Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis (47 page)

Where the cognitive-behavioural emphasis on imagination is involved, it should be said that this has turned out to be a double-edged sword, working against them just as effectively as it does for them. They argue that the subjects' imaginative involvement in the task is what creates or helps to create the phenomena. State theorists have turned this on its head. They agree that imagination is an important factor – but a factor that enables a person to reach a trance state, in which the phenomena will be produced.

I don't want to get into all the experimental evidence that supports the non-state theorists, or tends to disprove their position, because it is obvious to the unbiased reader that experiments can be made to prove or disprove all sorts of things, depending on what you want to read into them. In reading accounts of the often ingenious experiments psychologists have set up in order to test one or another alleged phenomenon of hypnotism, it is clear that the results are frequently ambiguous, and that the researcher's own philosophical preconceptions invariably guide how the results are interpreted. For instance, in a classic experiment a psychologist called Seymour Fisher showed that subjects responded to post-hypnotic cues only when they thought the experiment was still ongoing; if they thought the experiment had ended, they stopped scratching their ears in response to the trigger-word ‘psychology' (which was the post-hypnotic suggestion that had been implanted in them). This experiment was meat and drink to the non-state theorists, since it cast doubt on the validity of hypnotic phenomena. But actually it is arguable that, the way the experiment was set up, Fisher had implicitly asked his subjects to respond to the cue only as long as the experiment was in progress, in which case it is not surprising that he got the results he did. This is a subtle point, but it goes to show that experimental results are not as hard and fast as they seem to be.

In task-motivational experiments the subjects are under strong pressure to report in a way that pleases the experimenter, regardless
of what they actually felt, whereas subjects in hypnotic experiments are rarely under such pressure. When an honest report is insisted upon, the results are far less striking, far less supportive of the task-motivational theory, whereas the same demand on hypnotized subjects makes little or no difference to their reports. Task-motivational instructions can alter reports but not experiences. So, to return for the moment to the vital issue of resistance to pain, and those who report in Barber's experiments that they feel no pain: ‘Common sense suggests that the subjects really did experience the pain but dared not admit it. The negative report … might well be due to Barber's telling them that they would not feel pain if they really tried, and that if they did they were making his experiment a failure, wasting time and making their professor look silly! Most of us will tell a convenient lie if we are under sufficient moral pressure.'

It also seems possible to me that for a light trance the social-psychological model might be correct – that so-called hypnosis is ‘strategic social behavior' – while for a deep trance, the state theorists might be correct. This would explain why the cognitive behaviourists get the results they do, and others get results which tend in the opposite direction. For instance, Barber and his colleagues have frequently found in their experiments that non-hypnotized subjects display the same phenomena as supposedly hypnotized subjects; others, however, have found that hypnotized subjects can produce, for instance, a far greater variation of skin temperature than non-hypnotized subjects. Perhaps, as the Victorians found, the deeper the level of trance, the more striking the phenomena that are produced. Erickson once defined a deep trance as ‘that level of hypnosis that permits the subject to function adequately and directly at an unconscious level of awareness without interference by the conscious mind'. The social-psychological model can only deal with a quite different level of the mind, and denies any functioning on the part of a hypnotized subject at an unconscious level.

Another prominent sceptical and behaviourist position on hypnosis is that of Theodore Sarbin and William Coe. They claim that hypnosis is just role-playing (or compliance, as British psychologist Graham Wagstaff puts it). The subject wants to please the operator, and plays out the role expected of him; he may even feel under some kind of pressure to comply. Now, there is an element of truth
in this. Anyone who has been hypnotized knows that there is a point (in a light trance, at any rate) where he chooses to go along with the hypnotist's suggestions, and so may be said to be playing a role; this has been a recognized aspect of hypnosis since the nineteenth century. But that is not a reason to deny that there is such a special state as the hypnotic trance: you could say that part of the definition of the hypnotic trance is precisely that it involves this mental ambiguity – the parallel-awareness feeling of ‘Shall I or shan't I go along with this?' In any case, I go back to Esdaile's surgical operations. Speaking as a man, there is no way that I'm going to play a role while someone is probing my testicles with a scalpel. I'm going to have to be in a deep enough trance to be analgesic in the relevant area.

Nicholas Spanos has a slightly more sophisticated take on analgesia. He argues that the phenomena attributed to hypnosis are what he calls ‘social behavior'. Subjects are so motivated to respond in keeping with their expected role that they develop ‘cognitive strategies' to do things such as overcoming pain. In this view, to say that they are playing a role is not to say that they are faking it: they make use of ‘cognitive strategies' such as imagery, self-distraction and verbalizations that help to convince them that the pain is not so bad, and these strategies do genuinely raise pain thresholds. So-called ‘hypnotizability', according to Spanos, is a learnable skill, as subjects learn to deploy their cognitive strategies more successfully. Graham Wagstaff agrees with this view, and adds that only if the cognitive strategies fail to work will a subject resort to mere behavioural compliance – that is, faking it. And Wagstaff should know, since in 1970, while a university student, he was ‘hypnotized' on stage by the magician Kreskin, and put through some of the usual tricks of a stage hypnotist.

The pain-relieving effect of hypnosis has, however, been proved time and again to be real. In one experiment, for instance, outside assessors could not distinguish simulators from genuinely hypnotized subjects by their responses, or lack of responses, to electric shocks. After the experiment, however, the simulators said that they felt the shocks and had to suppress their response, while the hypnotized subjects said that they felt nothing. Contrary experiments which are supposed to show that task-motivated or compliant subjects gain as
much relief from pain have often been poorly designed. The idea is not to hypnotize subjects, but just to persuade them by suggestion and relaxation not to feel so much pain. The problem with these experiments is that any of the subjects who are susceptible to hypnosis will drift into a hypnotic state as a result of relaxing and listening to the suggestions, and so at least some of the subjects are gaining relief from pain through hypnosis, after all. It is as hard to prove that someone is
not
hypnotized as it is to prove that she is.

While it has generally been my role in this book to report rather than to comment, I feel impelled to offset the vociferousness of these non-state theorists, who basically rule the roost at the moment and are in danger of carrying the day by the sheer weight of their publications. Although there are certain minor differences between their views, they are similar enough for Spanos and Barber to have spoken, prematurely, of a ‘convergence' in academics' opinions about hypnosis, as if the state theory had been laid to rest once and for all. So let me say that there are five kinds of phenomena which, as far as I can see, still present obstacles to their view. These are: first, state-dependent memory; second, resistance to pain; third, the ability not to blister and other remarkable effects showing control of organic processes; fourth, the phenomenon of post-hypnotic suggestion; fifth, the phenomenon of trance logic.

State-dependent Memory:
We have met this facet of memory before. In an interesting experiment much earlier this century, the Swiss psychologist Edouard Claparède (1873–1940) read his subjects ten bizarre words when they were deeply hypnotized, and ten equally unfamiliar words while they were awake. These twenty words were then jumbled together with a number of other words. The subjects, after being dehypnotized, were then asked which words they recognized. They always recognized only the ten they had heard while awake, and never the ten they had heard while hypnotized. Unhypnotized people can only
pretend
not to recognize the words. Post-hypnotic amnesia is a genuine, state-dependent phenomenon, which makes it look as though the hypnotic state is genuine too.

Resistance to Pain:
It is not just that hypnotized subjects can resist pain. Experiments have shown that unhypnotized subjects can also
resist pain, either under conditions of distraction, or because they are suitably motivated and so on. There are of course subjective elements to the sensation of pain: everyone knows that some people have a higher pain threshold than others, and surveys show that soldiers resist the pain of wounds better because for them a wound is a good thing (it allows them to go home with honour), whereas for a civilian a wound is usually a bad thing, and so he feels it more acutely. Part of the problem here is that Barber and his colleagues rely heavily on experimental evidence and tend to ignore the downand-dirty evidence of hypnotists who have performed surgical operations. But some of the surgical operations performed under hypnotism are extremely painful, and extremely protracted. Even if people had higher pain thresholds in Esdaile's day, it is still unthinkable that an eight-hour operation could be performed under hypnosis, that patients would lie still for amputations, the removal of breast cancers, scrotal growths and so on. Not all of them did, but a good 50 per cent did. Esdaile had the definitive response to the doubters, and it still rings absolutely true:

I have
every month
more operations of this kind than take place in the native hospital in Calcutta a year, and more than I had for the six years previous. There must be some reason for this, and I can only see two ways of accounting for it: my patients, on returning home, either say to their friends similarly afflicted: ‘Wah! brother, what a soft man the doctor Sahib is! He cut me to pieces for twenty minutes, and I made him believe that I did not feel it. Isn't it a capital joke? Do go and play him the same trick.' … Or they say to their brother sufferers, – ‘Look at me; I have got rid of my burthen (of 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, or 80 lbs., as it may be), am restored to the use of my body, and can again work for my bread: this, I assure you, the doctor Sahib did when I was asleep, and I knew nothing about it; – you will be equally lucky, I dare say; and I advise you to go try; you need not be cut if you feel it.' Which of these hypotheses best explains the facts my readers will decide for themselves.

Or consider this case. Once a worker in an aluminium plant slipped and immersed his leg up to the knee in molten aluminium, with a temperature of 950? C. Under the hypnotic suggestion that
his leg would not be inflamed and would be cool and comfortable, the man needed nothing more than a relatively mild painkiller, and he was discharged from hospital after only nineteen days, with new skin already growing well over the injury. If this is role-playing, or imaginative involvement, or response to social cues of any kind, it is quite remarkable. Whereas the non-state theorists frequently claim that they are the ones wielding Occam's razor, in this kind of case it seems more economical to think that a special state is involved, one which activates the naturally remarkable powers of the mind.

Remarkable Effects:
Going back to some of the supernormal capacities detailed in an earlier chapter, what is remarkable is not just the ability to defy pain, but the ability of the body of a hypnotized person not to bleed when pierced, or not to blister when scalded and so on. Or again, there was an experiment in which the hypnotized subjects were told they would not be able to hear, out of the whole range of sounds, a tone with a particular frequency (575 cycles per second). When this sound was played loudly in their ears, they showed no measurable physiological reactions. I challenge any unhypnotized person to do any of these things, or a whole host of other strange feats. I certainly don't know of any experiments that have shown that any of these effects are possible under non-hypnotic conditions.

Post-hypnotic Suggestion:
If a subject will display behavioural changes after the hypnotic session, when the hypnotist is no longer present and the subject has no knowledge that his or her behaviour is being monitored, how can hypnosis be compliance, role-playing, or the desire to please?

Trance Logic:
In repeated experiments using unhypnotized control subjects (‘simulators') as well as fully hypnotized subjects (‘reals'), a distinctly dreamlike form of mentation was displayed by the reals, but not by the others, even if they were instructed to do their best to simulate a trance state. For instance, everyone is told to hallucinate a figure sitting on a given chair in the room. They do so, and they all describe the figure with equal vividness. But then they are asked to describe the back of the chair; the simulators say that they
cannot see the back of the chair, since there is someone sitting in it, but a fair proportion of the reals have no difficulty in seeing the back of the chair. Non-state theorists try to explain this difference by saying that the reals, but not the simulators, were imaginatively involved in the task they had been set, but this smacks to me of a weak response – a plea born of desperation, like others among their arguments. For instance, in one experiment state theorists proved that some subjects remained amnesic after hypnosis despite explicit instructions to remember everything; non-state theorists tried to blunt the force of this experiment by arguing that it was just that the subjects did not want to lose face, since they believed that good hypnotic subjects would be amnesic.