Leaving hypnosis behind?

ABSTRACT

Our consciousness and our practice of hypnosis co-evolve. From earliest civilizations to the present, we can think of the source of our abilities and knowledge, along with our self-awareness, as progressing from external and imperative to internal and autonomous. This perspective aligns with Jaynes’ thesis on the origin of consciousness and its trajectory from a bicameral mind, to increasing self-efficacy, and on toward higher consciousness. With the ongoing emergence of our subjective and narrative consciousness comes shifting and multiplying resources for rational, shared, compassionate, and creative self-determination. However, the formal practice of therapeutic hypnosis – especially within reductive and diagnosis-based biomedical and psychological models – has lagged behind the evolution of consciousness. Most of the history of hypnosis has adhered to the bicameral paradigm. We have reserved a place for the authority of an externalized, revered entity whom we credit nonconsciously with our innate and extraordinary abilities. The creative applications of hypnosis by Erickson and the expansion of that work by Rossi signaled a fundamental emergence from that paradigm that encourages self-authorization and moves hypnosis practice toward a more evocative, systematic, and numinous horizon.

KEYWORDS:

• Bicameral mind
• consciousness
• hypnosis

Acknowledgments

The author gratefully acknowledges Glenn Pascal for his help with resources on consciousness and Roxanna Erikson-Klein for her review.

Notes

¹ This adjective, numinous, while not widely accepted, is used here and throughout this paper for layered reasons. Its noun form, numinosum, was derived from the Latin by Rudolph Otto (1923/1950) to describe the experience of sensing the divine. Carl Jung applied the term a bit more secularly and broadly to psychology as the experience of enlightenment, deeper self-understanding, and suddenly shifting from the known to unknown (Bishop, 2006; Jung, 1938). Ernest Rossi, who referred to himself as a Jungian, adopted the term to coincide with the experience of new understanding that comes with Stage Three of the Four Stage Cycle (Rossi, 2002). So, the term applies here, mixing all its meanings – from spiritual to personal.

² What would it like to be a “cultural zombie”? The question is the problem. To answer a “what-is-it-like” question referencing self-awareness requires consciousness. We tend to project our conscious abilities to non-conscious entities (e.g., appliances, computers, pets) because we are challenged to be aware of that of which we are unaware. Consciousness is a genie that cannot be rebottled. Conversely, cultural zombies cannot grasp what it is like to be conscious. But, because we are conscious, we can imagine. Jaynes (1976, p. 85) likens cultural zombiehood to driving a familiar route, a common analogy for trance. A more modern analogy would be to imagine what it is like to be an artificially intelligent self-driving car. A more compelling, though flawed, comparison is to imagine being born into and living cooperatively in a totalitarian cult. Hassan (2013) has written extensively and from personal experience about the subjugation of self in victims of undue influence. The flaw in this analogy is that consciousness persists when subjugated. Cult members keep a whispering self. That is the key to the recovery of their autonomy. (Steven A. Hassan, personal communication, March 25, 2021).

³ The notion that hallucination performed such an important role in the formation of civilizations initially strikes us as absurd. In the era of consciousness, we have been conditioned to hold hallucinations as abnormal, if not pathological. Jaynes also discusses hallucination in psychosis and schizophrenia as models for understanding bicameral hallucination.