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Hypnotism

  
 
JOY NO WRY
13:32 / 10.03.05
I've been talking to a friend who consistantly fails to get up in time for his lectures because he simply doesn't have the motivation, and he brought up the subject of hyponitism. Basically, he was asking me if I thought it was a good idea to get somebody else to effectivly force a part of his personality to change in order to get him to his lectures.

I couldn't really answer because I have a number of issues with the whole question. I see quite a lot of adverts in magazines etc. for some pretty dodgy looking agencies offering this service, but I'm not really sure how accepted the whole concept is in the scientific community. I certainly believe in hypnotism to some degree, self-hypnotism at least, because it seems to me that that is exactly what psychosomatic illnesses or other suggestions are; but to what extent can this kind of suggestion be created by another person? Even if it can be done, should it be done? What do you think? Has anybody else tried this kind of thing?
 
 
Smoothly
14:06 / 10.03.05
I think this might make a better Lab thread, but I'm as keen as you are, Kapok, to hear what people have to say about this. Personally, I'm very sceptical about it, largely because I’d have thought that if it were possible to influence behaviour in this way, we'd all be doing it.
I think there's probably something to hypnotism as a kind of guided meditation - but when I see drunken attention seekers on stage, acting out some suggestion that they think they're from Mars or can see the audience naked, I just think 'Bollocks'. Give a certain kind of person (the hypnotist says 'open minded', I'd say exhibitionist) permission to play-up, and an excuse to justify it, I reckon you can get people to pretend all sorts of things. But if you can get someone to really want to go to lectures, I'd be amazed.
If anyone knows different, let me know where I sign up. I want to be really into working hard, living healthily and watching football on big floppy screens in pubs.
 
 
Joetheneophyte
20:30 / 14.03.05
I am a bit of a skeptic myself but only because having attended numerous Hypnotherapists, nothing much has changed ....I am a hopeful skeptic

another poster on here whose job it is to know about all matters of the mind, told me once that Hypnotism is good for specific problems, where a well defined outcome is wished for.....such as habit cessation.
The hypnosis practitioners themselves will tell you that they can treat just about anything and some of the more outlandish claims are that hair regrowth, height adjustment and genetic factors can be addressed via this methodology

Personally, I still hold out hope and my personal feelings are

a: There are a handful of practitioners who are skilled enough to achieve fantastic results with a large percentage of their clients

b: There are certain people who are just ready to change and no matter what type of therapy they attended, change would occur

c: Sometimes a and b meet and the truly miraculous happens, well in excess of the hopes of either a or b


Now a 'Meta' question which you addressed in your post is, What actually is Hypnosis?

Is it a form of Mesmerism, where the practitioner directs vital forces and has control over you? This is similar to the idea that Authoritarian practitioners follow. They give you suggestions or commands and you are supposed to follow them upon waking

All well and good and often this works but the client can resist or in some circumstances, the problem or underlying cause might manifest in a different way. Richard Bandler tells of a client who stopped smoking but then became addicted to cod liver oil. The taste of cigarettes had been initially equated with Dod liver oil
(whether this is true or metaphorical or an outright lie is hard to tell when talking about Dr Bandler)

Ericksonian Hypnosis is more client centred and the therapist utilises what he or she is presented with and guides the client into a self induced trance. Ericksonian practitioners have a different view and think that all trance is self induced and the communication between client and therapist is used to guide the client into an 'altered state' where resolutions to problems can be obtained or sought. Again this pre-supposes that there is a specific medium called 'trance', different from day to day wakefulness

My take:

I don't care whether it is all hokum and a big con trick

If I had a problem and a hypnotherapist could help, then even if I am kidding myself, if the 'trance' and subsequent questioning and work achieves the desired results, then I don't care whether I am being fooled. Personally, I do think there is something to it as people able to get themselves into deep trance (James Esdaile helped people into these states as does Dave Elman) have had operations with anaesthesia

Now if you can kid yourself into not experiencing pain and healing faster during and after an operation, who am I to question it's efficacy?

No the problem with Hypnosis and latterly NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) is that too many charlatans make ridiculous claims, have but the barest training and are not ruled by any overall governing or monitoring body. I do believe there are very skilled therapists out there who could utilise trance and aid your friend in his/her motivational problems (well defined outcome as stated above) but finding such a practitioner in such an unregulated field is difficult

Now as for how effective hypnotherapy might be for say an underlying reason for the procrastination, if it is something 'deeper' then I cannot say and am not qualified to state. Maybe he or she should give it a go with a set number of sessions clearly defined but again, abreaction can occur and what once may have been intended as brief therapy might lead to your friend requiring more in depth or long term help

I hope not and I sincerely hope they find relief
 
 
sine
21:07 / 14.03.05
I would love Ganesh's take on this.

A few years back I became seriously interested in hypnosis after my mother, a long-time heavy smoker who had tried repeatedly to quit, dropped tobacco after a single session. I found to my surprise that here in Ontario, hypnotic smoking cessation is the only method covered by medicare.

Now I already had a more than passing familiarity with hypnotic techniques from my magickal practise, but I took the step of questioning a psychologist friend of mine who was doing hypnotherapy at the time (he has since retired). When I asked him about the standard line - "all hypnosis is autohypnosis, no subject would ever do something against their will, etc" - he surprised me by flatly saying this was bunk.

He contended that all of that standard boilerplate disclaimer was just the residue of a smokescreen hypnotists had been forced to throw up after some embarassing and horrific criminal trials had cast shadows over their ranks; in fact, he said the whole downplay of hypnosis had been a deliberate ploy to keep it from being banned or suppressed and the hypnotists lynched and run out of town. Basically they lied about its potentials to keep it in research circulation.

He went straight down the checklist: the subject needn't be willing; the subject can be made amnesiac; the subject can be made unable to distinguish hypnotic suggestions from their own ideas; the subject can be made to experience strong physical symptoms; and on.

I'm not certain how much I believe that, but I was impressed by it. He is, by-and-large, a pretty hardheaded and modest guy, and it isn't like him to concoct or inflate Manchurian Candidate cliams about his profession. Needless to say, it has made me think hard about my own experiences with hypnosis.
 
 
Joetheneophyte
22:05 / 14.03.05
I have heard similar claims, in fact as for the Manchurian candidate line, there is some anecdotal evidence that Milton Erickson was employed by the US war dept in WW2 to question German prisoners and presumbaly utilise his communication skills to gather info

Whether he actually used hypnosis or just watched their non verbal behaviour as a form of lie detection I do not know (Erickson was allegedly a master at seeing non verbal cues and patterns and hence was a human lie detector)

as for Ganesh, it was he who gave me the advice I mentioned in my last post about Hypnosis being useful for clearly defined goals, rather than pervasive mental or attitudinal states or beliefs (if I am misquoting Ganesh, I sincerely apologise)
I got the impression that he believed in it's efficacy but believed it to be limited in it's uses. Seth on here is interested in this field and I hope I am not being out of order by referring you to his/her posts on these matters

I am no good at posting links, somebody tried to show me on here once but I couldn't get the hang of it but if you do a search in TEMPLE for keywords NLP and Hypnosis, something of interest should come up for you. Seth definately knows hir stuff. I have read the books but Seth has done the training and knows much more than I as a result

Mesmerism is often equated with Hypnotism and I was reading a book recently called Devolution by Michael Cremo where he detailed how some early practitioners of mesmerism achieved truly remarkable results, bordering on extra sensory

I believe that mesmerism is more 'hands on' and that the practitioner gets the client/ recipient to the required state by passing their hands over the patients body about 1/2 an inch from the skin. Some reports state that these hand passes are continued for sometime and that eventually the repitition induces a profound altered state......deeper than traditional 'talking' hypnosis achieves
James Esdaile was a British forces doctor who utilised this methodology and his books look really interesting but unfortunately are very expensive. One day when I am more flush I will order the one or two books about his work that are still available

so in summary, Mesmerism is the same and yet different than Hypnotism dependant upon your basic beliefs in how they work. It can be considered a deep level of hypnotic trance or as moving 'vital forces' to induce a trance

sorry this is garbled but it is getting late here and I am tired

If the claims I have read about mesmerism are correct, then it is a shame that scientific study seems to have stalled. Cremo claims virtual extra sensory perception and none local perceptions are possible via this method
 
 
grant
20:00 / 15.03.05
I'm moving this to the Laboratory.

Hope it doesn't confuse anyone too much.
 
 
astrojax69
20:15 / 15.03.05
i'm getting confused... very confused... my eyes are getting heavy... i can't see this thread in head shop...

hypnotism, if i understand it, is about suggestion... you can't hypnotise someone to be or do something of which they would be physically incapable. you couldn't hypnotise me to speak swahili, for instance, if i'd never been exposed to the language (and i haven't).

so the power of suggestion is at work, and that is a very powerful thing, no?

i gather from pyschologist colleagues that a good practicioner is very useful in cases of adictive behaviours, though the first step MUST be the patient admit addiction. there must be some willing participation on the side of the patient.

the mind is a marvellous place.
 
 
Spaniel
11:24 / 16.03.05
To the best of my (somewhat limited) knowledge there are two primary scientific hypotheses pertaining to hypnotism.

The first suggests that hypnotism is just a kind of social control - a brand of peer pressure. The second that hypnotism actually changes the brain state of the subject and leaves them open to suggestion - there seems to be some evidence that for this.

According to the article that I read, the answer may be that both hypotheses can account for hypnotism. That essentially hypnotism isn't one thing, but two distinct processes that induce two distinct psychological and/or mental states.
 
 
akira
13:57 / 18.03.05
akira...doing his best Tyler Durden impression

Whether you know it or not you've been in a hypnotic state thousands of times. Anytime you've been caught daydreaming or being absent minded, you've been under a form of hypnosis.
Ninety percent of peaple can be deliberatly hypnotized to some degree and of that number, fully 10 percent are highly suggestable and thus sesceptible to being placed in deep levels of trance.
How does it work? We still dont know. We do know, however, that effective hypnotism as suggested above, depends on the power of suggestion.
The term absent-minded is appropriate since during hypnosis our usual controlling consious "higher" mind is temporarily absent or asleep, while our "lower" subconscoius "shadow mind" (responsible for emotion and motor control) is still awake.
Under hypnosis, our brains go to sleep while our lower brains, accustomed to being given commands by our higher brains, continue to take orders from the hypnotist. Thus, under hypnosis, this lower brain simply substitutes the outside commands of the hypnotist for the commands of its sleeping higher brain.

Three things make this hynosis possible:
1. The subject's focus is narrowed to the point to where only a single source of information is coming into the subject's brain - information controlled by the hypnotist. The hypnotist then literally defines reality for the victim's subconscious mind.
2. It is important the subject believe in the process of hypnosis and in the hypnotist.
3. For hypnotism to be successful the subject must be willing to suspend logic and temporarily accept distortions in cause and effect, and in his perception of time and space.

For example, a hypnotized subject can be given post-hypnotic suggestion to forget the number seven. When awakened from the trance and asked "what is three plus four?", the subject answers either "six or "eight". Asked how many fingers he has, the subject correctly respondes "10" and often seems unbothered by the fact he has an extra digit whan asked to count his fingers.
Any time such discrepancies in logic appear, hypnotized subjects either attemt to rationalize away or simply ignore them. This is known as trance logic and is often seen in cults where members go to great extreams to rationalize the bizarre and oftern contradicory actions of their leaders.

Shinobi called hypnosis yugen-shin, "mysterious mind", and saw it as a valuable tool for helping them accomplish thier missions. Self-hypnosis was taught to ninja students to improve their control over self, and hypnosis was taught them so they could overshadow thier foes.
 
 
Spaniel
14:25 / 18.03.05
No, that's the way *you* think hypnosis works. As I've stated above, some theorists - people who actually study the phenomenon - suggest that the reality is very different.
 
 
Spaniel
19:00 / 18.03.05
Akira, you and Haus should really get together and talk about ninjas.
 
 
Seth
08:28 / 19.03.05
I'm interested in the line of thought that says, "You can't use hypnosis to make someone do something against his or her will." It presupposes that "hypnosis," a specific "someone" and their "will" all exist and can be defined. For example, some practitioners see someone’s very sense of identity as a powerful trance state, rather than as something with a concrete existence. I don’t really agree, but there is an element of worth in that…

In my experience these things are much more strange and plastic, and there are many fine shades. One specific practitioner with one specific method of inducing one specific type of trance in one specific group of clients will seem to be a charlatan to the specific observer who has specific beliefs and preconceptions and who allows the specific instance they believe they’ve observed to reinforce those beliefs and preconceptions. Simplified a great deal, but you get the picture.

The general idea behind NLP “hypnosis” is that people seem to constantly change their state and go into different types of trance all the time. You can tailor the way in which you work with trances to the individual, and the only effective technique is judged by what works. If nothing works then that’s seen to be simply be a statement that one specific practitioner couldn’t find a means to be successful with one specific client, “success” being determined by whatever goals the two individuals dreamed up at the time, which may or may not be in keeping with the wider ecology of themselves and the situation.

Thanks for the big up, Joe. I know far less on the subject than you think I do, but it interests me a lot...
 
  
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