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learning in groups.
Let us finally add the fact that medicine in the last century had so little in the way of effective remedies
and so many outright poisons in the pharmacopoeia, that NO treatment would often have been safer than
any that could be prescribed, and the combination of no treatment and a strong belief in recovery would
have won hands down over most treatments of the time for most conditions!
Nowadays inductions tend to be more relaxed and less authoritative in a therapeutic context, though stage
hypnosis continues to be relatively forceful and authoritative. We will explore more modern approaches
in a later chapter. But in the mean time you might like to compare the effect of one of these classical
inductions with the relaxation technique that was presented in Chapter 2, or one that you improvised
yourself at the time.
If you are working with the same friend as subject you will find it interesting to ask them how they felt as
a result of a relaxation approach and a more forceful approach; and in addition see which approach
seemed to produce the greater intensification of response to whatever test you applied. (E.g. the use of
words to induce limb movement or rigidity etc.) It will not be surprising if you find that results vary from
person to person!
Summary
You should have now tried out some classical inductions; seen that they rely on mechanisms that you
have explored in earlier chapters; and seen that their effect is on the whole to get the subject's eyes closed
and mind attending to nothing but the hypnotist's voice. You should also have noticed that in general it is
then easier to produce the kind of phenomena that you met in earlier chapters. You should also have
compared the results with that of a relaxation technique.
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Hypnotherapy for Beginners:
Chapter 6
Posthypnotic suggestions
Posthypnotic suggestions are a large part of what people regard as typical of hypnosis. We start by
comparing it with the common phenomenon of social compliance: the fact that people quite normally will
do what another asks them to do. A description of a subject (Nobel Prizewinner Richard Feynman) is
used to illustrate what it feels like to carry out a post hypnotic suggestion. Both phenomena are based on
establishing a causal connection between two subsystems of the brain.
Some exercises are suggested for you to find out how easy it is under ordinary conditions to establish
such a causal connection between two subsystems of the brain, so that you can (as in the previous
chapter) later compare the ease of doing the same after a preliminary induction.
In fact the usual word to describe the creation of a causal link between two systems is learning! And you
are asked to consider the conditions under which learning is most likely to happen well. I suggest that a
focussed attention is generally best.
However this matter is complicated by the fact that the brain consists of very many subsystems and we
may consider each to be capable of independent attention, or arousal. To explore this, a exercises are
given aiming at maintaining the attention of just one subsystem (in this case that connected to fingers)
while conscious attention subsides.
In this chapter we will be discussing, and you will be exploring, phenomena that are usually termed
"posthypnotic suggestions". You will probably know the sort of thing. The hypnotist has told the subject
that at any time a whistle blows he will stand to attention. Five minutes later the hypnotist blows and the
subject stands to attention involuntarily.
As usual I believe that in order to understand what is going on it is best to look at such things in a
broader context first.
Let us suppose that you are in someone else's room. They leave for a few minutes, saying to you as they
leave, "If the phone rings could you answer it for me, please?" As it happens the phone does ring before
they are back. What happens next?
I think that it is almost certain that, in the absence of a strong reason not to, you will naturally pick up the
phone and answer, as had been suggested to you. It is possible that you would spend the interval thinking
about answering the phone. It is also possible that your mind had drifted onto something else, such as
reading a book, or watching TV, and when you answered the phone you did so automatically, without
particular conscious thought.
Now that little scenario is so normal that it totally unremarkable. But compare it with the following.
A hypnotist takes a subject though an induction routine such as those we met in the previous chapter. The
hypnotist then says in solemn tones, "Now when the phone rings you will answer it." He then snaps his
fingers and says, "You are wide awake now, wide awake!" A few minutes later the phone rings near the
subject. What happens next?
In the vast majority of cases the subject will simply respond to the cue of a ringing phone and go and
pick it up and answer it. It would turn out that some would do so rather automatically, without much
thought, while others would report being aware that they had been told to pick up the phone and perhaps
thinking about it quite a lot. Is there really much difference between these two cases?
The obvious answer is that there seems very little, other than the extra drama involved in the one case.
The point of this observation is that for most people it is in fact enough to ask them to do a simple thing
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