If we can regard punishment in childhood as a way of instilling an enhanced relationship to authority, hence training some of those neurological relationships that were once the bicameral mind, we might expect this to increase hypnotic susceptibility. And this is true. Careful studies show that those who have experienced severe punishment in childhood and come from a disciplined home are more easily hypnotized, while those who were rarely punished or not punished at all tend to be less susceptible to hypnosis.
These laboratory findings are only suggestive, and there are quite different ways of understanding them, for which I refer the reader to the original reports. But together they do form a pattern which lends support to the hypothesis that hypnosis is in part a vestige of a preconscious mentality. Placing the phenomena of hypnosis against the broad historical background of mankind in this way gives them certain contours that they would not otherwise have. If one has a very definite biological notion of consciousness and that its origin is back in the evolution of mammalian nervous systems, I cannot see how the phenomenon of hypnosis can be understood at all, not one speck of it. But if we
398 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World fully realize that consciousness is a culturally learned event, balanced over the suppressed vestiges of an earlier mentality, then we can see that consciousness, in part, can be culturally unlearned or arrested. Learned features, such as analog ‘I,’ can under the proper cultural imperative be taken over by a different initiative, and one such instance is what we call hypnosis. The reason that that different initiative works in conjunction with the other factors of the diminishing consciousness of the induction and trance is that in some way it engages a paradigm of an older mentality than subjective consciousness.
Objection: Does Hypnosis Exist?
Finally, I should briefly refer to possible alternative interpretations. But presently there are not so much theories of hypnosis as points of view, each correct as far as it goes. One view insists that imagination and concentration on what the hypnotist suggests, and the tendency of such an imagination to result in conforming action, are important.20 They are. Another, that it is condition of monomotivation that counts.21 Of course, that is a description. Another states that the basic phenomenon is simply the ability to enact different roles, the as-if nature of most hypnotic performances.22 This certainly is true. Another correctly stresses the dissociation.23 Another that hypnosis is a regression to a childlike relation to a parent.24 And indeed this is often how 20 Magda Arnold, "On the Mechanism of Suggestion and Hypnosis," Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1946, 41 : 107-128.
21 Robert White, "A Preface to the Theory of Hypnotism," Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1941, 16:477-505.
22 T. R. Sarbin, "Contributions to Role-Taking Theory." But see also his more recent paper with Milton Anderson "Role-Theoretical Analysis of Hypnotic Behavior,"
in J. E. Gordon.
23 Ernest Hilgard, "A Neodissociation Interpretation."
24 One of two psychoanalytic interpretations of hypnosis. See for example Mer-ton M. Gill and Margaret Brenman, Hypnosis and Related States (New York: International Universities Press, 1959). The other, that hypnosis is a love relationship between operator and subject, is no longer taken seriously.
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any vestige of the bicameral mind appears, since the bicameral mind itself is based on such admonitory experience.
But the main theoretical controversy — and it is a continuing one, and the one that is most important for us here — is whether or not hypnosis is really anything different from what happens every day in the normal state. For if this view is final, my interpretation in this chapter of a different mentality is utterly wrong. Hypnosis cannot be a vestige of anything since it does not really exist. All the manifestations of hypnosis, this position insists, can be shown to be simply exaggerations of normal phenomena. We can tick them off:
As for the kind of obedience to the operator, all of us do the same thing without thinking in situations that are so definedy as with a teacher or a traffic policeman, or perhaps the caller at a square dance.
As to such phenomena as suggested deafness, everyone has had the experience of 'listening' carefully to another person and yet not hearing a word. And so the mother who sleeps through a thunderstorm and yet hears and wakes to the cry of her baby is not engaging a different mechanism from that of the hypnotized subject who hears only the hypnotist's voice and is asleep to all else.
As for the induced amnesia which so astonishes an observer, who can remember what he was thinking five minutes ago? You must suggest to yourself a set or struction to remember at the time. And this the operator of the present day can do or not do, negating or enhancing the paraphrand of submersion, so that the subject does or does not remember.
As for the suggested paralysis under hypnosis, who has not been in discussion with a friend during a walk until, becoming more and more absorbed, both walk more slowly until you are standing still? Concentrated attention has meant arrest of movement.
As for hypnotic anesthesia, that most remarkable of hypnotic phenomena, who has not seen a hurt child distracted by a toy
400 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World until the crying stops and the pain is forgotten? Or known of victims of accidents bleeding from unfelt wounds? And acupunc-ture may indeed be a related phenomenon.
And as for the "hidden observer," this kind of parallel processing goes on all the time. In ordinary conversation, we listen to someone and plan what we are going to say at the same time.
And actors do this constantly, always acting as their own hidden observers; Stanislavski to the contrary, they are always able to criticize their performances. And many of the examples of nonconscious thought in I.1, or my description of driving a car and conversing which opened I.4, are further instances.
And as for the startling success of post-hypnotic suggestion, we all sometimes decide to react to some event in a certain way and then do so, even forgetting our prior reason. It is really not different from 'pre-hypnotic suggestion', as in the supposed paralysis of the dominant hand a few pages ago. It is a structuring of the collective cognitive imperative that can predetermine our reactions in very specific ways.
And so for other remarkable feats performed under hypnosis j all are exaggerations of everyday phenomena. Hypnosis, the argument runs, just seems different to an observer. The trance behavior is simply intense concentration as in the proverbial
"absent-minded professor." Indeed a host of recent experiments have been aimed at showing that all hypnotic phenomena can be duplicated in waking subjects by simple suggestion.25
My reply, and it is the reply of others as well, is that this is not explaining hypnosis. It is explaining it away. Even though all of the phenomena of hypnosis can be duplicated in ordinary life (and I do not think they can), hypnosis can still be defined by distinct procedures, distinct susceptibilities which correlate with 25 The most prominent and untiring researcher with this view is Theodore X.
Barber. For Barber, "hypnosis" just does not exist as a state different from waking life, and the term should therefore always be written with quotation marks. Among his numerous papers, see his "Experimental Analysis of 'Hypnotic' Behavior: Review of Recent Empirical Findings," Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 1965, 70: 132-154.
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other experiences as well as other vestiges of the bicameral mind, and by huge differences in the ease with which hypnotic phenomena can be reproduced with and without hypnotic induction. In any speculation about possible future changes in our mentality, this latter difference is extremely important. That is why I began this chapter as I did. If we are asked to be animals, five-year-olds, painless when pricked, color-blind, cataleptic, or show nystagmus to imagined whirlings of the visual field,26 or to taste vinegar as champagne — it is enormously more difficult to do in our normal state of consciousness than when ordinary consciousness is absent under hypnosis. Such feats without rapport with an operator require grotesque efforts of persuasion and massive burdens of concentration. The full consciousness of the waking state seems itself like a huge wilderness of distracting closenesses that cannot easily be crossed to catch into such immediate control.