It is paralogic compliance that a subject walks around a chair he has been told is not there, rather than crashing into it (logical compliance), and finds nothing illogical in his actions. It is paralogical compliance when a subject says in English that he knows no English and finds nothing amiss in saying so. If our German subject had been simulating hypnosis, he would have shown logical compliance by talking only in what German he could remember or being mute.
It is paralogic compliance when a subject can accept that the same person is in two locations at the same time. If a hypnotized subject is told that person X is person Y, he will behave accord-8 The basic work in comparing hypnotized subjects with control subjects asked to simulate the hypnotic state has been done by Martin Orne. This ingeniously simple example is due to him.
9 Martin Orne, "The Nature of Hypnosis: Artifact and Essence."
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ingly. Then if the real person Y walks into the room, the subject finds it perfectly acceptable that both are person Y. This is similar to the paralogic compliance found today in another vestige of the bicameral mind, schizophrenia. Two patients in a ward may both believe themselves to be the same important or divine person without any feelings of illogicality.10 I suggest that a similar paralogic compliance was also evident in the bicameral era itself, as in treating unmoving idols as living and eating, or the same god as being in several places at one time, or in the multiples of jewel-eyed effigies of the same god-king found side-by-side in the pyramids. Like a bicameral man, the hypnotized subject does not recognize any peculiarities and inconsistencies in his behavior. He cannot ‘see’ contradictions because he cannot introspect in a completely conscious way.
The sense of time in a trance is also diminished, as we have seen it was in the bicameral mind. This is particularly evident in post-hypnotic amnesia. We, in our normal states, use the spatialized succession of conscious time as a substrate for successions of memories. Asked what we have done since breakfast, we commonly narratize a row of happenings that are what we can call
"time-tagged." But the subject in a hypnotic trance, like the schizophrenic patient or the bicameral man, has not such a schema of time in which events can be time-tagged. The before-and afterness of spatialized time is missing. Such events as can be remembered from the trance by a subject in post-hypnotic amnesia are vague isolated fragments, cuing off the self, rather than spatialized time as in normal remembering. Amnesic subjects can only report, if anything, "I clasped my hands, I sat in a chair," with no detail or sequencing, in a way that to me is reminiscent of Hammurabi or Achilles.11 What is significantly 10 For an extensive description of one example, see Milton Rokeach, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti (New York: Knopf, 1960).
11 I am grateful to John Kihlstrom of Harvard for discussions on these points. The distinct contrast between the language of amnesics and that of rememberers is from his study, soon to be published.
392 Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World different about the contemporary hypnotic subject, however, is the fact that at the suggestion of the operator, the narratized sequential memories can often be brought back to the subject, showing that there has been some kind of parallel processing by consciousness outside of the trance.
Such facts make the hypnotic trance a fascinating complexity.
Parallel processing! While a subject is doing and saying one thing, his brain is processing his situation in at least two different ways, one more inclusive than the other. This conclusion can be demonstrated even more dramatically by the recent discovery that has been dubbed "the hidden observer." A hypnotized subject, after the suggestion that he will feel nothing when keeping his hand in a bucket of ice-cold water for a minute (a really painful, but benign experience!), may show no discomfort and say he felt nothing; but if it has previously been suggested that when and only when the operator touches his shoulder, he will say in another voice exactly what he really felt, that is what happens. At such a touch, the subject, often in a low guttural voice, may give full expression to his discomfiture, yet return immediately to his ordinary voice and to the anesthetized state when the operator's hand is lifted.12
Such evidence returns us to a once rejected notion of hypnosis known as dissociation that emerged from studies of multiple personality at the beginning of this century.13 The idea is that in hypnosis the totality of mind or reactivity is being separated into concurrent streams which can function independently of each other. What this means for the theory of consciousness and its origin as described in Book I is not immediately apparent. But 12 Ernest Hilgard, "A Neodissociation Interpretation of Pain Reduction in Hypnosis," Psychological Review, 1973, 80: 396-411. I would like to record here my gratitude to Ernest Hilgard for a critical reading of the earlier chapters. His encouraging criticisms were extremely helpful.
13 The classics in this field are Pierre Janet, The Major Symptoms of Hysteria, 1907 (2nd ed., New York: Holt, 1920) and Morton Prince, The Unconscious (New York: Macmillan, 1914). For an excellent discussion see Ernest Hilgard's "Dissociation Revisited" in M. Henle, J. Jaynes, and J. J. Sullivan, eds., Historical Conceptions of Psychology (New York: Springer, 1973).
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such dissociated processing is certainly reminiscent of the bicameral organization of mind itself, as well as the kind of nonconscious problem solving discussed in I.1.
Perhaps the least discussed aspect of hypnosis is the difference in the nature of the trance among persons who have never seen or known much about hypnosis before. Usually, of course, the trance is in our time a passive and suggestible state. But some subjects really do go to sleep. Others are always partly conscious and yet peculiarly suggestible until who can judge between acting and reality? Others tremble so severely that the subject has to be
'awakened'. And so on.
That such individual differences are due to differences in the belief or collective cognitive imperative of the individual is suggested by a recent study. Subjects were asked to describe in writing what happens in hypnosis. They were later hypnotized, and the results compared with their expectation. One 'awoke'
from the trance each time she was given a task for which she had to see. A later perusal of her paper showed she had written, "A person's eyes must be closed in order to be in a hypnotic trance."
Another could only be hypnotized on a second attempt. He had written, "Most people cannot be hypnotized the first time." And another could not perform tasks under hypnosis when standing.
She had written, "The subject has to be reclining or sitting."14
But the more hypnosis is talked about, even as on these pages, the more standardized the cognitive imperative and hence the trance becomes.
The Hypnotist as Authorization
And so, fourthly, a very particular kind of archaic authorization which also determines in part the different nature of the trance. For here, instead of the authorization being an hallucinated or possessing god, it is the operator himself. He is mani-14 T. R. Sarbin, "Contribution to Role-Taking Theory: I. Hypnotic Behavior,"