If the subject is not able to narrow his consciousness in this fashion, if he cannot forget the situation as a whole, if he remains in a state of consciousness of other considerations, such as the room and his relationship to the operator, if he is still narra-6 The best discussion of induction procedures is that of Perry London, "Hie Induction of Hypnosis," in J. E. Gordon, pp. 44-79. And for discussions of hypnosis in general that I have found helpful, see the papers of Ronald Shor, particularly his
"Hypnosis and the Concept of the Generalized Reality-Orientation," American Journal of Psychotherapy, 1959, 13: 582-602, and "Three Dimensions of Hypnotic Depth," International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 1962, 10: 23-38.
H Y P N O S I S
387
tizing with his analog ‘I’ or 'seeing' his metaphor 'me' being hypnotized, hypnosis will be unsuccessful. But repeated attempts with such subjects often succeed, showing that the "narrowing"
of consciousness in hypnotic induction is partly a learned ability, learned, I should add, on the basis of the aptic structure I have called the general bicameral paradigm. As we saw earlier that the ease with which a katochos can enter an hallucinatory trance improves with practice, so also in hypnosis: even in the most susceptible, the length of the induction and its substances can be radically reduced with repeated sessions.
Trance and Paralogic Compliance
Thirdly, the hypnotic trance is called just that. It is of course usually different from the kind of trance that goes on in other vestiges of the bicameral mind. Individuals do not have true auditory hallucinations, as in the trances of oracles or mediums.
That place in the paradigm is taken over by the operator. But there is the same diminution and then absence of normal consciousness. Narratization is severely restricted. The analog 'P is more or less effaced. The hypnotized subject is not living in a subjective world. He does not introspect as we do, does not know he is hypnotized, and is not constantly monitoring himself as, in an unhypnotized state, he does.
In recent times, the metaphor of submersion in water is almost invariably used to talk about the trance. Thus there are references to "going under" and to "deep" or "shallow" trances.
The hypnotist often tells a subject he is going "deeper and deeper." It is indeed possible that without the submersion metaphier, the whole phenomenon would be different, particularly in regard to post-hypnotic amnesia. The paraphiers of above and below the surface of water, with its different visual and tactual fields, could be creating a kind of two-world-ness resulting in something similar to state-dependent memory. And the sudden
388 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World appearance of spontaneous post-hypnotic amnesia in the early nineteenth century may be due to this change from gravitational to submersion metaphors. In other words, spontaneous post-hypnotic amnesia may have been a paraphrand of the submersion metaphor. (It is interesting to note that such spontaneous amnesia is presently disappearing from hypnotic phenomena.
Possibly, hypnosis has become so familiar as to become a thing in itself, its metaphorical basis wearing away with use, reducing the power of its paraphrands.)
It is in the "deeper" stages of the trance that the most interesting phenomena can be elicited. These are extremely important for any theory of mind to explain. Unless otherwise suggested, the subject is 'deaf' to all but the operator's voice; he does not
'hear' other people. Pain can be 'blocked' off, or enhanced above normal. So can sensory experience. Emotions can be totally structured by suggestion: told he is about to hear a funny joke, the subject will laugh uproariously at "grass is green." The subject can somehow control certain automatic responses better than in the normal state at the suggestion of the operator. His sense of identity can be radically changed. He can be made to act as if he were an animal, or an old man, or a child.
But it is an as-if with a suppression of an it-isn't. Some extrem-ists in hypnosis have sometimes claimed that when a subject in a trance is told he is now only five or six years old, that an actual regression to that age of childhood occurs. This is clearly untrue.
Let me cite one example. The subject had been born in Germany, and emigrated with his family to an English-speaking country at about age eight, at which time he learned English, forgetting most of his German. When the operator suggested to him under 'deep' hypnosis that he was only six years old, he displayed all kinds of childish mannerisms, even writing in childish print on a blackboard. Asked in English if he understood English, he childishly explained in English that he could not understand or speak English but only German! He even printed
H Y P N O S I S
389
on the blackboard in English that he could not understand a word of English!7 The phenomenon is thus like play acting, not a true regression. It is an uncritical and illogical obedience to the operator and his expectations that is similar to the obedience of a bicameral man to a god.
Another common error made about hypnosis, even in the best modern textbooks, is to suppose that the operator can induce true hallucinations. Some unpublished observations of my own bear to the contrary. After a subject was in deep hypnosis, I went through the motions of giving him a nonexistent vase and asked him to place nonexistent flowers from a table into the vase, saying out loud the color of each one. This was easily done. It was play-acting. But giving him a nonexistent book, and asking him to hold it in his hands, to turn to page one and begin reading was a different matter. It could not be play-acted without more creativity than most of us can muster. The subject would readily go through the suggested motions of holding such a book, might stumble through some cliche first phrase or possibly a sentence, but then would complain that the print was blurry, or too difficult to read, or some similar rationalization. Or when asked to describe a picture (nonexistent) on a blank piece of paper, the subject would reply in a halting way if at all, giving only short answers when prodded by questions as to what he saw. If this had been a true hallucination, his eyes would have roamed over the paper and a full description would have been a simple matter — as it is when schizophrenics describe their visual hallucinations. There were great individual differences here, as might be expected, but the behavior is much more consistent with an as-if hesitant role-taking than with the effortless givenness with which true hallucinations are experienced.
This point is brought out by another experiment. If a hypnotized person is told to walk across the room, and a chair has been placed in his path, and he is told that there is no chair there, he 7 I am grateful to Martin Orne for this example.
390 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World does not hallucinate the chair out of existence. He simply walks around it. He behaves as if he did not notice it — which of course he did, since he walked around it. It is interesting here that if unhypnotized subjects are asked to simulate hypnosis in this particular situation, they promptly crash into the chair,8
since they are trying to be consistent with the erroneous view that hypnosis actually changes perceptions.
Hence the important concept of trance logic which has been brought forward to denote this difference.9 This is simply the bland response to absurd logical contradictions. But it is not any kind of logic really, nor simply a trance phenomenon. It is rather what I would prefer to dress up as paralogical compliance to verbally mediated reality. It is paralogic because the rules of logic (which we remember are an external standard of truth, not the way the mind works) are put aside to comply with assertions about reality that are not concretely true. It is a type of behavior found everywhere in the human condition from contemporary religious litanies to various superstitions of tribal societies. But it is particularly pronounced in and centrally characteristic of the mental state of hypnosis.