The earliest references to hypnosis date back to ancient Egypt and Greece. Indeed, 'hypnos' is the Greek word for sleep, although the actual state of hypnosis is very different from that of sleep. Both cultures had religious centres where people came for help with their problems. Hypnosis was used to induce dreams, which were then analyzed to get to the root of the trouble.
There are many references to trance and hypnosis in early writings. In 2600 BC the father of Chinese medicine,Wong Tai, wrote about techniques that involved incantations and passes of the hands. the Hindu Vedas written around 1500 BC mention hypnotic procedures. Trance-like states occur in many shamanistic, druidic, voodoo, yogic and religious practices.
Hypnotic Pioneers
The modern father of hypnosis was an Austrian physician, Franz Mesmer (1734 - 1815), from whose name the word 'mesmerism' is derived. Though much maligned by the medical world of his day, Mesmer was nevertheless a brilliant man. He developed the theory of 'animal magnetism' - the idea that diseases are the result of blockages in the flow of magnetic forces in the body. He believed he could store his animal magnetism in baths of iron filings and transfer it to patients with rods or by 'mesmeric passes'.
Mesmer would stand his subjects quite still while he swept his arms across their body, sometimes for hours on end. Mesmer himself was very much a showman, conveying by his manner that something was going to happen to the patient. In itself this form of indirect suggestion was very powerful. Mesmer was also responsible for the popular image of the hypnotist as a man with magnetic eyes, a cape and goatee beard.
Another pioneer of hypnosis in Britain appeared in the mid-nineteenth century with James Braid (1795 - 1860). Primarily a Scottish eye doctor, he developed an interest in mesmerism quite by chance. One day, when he was late for an appointment, he found his patient in the waiting room staring into an old lamp, his eyes glazed. Fascinated, Braid gave the patient some commands, telling him to close his eyes and go to sleep. The patient complied and Braid's interest grew. He discovered that getting a patient to fixate upon something was one of the most important components of putting them into a trance.
The swinging watch, which many people associate with hypnosis, was popular in the early days as an object of fixation. Following his discovery that it was not necessary to go through all the palaver of mesmeric passes, Braid published a book in which he proposed that the phenomenon now be called hypnotism.
Meanwhile, a British surgeon in India, James Esdaile (1808 - 59), recognized the enormous benefits of hypnotism for pain relief and performed hundreds of major operations using hypnotism as his only anesthetic. When he returned to England he tried to convince the medical establishment of his findings, but they laughed at him and declared that pain was character-building (although they were biased in favour of the new chemical anesthetics, which they could control and, of course, charge more money for). So hypnosis became, and remains to this day, an 'alternative' form of medicine.
The French were also taking an interest in the subject of hypnosis, and many breakthroughs were made by such men as Ambrose Liébeault (1823 - 1904), J.M. Charcot (1825 - 93) and Charles Richet (1850 - 1935).
The work of another Frenchman, Emile Coué (1857 - 1926), was very interesting. He moved away from conventional approaches and pioneered the use of auto-suggestion. He is most famous for the phrase, 'Day by day in every way I am getting better and better.' His technique was one of affirmation and it has been championed in countless modern books.
A man of enormous compassion, Coué believed that he did not heal people himself but merely facilitated their own self-healing. He understood the importance of the subject's participation in hypnosis, and was a forerunner of those modern practitioners who claim, 'There is no such thing as hypnosis, only self-hypnosis.'
Perhaps his most famous idea was that the imagination is always more powerful than the will. For example, if you ask someone to walk across a plank of wood on the floor, they can usually do it without wobbling. However, if you tell them to close their eyes and imagine the plank is suspended between two buildings hundreds of feet above the ground, they will start to sway.
Sigmund Freud (1856 - 1939) was also interested in hypnosis, initially using it extensively in his work. He eventually abandoned the practice - for several reasons, not least that he wasn't very good at it! He favoured psychoanalysis, which involves the patient lying on a couch and the analyst doing a lot of listening. He believed that the evolution of the self was a difficult process of working through stages of sexual development, with repressed memories of traumatic incidents the main cause of psychological problems. This is an interesting idea that has yet to be proved.
In more recent times, the recognized leading authority on clinical hypnosis was Milton H. Erickson, MD (1901-80), a remarkable man and a highly effective psychotherapist. As a teenager he was stricken with polio and paralyzed, but he remobilized himself. It was while paralyzed that he had an unusual opportunity to observe people, and he noticed that what people said and what they did were often very different. He became fascinated by human psychology and devised countless innovative and creative ways to heal people. he healed through metaphor, surprise, confusion and humour, as well as hypnosis. A master of 'indirect hypnosis', he was able to put a person into a trance without even mentioning the word hypnosis.
It is becoming more and more accepted that an understanding of hypnosis is essential for the efficient practice of every type of psychotherapy. Erickson's approach and its derivatives are without question the most effective techniques.
Over the years hypnosis has gained ground and respectability within the medical profession. Although hypnosis and medicine are not the same, they are now acknowledged as being related, and it is only a matter of time before hypnosis becomes a mainstream practice, as acceptable to the general public as a visit to the dentist.
I have run through the main pioneers in the exploration and study of hypnosis, but it is also interesting that many creative individuals have used a trance-like state to access their talents. Artists, writers,, poets and composers have induced a form of hypnotic trance to help them with their work.
The poet Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-92) would repeat his own name to himself again and again like a mantra, and by doing this would access a different state of consciousness in which whole poems came to him that he could then transcribe. Mozart (1756 - 91) apparently composed Cosi fan tutte, one of his most famous operas, while hypnotized, and Rachmaninov (1873-1943) reportedly composed one of his concertos following a post-hypnotic suggestion.
When the University of Strasbourg gave classes in hypnosis, students included the poet and playwright Goethe (1749-1832) as well as another composer, Chopin (1810-49). Thomas Edison (1847-1931), Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), Henry Ford (1863-1947), Albert Einstein (1879-1955) and Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) all used trance-like states to help in the development of their ideas.
Many of history's greatest innovators made documented use of some 'special' level of consciousness. These days huge numbers of leading athletes, business people and artists in many different fields use similar approaches with great success.
The Dalai Lama questioned our reasons for sending investigative teams into outer space and under the sea when the real undiscovered treasures of humanity lie within the realms of our minds, and I must say I have to agree with him!
What Is Hypnosis?
To understand what hypnosis is and how it works, you need too know something about your mind - in particular, what is meant by the conscious and unconscious minds.
The human mind can be compared to an iceberg, with the visible tip being the conscious mind and the invisible mass or larger part of the mind, being the unconscious mind.
The Conscious Mind
When I talk about the conscious mind, I am referring to the little voice in your head, the one that right now is saying, 'Oh yes, that little voice!' This is the mind you actively think with all day long. It can hold only a handful of ideas and thoughts at any one time - which is why, for example, many people memorize numbers in small chunks, 1943609315 being easier to remember as 194 (first chunk), 360 (second chunk), 9315 (third chunk), because on average the conscious mind can retain only between five and nine discrete units of information at any one time. The conscious mind is critical and analytical; it sorts out information by noticing differences.
The Unconscious Mind
The unconscious mind contains all your wisdom, memories and intelligence; it is your source of creativity. It regulates body-maintenance, and autonomic processes like breathing, blood circulation and tissue regeneration. The conscious mind cannot heal a cut or accelerate your heartbeat to the correct rate; the unconscious mind does. It is the seat of your emotions and directs nearly all of your behaviour. Everything that has ever happened to you and everything that you have ever imagined is stored as a multi-sensory recording in your unconscious mind and reveal details of incidents that happened many years before, all of which are filed away somewhere.
The unconscious mind works by association, by looking at something and seeing the similarities with a past event.
Of course, the words 'conscious' and 'unconscious' are only models for the way your mind works, but they are the best and easiest way to explain the complicated structure of the human brain. 'Consciousness' is not fixed in either the conscious or the unconscious; it is a spectrum of awareness.
In one sense our lives are run mainly by our unconscious minds. We are largely unaware of our autonomic processes and thinking, and yet every single second our unconscious mind receives two million messages of sensory awareness. It would be impossible to process all that information consciously, so the unconscious sorts it and presents you with a summary of what is taking place. For example, when you are at a party, your unconscious is monitoring all the conversations that are taking place around you. Then, if somebody over the other side of the room says your name, suddenly you hear it. The unconscious mind sorted that piece of information and brought it to your conscious attention.
The unconscious can also delete information from our awareness. A friend of mine is a builder. At work he gets lots of little cuts on his hands but he doesn't notice them, because they would interfere with the job, so his unconscious keeps his attention on his work and literally anaesthetizes any pain.
The interaction between the conscious and unconscious minds is going on all the time, but how is it decided what information each individual should specifically focus upon?
How is it sifted by the unconscious and presented to your conscious mind? The answer is programming.
This is using questions to reason. If you think about it your conscious mind, the voice in your head, is always evaluating - critically and analytically - by comparing and noticing. For example, if I were to say to you that 'you are feeling hotter', inductive reasoning would be to ask yourself 'Do I feel hotter? Do I have too many clothes on? Is there a fire in the room?' You ask yourself questions that analyze the statement.
Deductive reasoning is different, If I say 'you are feeling hotter' and you deductively reason, then you accept the premise to be true and you ask questions based upon that. For example you might say 'If it's hot then maybe I'd better open a window, or fan my face'.
Deductive reasoning is how your unconscious mind evaluates, by assuming what you believe is true and generalizing. For example, as a child you learn how to open a door, then in future you generalize in your mind about all doors everywhere so that you can open them automatically, otherwise you would have to re-learn how to go in and out of a room each time you wanted to. So whenever you learn something new you store the 'program' in your unconscious.
However this generalizing principle also applies to negative experiences, for example, this is how phobias are formed. One emotionally charged experience in an elevator, at the dentist or reading in front of the class can provide a negative generalization that operates powerfully in the unconscious, so that whenever a similar event occurs in the future, the old feelings of discomfort that were felt at an early age are instantly brought back to over protect you.
Everyone experience some negatively and emotionally charged events early in life that shape them later in adulthood. Having an intellectual understanding of these past experiences sometimes help, but not always. Using hypnosis we can communicate directly with the unconscious mind which holds our generalizations, our deepest beliefs about ourselves, and ask it to re-evaluate to find new, more empowering beliefs that help us more.
Everything that happened to you between the time you were born and about the age of six, particularly moments of intense emotion, builds the foundation of your thinking and your behaviour for the rest of your life.
A child's mind is open, like a sponge, taking in all the stimuli in its environment. The mind absorbs everything it can in order to develop. Before the age of six a child doesn't know enough to be able to rely on its own judgement and reasoning; its critical faculty is undeveloped (a critical faculty is the ability to question, judge, analyze, criticize and, very importantly, compare). It is because children haven't developed this critical faculty that they are so innocent and can believe in things like Father Christmas or fairies. It is also why so many people end up the same as their parents, programmed by chance events, opinions and the superstitions of those around them, who were in turn programmed in their own formative years.
While the small child has not yet developed a critical faculty, in adults this faculty is partially or completely suspended when they are in a hypnotic trance. In a hypnotic trance you focus on just one thing, or on one thing at a time, rather than on several things at once, this leads to fascination and absorption - a very different state from our waking consciousness, when we are constantly comparing and criticizing.
Quite simply, hypnosis is a state that allows excellent communication with the unconscious mind. So when a stage hypnotist tells hypnotized subjects that they are ballet dancers and subjects begin leaping about the stage, the suggestion has gone straight into their unconscious mind. With their critical faculties suspended, subjects, although often baffled, have no means of arguing the suggestion. They cannot reason, 'You are just a hypnotist telling me to do this and I am not a ballet dancer'; they cannot evaluate the suggestion, having nothing to compare it with, so they have to act as if it were true. They have lost access to any evidence to the contrary.
Suggestions are the key to hypnosis. Charles Baudouin, a famous French hypnotist, defines suggestion as 'a proposed or imposed idea, image or concept from an operator accepted by the mind of a subject'. Hypnosis evolved as a way of enhancing suggestibility, through language and psychological techniques.
The human mind has been likened to a computer and, to continue the analogy, hypnosis is a way of reprogramming the computer. When the critical faculty is quietened during trance, new ideas may be put to a person which result in new patterns of behaviour.
So what is this mystical thing called trance?
If you ask most people whether they have ever been in a trance they will answer 'No', but they will be wrong. Every single one of us enters naturally occurring trance states all day long - day-dreaming, being engrossed in a book or even while driving a car.
The key to identifying trance states is in the fixation of attention, either internally or externally. Quite simply, trance is all about the focus of a person's attention. When a subject is hypnotized, this focus is highly concentrated by suggestion.
Television, for example, promotes a trance state. When watching, you forget about the room around you - the carpet, curtains, the furniture; your focus is the television. Something scary happens on the screen and you sit forward, tense up and get a burst of adrenaline, Quite simply, you plug your experience into that little box and, while you are engrossed, it becomes your reality.
Not all trance is detached and simple. Even a very sophisticated process can be performed in a trance. Have you ever driven for several miles and then not been able to remember that part of the journey? You are driving competently but suddenly, when somebody speaks or some thing catches your attention, you cannot remember what you were thinking about before. You were in a trance.
Trance is often described as an altered state of consciousness, but altered from what? The way I see it, we are all perpetually moving from one kind of consciousness to another. Your state of mind when operating a computer, say, is simply different from what it is when you are in a lift, or in the bath, or in the middle of an intense conversation.
So what's the difference between these natural trances that people go in and out all day long and a hypnotic trance? The difference is the hypnosis is a deliberately induced trance. Other deliberately created and utilized trances are commonly found in disciplines such as yoga and meditation, and also in newer areas such as creative visualization and stress management.
The context for hypnosis is most typically a therapy session or a stage show where the hypnotist alters the subjects' awareness through language and psychological techniques. The hypnotist is the facilitator, the guide, elected by subjects for their journey through the realms of their consciousness.
The name given to the most extreme state of hypnosis is somnambulism. Somnambulist subjects have access to all the hypnotic phenomena; they are in a psychologically limitless environment. Subject can regress to early childhood, transforming their manner and speech to those of a child, and can achieve all the traditional deep-trance phenomena that I will refer to in more detail later.
In a hypnotic trance the conventional limitations of the beliefs which determine everyday life do not exist. There is complete flexibility in the recovery of memories from your personal history. You are able to recall moments of trauma and gain new insights about them. You can tap into moments of personal excellence and replicate them in the future (athletes use this approach to reach peak performance states, retriggering them at appropriate times). You can even go into the future, imagine skills and resources you would like to have and bring them back with you!
So, that's what a trance is. Now what does it feel like?
When you go into a trance, you will experience a change in awareness. Just as everybody is different in the way they experience life, so each person's way of experiencing trance is unique, and every trance may also be different. You could even say that there is no such thing as a trance state, only infinite altered states of consciousness.
In many cases naïve subjects do not actually believe that they have been hypnotized when they come out of a trance.
This is often due to preconceptions about what a trance will be like and then surprise when the experience does not match expectations. While hypnotized you do not necessarily stop being aware or conscious of what is going on around you; you are actually in a heightened state of awareness.
When people's consciousness is altered, they automatically experience certain changes. although it would be very unusual for somebody to experience all of these, here are seven of the most common internal characteristics of a hypnotic trance state:
1. Fixation - You become fascinated by an object or a train of thought, an idea, images or even your own breathing,
2. Sensory Changes - Your sensory awareness alters: sounds may appear louder and crisper, or quieter; feelings may be stronger or more dulled; colours may appear brighter or more hazy.
3. Time Distortion - Your experience of time may change. It is common for an hour in a trance to seem like five minutes.
4. Effortlessness - Subjects often find ideas and images come and go without any effort on their part.
5. Trance Logic - Situations that could appear unusual or illogical in the waking state (existence of fantasy kingdoms, appearance of talking animals and historical figures) are more easily accepted and explored.
6. Differences In Time And Space - You can age and life-regress, or travel forward in time and space. You can even exist in two places at the same time. As in dreams, all events can be happening now - past, present and future occurring simultaneously.
7. Amnesia - It is very likely that you will be unable to remember all of what happened during your trance. In most cases your recall will be at best partial, and it may well also be unclear, disordered and without much detail.
(With The Help & Thoughts Of Paul McKenna.)