Hypnosis: depth or width?

Abstract

Recent research (2, 3) has- emphasized the usefulness of an interactional approach to hypnosis. When hypnosis is understood from this point of view, it becomes clear that some of the traditional concepts and some of the terms used to describe these concepn need to be revised. One of these is the idea of the of hypnosis, which is merely a concept and not an ultimate reality (5). The idea of a depth dimension of hypnosis originares from the psychoanalytic view of the unconscious. Here the conception is that, as hypnosis progresses, the subject goes deeper into his unconscious mind. This conceptualization does not have any meaning within the interactional explanation of hypnosis. Even when hypnosis is approached traditionally, researchers find it necessary to attach various behavioural, that is, observable, indices to the different proposed levels of depth. Messages (verbal and npn-verbal behaviour) from the subject are used to infer certain levels of depth. For instance, glove anaesthesia is chought to be an indication of a medium trance depth (1). The interactional view sees these same messages as statements about the hypnotistsubject relationship (4). As such they form part of the negotiation for the definition of the relationship that goes on between hypnotist and subject (3). As the relationship progressively becomes defined as hypnotic by the hypnotist, the subject's responsive behaviour increasingly confirms this definition, indicating increasing acceptance of the hypnotic relationship. In this way the nature of the relationship is mutually defined. The murual acceptance of the narure of the relationship involves a tacit agreement as to which behaviours (hypnotic phenomena) could occur within the bounds of the relationship. The wider these bounds, the more phenomena could be exhibited by the subject in that particular hypnotic relationship. From this perspective it becomes more appropriate to talk about the width of the hypnotic rellrtionrhip rather than the depth of hypnosis. The concept of the width of the hypnotic relationship represents a theoretical shift from an intrapsychic viewpoint to an understanding of hypnosis as an interaaional phenomenon.