The Illusion of Conscious Will (48 page)

To summarize, the induction of hypnosis requires two things: the right situation and the right person. The situation is the actual induction process, and as we have seen, this can vary quite widely from the standard induction we reviewed in detail. The induction can occur, moreover, quite without anyone’s awareness that a process of hypnosis is underway. The response of the faith healer’s subjects to “the push” is undoubtedly of the hypnotic variety, but both the healer and the faithful would likely balk at any description of their interaction as hypnotic induction. The induction of hypnosis also requires a special sort of person. Although most people can experience some of the effects of hypnosis, only a few will show evidence of strong influence along with extreme reductions in the sense of voluntariness across a range of hypnotic tests.

The findings regarding hypnotic susceptibility suggest a cautionary note for our study of the will. In essence, we can’t be sure that what we learn about the nature of conscious will through the study of hypnosis is true of all people. Any anomalies in the experience of will that we observe happening during hypnosis are, in fact, limited to that portion of the population that is hypnotically susceptible. In the words of the early hypnosis researcher Albert Moll, “Though hypnosis is not a pathological state it is an exceptional one, from which we must not draw general conclusions. Few who have made such experiments often can fail to feel occasional subjective doubts of freedom of will, but from these doubts to scientific proof is an immense step. Further, it should not be forgotten that we do not by any means find these deep hypnoses and subjective delusions of the judgment in all subjects” (1889, 155).

Hypnotic Phenomena

What does hypnosis do? The main questions about the influence of hypnosis seem to come down to three: What does it feel like? Can people be hypnotized to do things they would otherwise not do? and Can people be hypnotized to do things that they would otherwise not be
able
to do? The first question is really about what consciousness is like in hypnosis and whether the experience of conscious will is preserved. The second is about whether the will of the hypnotist is truly imposed on the subject. And the third is a question about special talents—whether there are human abilities that are available to us only through hypnosis.

The Experience

For some reason, hypnosis researchers have devoted a tremendous amount of effort to discerning whether people who are hypnotized are in a “trance.” The same handwringing we found around this word in the case of spirit possession shows up here (Chaves 1997). One camp wants to use this word (e.g., Hilgard 1986) and another finds it objectionable (e.g., Spanos 1986). The main objection is that “trance” or “altered state of consciousness” might be interpreted as a causal explanation rather than as a description of a feeling. The hypnotized person often describes the experience as one in which consciousness is not quite the same as usual—an altered state, maybe with some grogginess or a feeling of blankness. If we stop at this point and appreciate that this might be called a trance, then the term is usefully descriptive. Indeed, being hypnotized can seem like a dream or sleep state (Edmonston 1981); there was an early period of hypnosis research in which the state was even called
somnambulism,
the term now applied to sleepwalking.
⁴
In hypnosis, at any rate, people do report that something is different—they say they are hypnotized (e.g., Spanos and Katsanis 1989).

The experience of being hypnotized is usually accompanied by a sense of involuntariness regarding the suggested behavior, a feeling that one’s action is happening rather than that one is doing it. In a study by Bowers, Laurence, and Hart (1988), people were asked to perform a series of twelve hypnotic tests. In one test, for instance, people were asked to hold their arms straight out ahead, palms a few inches apart, and it was suggested to them that their hands were coming together. In this sample of respondents doing the twelve tests, 63 percent of the suggested behaviors were experienced (e.g., people said they found their hands coming together). Considering now only those people who experienced actually following the suggestion, some 32 percent of these experienced complete involuntariness (“I found my hands moving together without my helping them”), 26 percent experienced the development of involuntariness (“I found I directed the movement of my hands and then later they continued to move together with no effort on my part”), 22 percent experikenced partial involuntariness (“The feelings of purposefully moving my hands were completely mixed with feelings that they were moving on their own”), and only 12 percent experienced complete voluntariness (“I purposefully directed the movement of my hands most of the time”).

4.
The historical confusion between hypnosis and sleepwalking is why one often sees cartoon depictions of hypnotized people walking with their arms out-stretched. People who are sleepwalking are usually shown with eyes closed and arms outstretched, although this isn’t typically what happens in fact. (Shakespeare said of the sleepwalking Lady Macbeth: “You see, her eyes are open, but their sense is shut!”)

The instructions in most hypnotic inductions stress involuntariness. Perhaps hypnosis creates the experience of involuntariness merely by saying that this is the way things will be. Just as someone saying again and again how sick you must be can make you sick, or someone saying how guilty you must feel can make you feel guilty, perhaps someone saying you have no conscious will makes you lose the feeling of doing. When hypnotic test instructions are put into words that imply involuntariness (“Your hands are coming together”), in fact, people report stronger feelings of involuntariness than when the instructions are put into words that emphasize volition (“Please bring your hands together”; Gorassini and Perlini 1988; Spanos and Gorassini 1984). This suggests that the experience of involuntariness is the result of an interpretive exercise, a self-observation in which one’s behavior performed in this context comes to be understood as involuntary because of the way it is described (Sarbin and Coe 1972; Spanos 1986). It makes sense in this light that people given “permissive”hypnoticsuggestions (“Letyourhandbecome heavy”) report feeling more voluntary than those given “authoritative” suggestions (“Your hand will become heavy”). When the tone and language suggest that you’re being pushed around, you feel pushed around (Lynn et al. 1988). Finally, experiencing one’s behavior as unwilled should not happen if one doesn’t actually perform the suggested action, and indeed involuntariness is experienced to the degree that the suggested action is actually carried out (Barber 1969; Bowers 1981; Gorassini 1999).

Hypnotic Influence

It is easy to code the interaction between hypnotist and subject as a battle of wills. The hypnotist influences the subject to do something he or she wouldn’t normally do, and the subject’s feeling of will dissipates in direct relation to the loss of willful control. As it turns out, the full story on the nature of hypnotic influence is more complex than this (have you ever heard of the full story being simpler?). The actual control of the subject’s behavior must be distinguished from the perceived control. The idea we’ve been pursuing throughout this book is that the experience of conscious will is not a direct indicator of a causal relation between thought and behavior. In the case of hypnosis, this means that the subject’s perception of involuntariness is not a direct indicator of the role of the subject’s thought in causing the subject’s behavior. Although the subject may perceive a draining away of conscious will during hypnosis, and the hypnotist may in turn experience some sort of surge in perceived control over the subject (we don’t actually know this because no one has studied hypnotists), these perceptions and experiences are not the final word on hypnotic influence. We need to establish what actual transfer of control is occurring, not only how it seems.

Let’s look into such hypnotic influence with some examples. Take, for instance, voodoo death. In 1942 the psychophysiologist Walter B. Cannon published a paper on this topic that summarized the anthropological and medical evidence available at the time. He described multiple cases of this phenomenon so extraordinary and so foreign that it seems incredible. One case, taken from Basedow (1925), illustrates the effect of the belief among Australian Aboriginal peoples that having someone point a bone at you is fatal:

The man who discovers he is being boned by an enemy is, indeed, a pitiable sight. He stands aghast, with his eyes staring at the treacherous pointer, and with his hands lifted as though to ward off the lethal medium, which he imagines is pouring into his body. . . . He attempts to shriek but usually the sound chokes in his throat . . . his body begins to tremble and the muscles twist involuntarily. He sways backwards and falls to the ground, and . . . appears to be in a swoon. After a short time he becomes very composed and crawls to his wurley. From this time onwards he sickens and frets, refusing to eat and keeping aloof from the daily affairs of the tribe. Unless help is forthcoming in the shape of a counter-charm administered by the . . . medicine man, his death is only a matter of a comparatively short time. (178-179)

Of course, events of this kind cannot be produced in the laboratory, and so it is difficult to offer a confident judgment of whether they even exist—let alone what caused them. However, Cannon (1942) observed a variety of similar effects in laboratory animals and in people subjected in life to intense physical traumas, leading him to propose that death might be caused psychologically through “lasting and intense action of the sympathetic-adrenal system” (187). The same reaction, known medically as
shock,
might be responsible for fatal responses to psychological threats. Although Cannon did not implicate hypnosis directly in his analysis, he pointed to the crucial importance of the individual’s belief in the threat for the occurrence of the effect: “This belief is so firmly held by all members of the tribe that the individual not only has the conviction himself but is obsessed by the knowledge that all his fellows likewise hold it. . . . Amid this mysterious murk of grim and ominous fatality, . . . an immediate threat of death fills the terrified victim with powerless misery” (186).

So at the extreme something like hypnosis seems to be capable of the ultimate social influence—death. But this example is pretty much out on the fringe, requiring the operation of a full-blown belief system shored up by thoroughly convincing cultural support. Are there any demonstrations of one lone hypnotist’s having anything like this kind of influence? As it happens, there is at least one reported case of apparent death by hypnosis (Schrenk-Notzing 1902). In 1894 the stage hypnotist Franz Neukomm was working with a highly susceptible subject, one Ella Salamon, who had experience being hypnotized many times in his show. In their routine, Neukomm would invite an ailing volunteer from the audience up on stage, hypnotize Ella, and give her a suggestion to place herself in the mind of the patient and provide information about his or her health. One night he changed his hypnotic instructions slightly and told Ella, “Your soul will leave your body in order to enter that of the patient.” Ella was unusually resistant to the suggestion and said she would not do this. Neukomm firmly repeated the “leave your body” command, deepened the trance, and repeated the command again. Ella died, apparently of heart failure. Although there is no way scientifically to establish whether hypnosiscausedherdeath—itmaywellhavebeencoincidence— Neukomm was charged with manslaughter and found guilty.

Figure 8.4

The lovely Trilby is hypnotized by Svengali into being able to sing. Illustration by du Maurier for a serialized version of
Trilby.

The power of hypnosis was a particularly active cultural theme in the late nineteenth century, and this story fits right in. This was the age in which du Maurier (1894) published his novel
Trilby,
for example, recounting the travails of a young female subject at the hands of the evil hypnotist Svengali (
fig. 8.4
). She was hypnotized against her will and made his slave, and the possibility of such perils created a widespread public distrust of hypnosis. The question of whether people can be induced to perform immoral or criminal acts by hypnosis gained the popular eye and since then has recurred perennially whenever anyone speaks of hypnosis. What’s the answer? Is it really so powerful?

There have been several studies in which people were asked in hypnosis to perform dangerous or criminal actions. In some cases, hypnotized subjects have been asked to pick up a dangerous snake or to throw acid at the experimenter (Rowland 1939; Young 1948), with safeguards in place to make sure that nobody would get hurt (unbeknownst to the subject, a plate of glass was between the subject and the snake and experimenter). The great majority of subjects in these studies did the awful acts—they reached out to the snake, or they threw the acid. Such findings suggest that hypnosis is truly powerful. They also suggest that the initial disclaimer of some hypnotists that hypnosis is not dangerous, and you can’t be forced to do something you don’t want to do, is not truthful advertising. However, there is a catch. A remarkable experiment performed by Orne and Evans (1965) followed up the snake and acid studies and discovered an important caveat.