A Hypnotic Evening. 1

The thick red curtains on the stage was lowered in a darkened theatre. A European man in a dark cape, loose white shirt, a long black swallow-tail with a red silk lapel and a top hat appeared with a wand on his hand. He bowed to the audience, then flicked his wand above his head. A scantily clad lady in short satin dress, who until then was standing quietly behind him, stepped forward. She bowed to the spectators. After another flick of his magic wand, two male stage assistants scurried from the wings to stage front with a long wooden table. Upon another another wave of the magic wand, the lady lay on the table, under a full spot light. He looked into her eyes and snapped his fingers. The lady's body became rigid. He circled his fingers over her eyes and then elegantly waved them over them again. No reaction. He walked around her a few times, his hand extended around the table to make sure it looked like that there were no strings around the table. Then he signaled to his male assistants to have the table removed from under her back. It was carefully removed. The lady hung there in mid-air to the the gasps of surprise and hushed murmurings of the spectators. Then the table was replaced. At another snap of his fingers, she revived and got off the table to the sound of thunderous applauses. This was my first experience of hypnotism at the International Cinema at Kowloon City nearly half a century ago! What is hypnotism? I tried to find an answer. I clicked into Wikipedia, downloaded, printed and read some materials and then attended a talk given by Jonathan Chui, a certified hypnotherapist, at the premises of UUHK last night. What did I find?

Hypnosis is a mental ( per state theory) or imaginative role-enactment (per non-state theory) usually induced by certain procedure called "hypnotic induction" comprising suggestions and instructions usually by a hypnotist or even by oneself. It is a term first used by James Braid, a Scottish surgeon around 1841 when he used the term "neuro-hypnotism" (nervous sleep) to describe the practices first developed by a Frenchman called Franz Mesmer( whose name is why we now have a word "mesmerize"). But contrary to popular belief, hypnotism is not a state of "sleep". On the contrary, it is a state of high mental concentration in which the subject's attention is focused on a single object or train of thought to the exclusion of all other objects otherwise within his visual field or all other ideas, impressions or train of thought (Braid called it "mono-ideism").  In 1994, Irving Kirsh defined hypnotism as a "nondeceptive mega-placebo" which amplifies the effects of verbal or non-verbal suggestions but James Randi, a professional stage magician, defines it as "a mutual agreement of the operator and the subject that the subject will co-operate in following suggestions." Thus at the heart of hypnotism is the power of suggestion!  The American Psychological Association Division 30 proposes that in a hypnosis, the subject is guided by the hypnotist to respond to suggestions by using the former's imagination for changes in the subject's experience, perceptions, sensation, emotion, thought or behavior, with the details of the hypnotic procedures and suggestions varying with the the goals of the practitioner and the purposes of the clinical or research endeavor, usually involving relaxation.

The suggestibility of different individuals to hypnotic induction will vary from low, medium to high. Suggestions may include the suggestion that one's arm is lighter and lighter and is beginning to float in the air and another is that one arm is rigid (catalepsy ) or that a fly is buzzing around one's head upon which the subject may perceive the intended effect as happening involuntarily. Practice has shown that psychological constructs such as attention, awareness, and the salience of evidence of the attainment of the hypnotic state will increase with the scale: principally Stanford Hypnotic Succeptibility Scale (SHSS) developed by André Muller Weitzenhoffer & Ernest Hilgard in 1959  consisting of 12 suggestion items following a standardized hypnotic eye-fixation induction script ( the 12 items being postural sway, eye closure, left hand lowering, right arm immobilization, finger lock, left arm rigidity, both hands moving together, verbal inhibition of name, hallucination (fly buzzing around one's head) eye catalepsy (fixed eyes) post-hypnotic changes of chair and amnesia) with the items being progressively more difficult to do. In another more advanced test, the following are suggested to the subject: eye closure, lowering right hand, moving hands apart, mosquito hallucination, taste hallucination, right arm rigidity, dream, age regresssion to different schools, arm immobilization, anosmia to ammonia, hallucinated voice, negative visual hallucination (three boxes) and post-hypnotic amnesia.

Another frequently used test is the Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility (HGSHS) developed by Ronald Shor & Emily Carota Orne in 1962.) which takes about 45 minutes to complete also consisting of 12 items of increasing difficulty including motor and cognitive tasks with the motor tasks easier to do and defined psychometrically by the percentage that a subject report experiencing each item. The average score is about 5 out of the 12. But the test is self-scored, so there may be some doubt as to its validity. 

Suggestions may also be effected in the absence of hypnosis ("waking suggestions") given the same way as hypnotic suggestions (given within hypnosis) and researches on such done by Hull (1933) Nicholas Spanos and Irving Kirsch show that there is strong correlation between people's responses to suggestions both in and out of hypnosis. There is also what is called "interrogative suggestibility" (answering questions and shifting response when interrogative pressure is applied). A quick way of determining if a person is susceptible to hypnosis is the Hypnotic Induction Profile (HIP) or the eye roll test, first proposed by Herb Spiegel, a simple test whereby a subject is asked to roll his eye upward and then the degree to which his iris and corea are seen is measured. The less this part of the eye is observed, the more hypnotically susceptible a person is. 

Hypnosis may be done not only by others. It can also be done by onself in self-hypnosis by what is called "auto-suggestion", through a method first discovered by a French apothecary Emile Coué which did not emphasize sleep or deep relaxation but instead focused on a series of specific suggestions. Coué is the first to discover the placebo effect when he worked as an apothecary in Troyes from 1882-1910. He left a small positive notice with each medication given and always reassured his client by praising each remedy's efficacy and soon realized that those patients to whom he praised the medicine usually showed much better improvement after taking the drugs. This led him to explore the power of imagination and the hypnotic methods employed by Ambrose-Auguste Liebeault and Hippolyte Bernheim, two leading experts in hypnosis. He soon discovered that patients could not be hypnotized against their will and more importantly that the effects of hypnosis waned when the subjects regained consciousness. In 1920, he published his first book Self Mastery through Conscious Autosuggestions in which he claimed that self-hypnosis is "an instrument that we possess at birth and with which we play unconsciously all our life, as a baby play with its rattle. It is however a dangerous instrument; it can wound and even kill you if you handle it imprudently and unconsciously. It can on the contrary save your life when you know how to employ it consciously.". Coué believes that firmly believing any idea which exclusvely occupies the mind will turn it into reality so long as that idea one believes in is objectively possible (self-fulfilling prophecy).To Coué, repeating words or images enough times causes the "subconscious" to absorb them e.g. the thought that " every day, in every way, I'm getting better and better" instead of thinking "I'm sick" can help amplify the effects of medicines actually taken. On the other hand, thinking negatively about the illness e.g that I am not feeling well will encourage both mind and body to accept this thought and our body will behave accordingly. But he observed that the main obstacle to autosuggestion is will power. For his method to work, the patient must refrain from making any independent judgement ie. he must not let his will impose its own views on positive ideas. Everything must be done to ensure that the positve autosuggestive idea is consciously "accepted" by the patient. He also observed that young children always applied his method perfectly because they lack the adult's will power. When he told a child, "Clasp your hands and you can't open them,", they obeyed immediately. Sometimes, a situation of self-conflict may arise eg. the more we want to sleep, the more we are awake. Therefore his method must be accompanied by proper relaxation training or autogenic training. With this method, he cured patients of kidney problems, diabetes, memory loss, stammering, lethargy, atrophy and all sorts of physical and mental illness. But Shultz think that autogenic training merely influences our autonomic nervous system and not the sub-conscious. 

Most hypnotists now believe that hypnotism works through the unconscious or sub-conscious mind like Milton Erickson, who prefers to use indirect suggestions like metaphors or stories whose intended meaning is concealed from the subject's conscious mind. The concept of subliminal suggestions is also directed at this unconscious mind but some hypnotists like Theodore Barber and Nicholas Spanos tend to make more use of direct verbal suggestions and instructions. Braid thinks that hypnotism relies on the subject focusing attention on a single idea to amplify the ideo-dynamic reflex response, a position also held by Clark L Hull, Hans Eysenck and Ernest Rossi. Studies have shown that 10% of the population have high and 10% low susceptibility to hypnosis but the balance of 80% have medium susceptibility. Hypnotizability are stable over a person's lifetime. Deirdre Barrett has found that there are two types of highly susceptible subjects: fantasizers (given to much daydreaming, report imaginary companions as a child and grew up with parents who encourged imaginary play) and dissociators (often with a history of child abuse or other trauma who learned early to escape into numbness and to forget unpleasant events, with their daydreaming and blocking out of reality a real blank instead of filled with imageries)

How to get a person hypnotized? The main one used is "eye fixation" technique first developed by the pioneer James Braid, now incorporated into the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale (SHSS). The usual technique is to hang a pendulum like object about 8-15 inches from the eyes in such a position above the forehead as to produce the maximum strain to the eyes and eyelids and to get the subject to focus on it in a fixed stare and to have his mind and attention riveted upon it. What happens is that first the pupils will contract and then dilate and if the fore and middle fingers of ther right hand, extended and a little separated were to approach from the object towards the eyes, the eyelids will close voluntarily with a vibratory motion and if not, the same is repeated and the subject will be told to close the eyes if the fingers approach his eyes again. But most techniques will involve a reclining posture, muscular relaxation, optical fixation, followed by eye-closure. But Hippolyte Bernheim (1884) switched from physical strain to verbal suggestion as the efficient part of the hypnotic technique. Now both direct and indirect verbal suggestions are used eg.requests, insinuation, metaphors and imagery and non-verbal suggestion like mental imagery, tonality of voice and physical manipulation. There are two types of suggestions: authoritarian and permissive. For therapeutic hypnosis, the hypnotherapeutic suggestions are usually made after the subject has already been hypnotized and suggestions are often repeated a number of times. 

To me, hypnosis, whether done by others or by ourselves does help to explain a lot of otherwise inexplicable phenemomena: eg. why some patient recover better and faster than others, why people who receive training in positive thinking will actually behave as if they had been empowered (e.g in many training of salesmanship) and even why people who join cults find it so difficult to escape from the influence of their cult leaders (due probably to the exclusivity of certain dominant ideas and their isolation from all other people holding contrary opinions through gathering only people of like beliefs together in isolated places.) The alleged efficacy of the use of dowsing rod used by primitive people in finding water or other objects they desire and my own personal experience in the use of the magnetic rod in Yuen Long also seems to suggests the power of the subconscious in influencing our perception. This is also confirmed by my reading of psychology and my study of various brain physiology and functioning. Although theoretically, our eyes see everything within our visual field, we have by focusing our attention only on certain items through our own self-suggestion through education (learning to focus on "relevant" and not to get "distracted" by irrelevant things), we fail to see everything else we physiologically "can" theoretically see. By releasing the grid-lock of our conscious will operating through unconscious blocking of the so-called "irrelevant details", we merely "regain" or "restore" that innate ability to see everything within our visual or mental field of vision, which has been with us since birth. Hence the need to relax in all forms of meditation. It is relaxation which releases and re-opens or restores back to us our innate ability to "see" and to "perceive" things we do not "normally" see. The majority of our actions are governed by unconscious or subconscious sub-routines through which have been trained up by numerous habitual association of perceptual images with certain sets of co-ordinated muscular motions in the past. This is so for a good evolutionary reason. If a routine is subconcious or unconscious, it gains enormously in speed and efficiency because the relevant actions do not need to go through the much longer and more circuitous route to the forebrain with complex feedback loops to various other parts of our brain which are in turn connected to various other parts of our body or sensory organs. Hence the need for constant practice in martial arts, in sports training. Everything is turned over to our subconscious or autonomous sub-routines. Likewise, if we associate certain thoughts with certain action through constant practice, they become an "automatic" habit and is shunted to our unconscious or subconcious neuro-muscular networks to be operated "unconsciously" or "subconsciously". Similar principles will work in training our body to resist illness and to recover from it. Hence the power of positive thinking is really the power of autosuggestions. It is a form of self-hypnosis!