Questioning Hypnosis

Dark legends of hypnotic spells are as old as sorcerers. Yet today, many reputable psychologists argue that hypnotism is a powerful and useful tool for probing the inner mysteries of man's mind. Dentists use hypnotism as an anaesthetic, and psychologists profess to cure everything from smoking to homosexuality by putting their subjects in a trance. But what is hypnosis?

Suggestion. Largely a put-on, claims Theodore Xenophon Barber, 43, director of psychological research at Massachusetts' Medfield State Hospital. "Since no test has been able to demonstrate the existence of the hypnotic state, there is no reason to assume that there is such a state," he writes in Psychology Today. In more than 100 experiments, Barber and others have reproduced hypnotic effects by the simple power of suggestion.

In one experiment, he subjected two groups of student nurses to identical degrees of pain: excruciating but not injurious pressure on a finger. The first group was "hypnotized" and instructed to listen to a tape recording of a story as a way to ignore the pain. The second group was simply told "that if they kept thinking about the story during the pain stimulation, they would not experience pain." Both reported equivalent pain reduction.

Warts Cured. Hypnosis allegedly cures warts. So does suggestion. Barber reports that the wart count among some New York schoolchildren fell dramatically after their warts were painted with chemically inert dyes identified as effective medication. Barber also discounts feats of strength under hypnosis, such as the ability of a man to make his body so rigid that he can be stretched like a plank between two chairs. "Practically all normally awake persons can remain suspended between two chairs while supported only by the head and ankles," Barber says.

Barber notes that hypnotists have claimed the ability to produce and inhibit labor contractions and allergic reactions, to improve vision and to change heartbeat rates, blood-glucose levels and stomach-acid secretions. But, he says, "in each case there is evidence that the same things can also be obtained by suggestion alone." Barber claims that he has demonstrated the ability of subjects to recall long-forgotten memories --without hypnosis.

Breaking the "Trance." The ultimate power of suggestion is reflected in the subject's own conception of hypnosis, he believes. People "know" that hypnotized subjects are supposed to act like glassy-eyed zombies. Thus, when it is suggested that they are hypnotized, they obediently act as expected. To demonstrate the point, Barber cites an experiment by Philadelphia Psychiatrist Martin Orne. Orne told a class of introductory-psychology students that, under hypnosis, a subject's dominant hand automatically becomes cataleptic--that is, it cannot be moved. That is simply not true. Nevertheless, when he put the class under "hypnosis," 55% of his students were unable to move their dominant hand.

Barber's arguments lead to the conclusion that hypnosis may be no more than a fancy name for human suggestibility. The same preconditions are required in both cases: a willingness to do what the suggester asks, the belief in one's ability to do it--plus the ability to do it. The importance of the latter is often overlooked. Asks Barber: If a hypnotist could really induce deafness in a subject, as hypnotists are forever claiming to do, then how could a verbal command ("You can hear now") ever break the "trance"?

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