But that doesn't hold up either. Even without hypnosis or any other known anesthetic, people sometimes simply do not respond to pain.
Terms Of Endearment
Lacking objective criteria for defining the experience, some proponents of hypnosis invoke terms that are more poetic than scientific. For clinical psychologist Jeffrey K. Zeig, Ph.D., keeper of the Ericksonian flame as founder and director of the Milton Erickson Foundation in Phoenix, hypnosis is a lot like love: "Falling in love is an experience we all know that we have, but how do you define it objectively?" Being under the spell of hypnosis is more of a subjective state of mind than an objectively measurable altered state of consciousness, he contends.
So do many other clinicians. The upshot is there's no consistent and agreed-on set of procedures among practitioners. Any therapeutic incident can be considered hypnotherapy--as long as a therapist says it is. According to Nicholas Spanos, Ph.D., a leading Canadian hypnosis researcher and coeditor of the professional tome Hypnosis: The Cognitive Behavioral Perspective, therapists have designated as "hypnotherapy" such diverse procedures as psychoanalytic age regression, direct suggestion for symptom removal, systematic desensitization, and other behavioral therapies. The only thing really tying these together is the name "hypnosis," with its attendant aroma of altered states and unusual psychological mechanism--"mythology" in the words of Spanos.
Then there are those who insist that hypnosis is a psychotherapeutic method favored by the late Erickson himself: the strategy of immediately directing a patient toward solving a problem rather than stopping to analyze its causes. But this so-called strategic approach is also practiced by those who do not consider it hypnosis and is widely used by family therapists and crisis-intervention centers all over the country.
In the laboratory the guiding concept behind much research is the notion that hypnosis is not only a special state of consciousness but one that some people are better than others at entering.
Roughly 15 percent of the population is held to be highly hypnotizable. About 25 percent are thought to be not hypnotizable at all. Researchers have expended a great deal of effort on attempts to identify highly hypnotizable people--they'd be proof positive of the existence of a special hypnotic state. Enter the hypnotic susceptibility scale. One of the most widely used scales was cocreated in 1959 by Stanford's Hilgard.
In the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scales, subjects who undergo hypnotic induction are given 12 suggestions--imagine a mosquito buzzing around, imagine a weight in one hand--while the hypnotist watches for evidence of responsiveness such as shifting position to avoid the insect. On a scale of zero (not hypnotizable) to 12 (highly so), subjects are scored by the degree to which they appear to heed the 12 suggestions.
Recently 50 Stanford alumni were retested and received almost the identical susceptibility scores they got 25 years ago. That, to Hilgard, is evidence that hypnotizability is a stable--that is, innate--psychological trait. "That gives you a feeling you're measuring something," he says, and that those who rate high must be entering a special state of mind in order to perform.
But measuring external responses doesn't get at internal states, points out Charles Tart, Ph.D., the famed altered-states researcher at the University of California at Davis and the author of States of Consciousness. Some people just go along with the experiment and some really feel something unusual. "Those different types of involvement may or may not involve an altered state," says Tart. A Talent for Compliance
Pursuing hypnosis as a single state of mind may make no more sense than viewing ordinary waking consciousness as a unified state. "A whole range of things commonly go under the name of hypnosis," says Tart. "People are lumping together a lot of different states, inner experience, and external phenomena. It's only in our ignorance that we treat everyone who undergoes hypnotic induction as if they're all having the same experience."
Hypnotic-susceptibility scores may reflect little more than a person's expectations and attitudes toward hypnosis and his or her willingness to comply with the test situation. Those who rate as high hypnotizables may not be faking outright, but they may be more inclinced to suspend their disbelief and do what is asked of them-- with or without entering a special state of consciousness.
Common laboratory attempts to validate distinctions between high and low hypnotizables may be similarly flawed, as they, too, rely on self-reports. In one such test, patients plunge a hand into icy water following hypnotic induction. Presumably only those very susceptible to hypnosis will report no pain. But critics see it differently.
If high hypnotizables are just those most willing to comply with the experimenter's wishes, then they are most likely to report having achieved the desired effect. "What they're really doing is selecting people who will be most responsive to manipulation," says Kentucky's Baker.
When the patients know whether they are hypnosis or nonhypnosis test subjects, the situation is even less like a scientific experiment than an exercise in placebo psychology. What's more, most clinical reports claiming success with hypnosis to cure medical and psychological ills are anecdotal--they lack control groups for comparing the effectiveness of treatments.
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