the words were, the easier they were for the highly-hypnotizable subjects to memorize both consciously and while under hypnosis. Words learned under hypnosis showed more activation in the areas of the brain associated with imagination and vision than did the words learned under normal conditions.
An earlier study done in 1999 at the University of Turku, Finland, also employed brain scan techniques to analyze each person’s reaction to sounds. Results showed that subjects under hypnosis perceived sounds in different areas of the brain than subjects who were not hypnotized. The hypnotized subjects showed the greatest stimulation in the prefrontal areas of the brain, areas which are associated with visual cues and preconscious speech. The researchers concluded that hypnosis seems to enhance the performance of pre-speech areas of the brain while at the same time inhibited the parts of the brain associated with reason and conscious thought.
The idea that hypnosis actually puts the hypnotic subject into an altered state of consciousness or ASC, is highly controversial in the medical and psychological community. Yet significant research points to the possibility that this may indeed be the case. A 2008 study published in the journal of neuroscience Neuron showed that when subjects were told under hypnosis to ‘forget’ a movie and then later told to ‘remember’ the same movie, the neural activity involved in this forgetting and remembering could be traced to a precise region of the brain. Not only does such research validate the effectiveness of hypnosis as a tool in the area of memory and imagination, it also points toward a valuable area for further research into the causes and cures of amnesia.
The controversy surrounding the neurological research on hypnosis stems from the struggle of the scientific community to form a new and accurate understanding of the relationships between perception, memory, imagination, and physiology. This controversy regarding the neurology of memory and perception, and its relationship to the practice of hypnosis, makes clinical research on hypnosis some of the most fascinating reading around. The fascination with the neurology of hypnosis dates all the way back to the medical studies of Jean Martin Charcot in the mid-1800s, and continues to this day as active as ever, promising new insights and renewed interest in the discipline.
Self-Hypnosis and Visualization
Several popular motivational books assert that visualizing success is a more direct route to it than rational planning. Meditation and affirmations have also become a popular part of the repertoire of motivational coaches and speakers. What is rarely mentioned is that all these tools are components of self-hypnosis, which as been around since the 1920s, when Emile Coue first encouraged his to repeat to themselves often, “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.”
Many people scoff at the New Age, pumped-up language and incredible claims and testimonies of the visualize-your-way-to-wealth crowd. In fact, visualization can be a very effective way to set and reach goals. By acting on the same pre-language, pre-conscious parts of the brain that are also activated during hypnosis, visualization creates a kind of self-induced post-hypnotic suggestion that guides the user toward a specific goal. The method is very similar to the method a hypnotist uses to guide a client toward a desired behaviour change.
To use visualization as a motivational tool, readers are instructed to use progressive relaxation techniques and meditation to become as calm as possible and as deeply relaxed as possible without falling asleep. Once in the relaxed state, the reader is instructed to visualize the desired goal in as much specific detail as possible. Sensory imagination is encouraged. How will the attainment of the goal feel? Smell? Taste? Specificity matters. A vision of a white clapboard house near the Pacific Ocean with a front porch swing and blue shutters is preferable to ‘a better house’. Often, readers of these books are encouraged to write the visualized goal in detail, and/or post pictures of their goal around their home and work area. Results can be impressive, but why?
Self-hypnosis appears to work by planting a suggestion deep in the preconscious, precognitive mind that actually directs individuals toward their goals without their conscious mental participation. Often, people think of themselves as mind and body only, not realizing that the mind works on many levels besides rational thought. A baby does not think rationally, and yet babies do perceive and learn, and even communicate, long before language fills up their growing brains. By tapping in to the nonverbal parts of the brain that adults continue to use without thinking much about it, self-hypnosis and the techniques of mediation, relaxation, visualization, and affirmation can effect dramatic desired changes in the lives of persons using these techniques.
Conscious VS Unconscious Mental States
The concept of consciousness, though familiar to Freud, Jung, and other famous psychoanalysts of the early twentieth century, has fallen into disfavour in the modern age. Consciousness as a concept is hard to measure, hard to define, and is a very difficult object for which to devise scientific experimentation. Though popular use of the terms conscious and unconscious has become mundane, as scientific terms these words have limited use. When people talk about being conscious versus being unconscious, what they are generally referring to is the state of being awake and self-aware versus the state of being completely unaware of anything including ones self.
When Freud talked about the unconscious, he was talking theoretically about a dynamic and significant part of the human psyche that was unavailable to the waking mind, yet constantly acting on it. Freud was speaking abstractly about mind, not the human brain. Ironically, years of neuropsychological research has validated some of the general components of his theories, if not in total, then at least in some of the particulars. For instance, modern science has discovered through experimentation that the parts of the brain activated during hypnosis are the same parts of the brain activated during remembering and forgetting, and also the same parts activated during visual, pre-verbal processing. So, there is in fact a large part of the human brain that is not part of language or rational thought, yet heavily influences both.
People often worry about becoming ‘unconscious’ during a session of hypnosis, but the term is misleading. A more useful way to think about it is that during hypnosis, external stimuli are blocked through deep relaxation so as to make the hypnotic suggestion the only focus. When the subject comes out of the hypnotic state, the subject’s attention is scattered as usual. It is not so much that the subject goes from conscious to unconscious back to conscious again. It is more that the person goes from a state of diffuse attention to incredibly focused attention, then back to normal attention again.
Hypnosis as an entertainment is a tradition that reaches back all the way to the 1600s when farmers would hypnotize chickens by balancing twigs on their noses or holding them down in front of a line in the dirt. Mystics in India have been “charming” snakes with techniques that are basically techniques of hypnosis, and travelling magicians of 17th and 18th century Europe astounded crowds by hypnotizing lions, rabbits, and even salamanders.
When people go to see a hypnotist entertain on stage, they already have a very clear idea of what to expect. They know that the hypnotist will ask for volunteers from the audience. They know that the subject will be expected to “go under” or fall into a trance state resembling very deep relaxation or sleep. They know that the hypnotist will make a suggestion that seems implausible or out of character with the personality of the volunteer. That being the case, the astonishing antics of “volunteers” are not really all that astonishing, given that the entire spectacle is well-understood in advance, and given that in any crowd of people there are always a certain percentage who enjoy acting foolishly for a laugh.
More astonishing is when a stage hypnotist can elicit a physical response from an avowed skeptic, which is actually not that difficult to do. Under deep relaxation, almost anyone will respond to the suggestion that their arms are so light as to be weightless. Deeply rational people are shocked to discover they do feel weightless under hypnotic suggestion, despite their skepticism. The reason for this amazement is less a function of the occult or magical nature of hypnosis, as it is a function of the misunderstanding most people have of deep relaxation, suggestion, and body language.
Hypnotists who work onstage cannot induce anyone to do anything against their will, or to do anything they consider immoral or unethical. Stage hypnotists are not so much magicians as they are very advanced readers of subtle human body language. Just as snake charmers read every change in a snake’s movement and expression to seemingly subdue and control the snake, stage hypnotists read very minute physical cues during the hypnotic performance to make successful, entertaining suggestions to the subject.
During the 1970s psychologist Richard Bandler and linguist John Grindler teamed up to create a method of psychotherapy that combined elements of hypnosis with elements of humanism and the study of language. The method was loosely based on the work of Fritz Perls (Gestalt Therapy), Virginia Sadir (Family Systems Therapy), and Milton H. Erickson (Clinical Hypnosis). Called Neuro-linguistic Programming or, more commonly, NLP, the method focused on the manipulation of certain patterns of human behaviour and understanding to create the maximum success and well-being in the subjects.
Today, NLP has become a such a big part of motivational therapies and seminars that intense debate goes on about what is NLP and what isn’t NLP. A few common themes can be identified though:
1) Problems, feelings, beliefs, desires, and outcomes are represented in physical cues in the form of eye movement, hearing, muscle movement, and even taste and smell.
2) When communicating with a client, therapists should respond not just to what the client says but also to the subtle non-verbal cues the client presents in his or her eye movements, body postures, choice of words and tone, and other signs.
3) By changing the language used with and by the client and modifying physical cues and behaviours, the therapist can actually change the feelings, beliefs, and practical outcomes for the client much faster than through traditional therapy alone.
4) “Anchoring” the client in a favourable emotional and mental state before the client and therapist set goals increases success. Various techniques involving manipulation of physical and verbal cues are used in NLP to anchor the client in a relaxed, positive state.
One example of NLP at work involves identifying whether the client experiences the world in a mainly auditory, visual, or physical way, and then referencing this in the actual words used to communicate with the client. So, for instance, in communicating understanding to a visual-oriented client, the therapist might say, “I see what you mean,” whereas with an auditory client the therapist might say something like, “I really hear what you are saying.”
The influence of the practice of hypnosis on NLP therapy and motivational coaching is obvious in the focus on subtle body language, the use of imagery and anchoring to induce relaxed states, and the idea that change can be more effectively created through preconscious means than conscious ones. Originally a counselling method, NLP has expanded far beyond the realm of psychotherapy and is now widely used in business to enhance performance and promote goal-setting, and in advertising to gain and direct the attention of buyers and persuade them to purchase products and services. Corporate management methods regularly make use of NLP techniques to promote on task behaviour and voluntary compliance in otherwise unpleasant conditions.
A person cannot be made to do anything he or she would not normally do while under hypnosis. People cannot be turned into murderers or zombies; people cannot be made the slaves of others in this way. The sensational aspects of hypnosis come mostly from stage shows and the popular imagination. However, it is also true hypnosis and its techniques are not without a dark side. For instance, to this day some people believe that the greatest danger to the human race is the ongoing practice of human sacrifice as a part of rampant ritual satanic abuse, even though not one single bone or wisp or hair or physical evidence of this crime has ever been found by the FBI. This is the result of the misuse of hypnosis to recover “memories” of nightmarish events that never really happened.
NLP, or Neuro-linguistic Programming, also comes with a certain creepiness factor. Cultish practitioners of the technique of NLP have come and gone, and not all of them are fondly remembered. It’s hard to imagine the appeal, for instance, of a seminar in which participants are not allowed to leave the room for urination, as they were in a once popular but short-lived program devised by a former NLP practitioner. Subliminal advertising, which consists of quick flashes of images or phrases (such as “buy popcorn”) embedded in ordinary movies to implant a sort of mini-hypnotic suggestion, has been found to be effective in some instances, but is mostly prohibited.
A reputable hypnotist will not induce discomfort or pain in a client for any reason, and will clearly agree upfront with the client on the goals of the sessions and the desired outcomes. Hypnotists who have an agenda such as discovering alien abductions or satanic activity should be avoided, as should hypnotists who combine their methods with harsh religious ideologies. In an interesting example, Scott Adams, the creator of the popular comic strip “Dilbert” and a trained hypnotist himself, tells a story about a televangelist who regularly used group hypnosis techniques to make the phrase “send money” stand out from all his religious rhetoric. By making the religious content monotone and incomprehensible, the “send money” phrase functioned as a hypnotic suggestion, one which was frequently taken.
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