Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis (6 page)

At the end of the session, the hypnotist will talk his client through the procedure, and is likely to give him an exercise in self-hypnosis to do at home to reinforce the beneficial effects of the session. This might be as simple as: ‘Every time you feel a craving for a cigarette, close your eyes, count to ten, and picture yourself jingling the extra money you have in your pocket as a result of not smoking.'

There are treatments without end, and I'll just be scraping the surface here. There's more in
Chapter 11
. The method of treatment is likely to depend on the school to which the therapist belongs and the problem the client wants to solve. But nowadays most hypnotherapists are empirically trained rather than school trained, and so he is likely to use a range of treatments, culled basically from
a Freudian or a behaviourist quiver. Freudian or psychodynamic methods are good for allowing the origin of problems to be brought to the surface, examined and explained, so that the undesirable effect can be made harmless. Behaviour-modification techniques are good for breaking ingrained habit patterns which contribute to problems. Then at the end of the treatment the therapist might suggest some reinforcing method, such as self-hypnosis or visualizations, with or without affirmations and positive thinking. Ideally each case will be judged on its own merits, and treatments tailored to the client's particular nature and needs, rather than the therapist's being so committed to a school that she cannot use techniques outside of that school.

Regression is a common technique, and has featured in films such as the 1946 Oscar-winning
The Seventh Veil
. In regression the therapist takes you back to your childhood, to uncover the origins of some syndrome or problem that you have. What caused that fear of spiders? Why did you originally start to stammer? In regression you can see the start of the problem, and begin to untie the knot.

I like the Freudian anagram technique: the hypnotized patient is told to imagine a box containing all the letters of the alphabet. She takes a handful of the letters, throws them into the air and watches them land. Those that land face up will form a word (so the therapist instructs) which will be related to the patient's problem. There are similar techniques, such as being taken through a symbolic journey, in which the things you encounter – a gate, an animal – are symbols with mental and emotional values. These are all ways for the therapist and client to see what is going on deep in the unconscious, so that measures can be taken to deal with whatever the problem may be. Sometimes being brought face to face with the roots of a problem can cause what is known as ‘abreaction' – a cathartic, emotional reaction such as weeping. If such a thing occurs, the therapist will gently guide the patient through it, and show her why it happened.

Behaviourist measures can seem quite drastic. In order to deal with a phobia, the therapist will take advantage of the ability of a hypnotized subject to visualize things vividly. Suppose you have a fear of spiders: you will gradually be brought to the point, over a series of images, to where you can cope with spiders crawling on
your stomach, perhaps. Or aversion is a technique whereby you are trained to associate a habit like smoking with something unpleasant, until you are put off smoking. These are techniques for ‘reframing' – locating something that was perceived as a problem inside a new frame of reference, one in which it is no longer a problem, or at least less of one. As the old saying goes, an optimist perceives as half full a glass which a pessimist perceives as half empty: they have different frames. Since there is a connection between thinking and emotion, and between emotion, breathing and bodily posture, working on any of these can help to bring about the required change. Some therapists literally displace the problem. Milton Erickson once got a woman who was scared of flying to imagine a plane trip on which there was plenty of air turbulence, and to let her fear slide out of her and on to her seat. She had shed it; it was no longer part of her.

Although the patient appears to be will-less, letting the therapist stand in for his will, I would rather say that the patient is distracting his will, akin to the Zen practice of acting through non-action. If you confront a problem head-on, you treat it like an adversary, which gives it power, and makes it harder to get rid of. But if you sideline the problem, or treat it in an avuncular fashion, as the manifestation of the spoiled child within you, so to speak, its hold over you is lessened. This is passivity, but not will-less passivity. Having said that, however, it is likely that direct, authoritarian approaches will work better in cases where the patient has chosen to come to the therapist, for treatment for addiction, perhaps, while indirect, permissive, reframing techniques will work better for more deep-rooted psychological problems. The former approach is for the hypnotist to implant the direct suggestion: ‘You will find that your craving for cigarettes has gone.' On the latter approach, the hypnotist might seed in the subject's mind ideas and pictures which represent how much healthier and wealthier he will be if he quits smoking.

Once the subject is hypnotized, suggestions will be seeded. Suggestions can be of various kinds, especially either direct or indirect. Let's say that you have gone to the therapist because you want to quit smoking. Then, as an example of direct suggestion, the hypnotist may say: ‘When you wake up you will find that you no longer want to smoke.' Indirect suggestions are more subtle. The
therapist might say something like: ‘I wonder how good you're going to feel about not smoking tomorrow?' On the face of it, this is an innocuous question, but by lightly emphasizing the words ‘
how good you're going to feel
' the suggestion is implanted in you that you will feel good if you quit smoking.

Like all therapists, a hypnotherapist needs to get feedback from his patients. Like all therapists who are dealing to any extent with the mind, they find it hard to get reliable information from their patients. In the very nature of the unconscious, the material is not readily available to the patient, so how can she communicate it to the therapist? In the 1930s the famous hypnotist Leslie LeCron developed a technique called ‘ideomotor signalling' that has come to be very widely used. The patient rests his hands on his thighs. He is asked to designate specific uses for the four fingers of his dominant hand. The reason he is asked to make the choice is that it is vital to have his agreement. So, one finger is for saying ‘yes', another for saying ‘no', a third for saying ‘I don't know', and a fourth for saying ‘That's none of your business' – or at any rate: ‘I don't want to answer that right now.'

Now LeCron found – and his findings have been confirmed by countless hypnotists since – that these fingers could act independently of the conscious mind. Consciously, a subject might answer ‘yes' to a question, while his ‘no' finger rises of its own accord into the air. And so this is a way for hypnotherapists to tap into the unconscious of their patients. It has even been used to evoke responses from patients in a coma. If this sounds freaky, and reminiscent of automatic writing, that is quite right. Hypnotists – sober academics in prestigious universities – regularly use automatic writing in their experiments. This doesn't mean they claim to contact the dear departed and transcribe spirit messages, but they make use of a kind of extension of ideomotor signalling. They get their subjects to express in writing what's going on below the threshold of consciousness.

Over the last couple of centuries, various theorists have been quite sure that there are seven – or nine, or four, or whatever – phases of trance. In actual fact, things are rather more fluid, and it is hard to discern the border between one phase and another, but there are tests that can be applied to determine depth of trance. The depth to which the client is hypnotized depends partly on his or her susceptibility, and partly on the skill of the hypnotist, but more on the particular therapy involved. For treating nicotine addiction, for instance, no more than a light or medium trance is necessary; for performing surgery, hopefully something deeper will be achieved!

For practical purposes, hypnotists may outline five stages of increasing depth of trance: the hypnoidal state, light trance, medium trance, deep trance, somnambulistic state. The term ‘somnambulism' is a hangover from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and since it means ‘sleepwalking' it is inaccurate, but it has been perpetuated in the literature on hypnosis. ‘Sleep-waking', a term which also has a long history, might be a better alternative. Since a regular hypnotic subject soon develops shortcuts to reach the full hypnotic state, the different stages of deep hypnosis are easiest to observe in a novice subject. If you've been hypnotized yourself, you may have noticed different phases in yourself. A light trance feels like being relaxed, but in a deeper trance, impressions are fresher, imagery is more vivid and so on.

What's happening, as the trance deepens, is that our generalized reality orientation is fading. Every situation every one of us encounters at any second of the day is actually unique. There has never been exactly this time before; even your front door has never been in exactly this light before. One of the main reasons that childhood is a time of wonder is that children are constantly meeting events they have never seen before, which strike them afresh. As we get older and our egos become the focal point of our lives, we assimilate new situations with old ones, accepting second best. Each of us
develops a frame of reference, a world view, which we use to assess events and experiences. Those which don't fit in are often rejected, while the rest are slotted into a preformed category. Psychologists call this our ‘generalized reality orientation' or GRO. It's not a bad thing: it enables us, for instance, to recognize that a movie is not real life, because we have a context in which we know that the movie is just a movie. One of the main things that happens in hypnosis is that our GRO fades in favour of a special, temporary orientation. The more the GRO fades the deeper the trance. The fading of the GRO involves a reduction in our critical faculties, so that things like fragmentary memories which might not normally impinge on our minds are accepted. That, to continue with the example of memories, is how recall can be enhanced by hypnosis. More generally, it is how we become more open to the suggestions the hypnotist puts to us.

Since the GRO is our filtering and editing mechanism, as the trance deepens and the GRO fades you get more in touch with unconscious regions of the mind. The unconscious is the basement of the mind. Far from everything down there is bad, but there are dusty corners where odd and potentially dangerous things lurk, all one's primitive impulses and desires. Everything we do not want to face about ourselves and the world has been shoved into one such corner. Every memory that we have is stored somewhere, capable of reconstruction. Everything of which we are not immediately conscious is by definition in an unconscious part of the mind. The conscious mind is characterized by everything that is immediately accessible; its relation to the unconscious mind is somewhat like a person taking a torch down into the cellar: we can use our consciousness to illuminate, or gain access to, areas of the unconscious mind. But the point is that the unconscious is taking in, storing and processing information on its own, even when it is not illuminated by consciousness. One scientist has put it like this: ‘The Unconscious is not unconscious, only the Conscious is unconscious of what the Unconscious is conscious of.' Hypnosis is a good way of bringing into consciousness material from unconscious regions, and so facing and reframing such material.

I'm not a very good hypnotic subject myself, but I can fairly easily go into a light trance, and in that state one of the primary
subjective impressions is a peculiarly ambiguous feeling. On the one hand, you are certain that if you chose to you would not go along with the hypnotist's suggestions, and you can easily see through his ways of getting you to do something; on the other hand you think to yourself: ‘I might as well go along with it for the sake of the experiment.' So the feeling is ‘Shall I or shan't I?', and this feeling persists throughout. Clever therapists use this state of slight confusion, which we could call ‘parallel awareness', to seed powerful therapeutic ideas into the subconscious, while the conscious is preoccupied with the confusion. In a different context – he was at a spiritist séance – the Irish poet W.B. Yeats described the feeling perfectly. He found that his hands and shoulders were twitching: ‘I could easily have stopped them,' he later wrote, ‘but I had never heard of such a thing and was curious.'

From the outside, the behaviour of a hypnotized person may be no different from that of a person in a normal state. From the inside, though, interesting things are going on. The most usual feelings are: relaxation; diminished awareness of outer events and increased immersion in an inner world; a general feeling that one's psychic processes have somehow been extended, despite a narrowing of focus; boredom (a decrease in associative activity), leading to increased vividness or forcefulness or interest of certain systems of ideas, particularly those introduced by the hypnotist; relative immobilization and fixation on a single sensory experience (e.g. the rhythm of the hypnotist's voice, which may become depersonalized from the hypnotist herself ); time-distortion and partial amnesia, so that a half hour passes like five seconds; a dream-like effortless flux of experience; a dream-like illogicality (‘trance logic'), so that anomalous situations are taken for granted. If you were to ask someone in a deep trance what she was thinking, she might well answer: ‘Nothing.' In fact, she is listening, waiting for the next suggestion from the hypnotist.

The American hypnotherapist Milton Erickson used to say that if someone was not hypnotized, that was a failure of the hypnotist, because everyone is susceptible. Who can resist the infectious enthusiasm of a crowd? Who is not stirred by martial music? Try watching a gripping thriller on TV and not tensing up and sitting on the edge of your seat. We like to conform and to be accepted by others. We don't like internal or external conflict. All these are pressures that make us suggestible. Hypnosis is defined by some as a state of heightened suggestibility. Even if this is inadequate as a full definition, it is certainly true that heightened suggestibility is a vital component. Since we are all suggestible, we are all susceptible to hypnosis.