Experimental and Clinical Hypnosis: Bridging the Gap and Slaying Sacred Cows

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Permalink Reply by Don on February 16, 2012 at 1:19pm

Hi Michele, 

When Mesmerism was at its height, the French government commissioned a blue-ribbon investigation to check into these strange goings-on, chaired by Benjamin Franklin, who was our ambassador to France at the time. Franklin's report concluded that everything that was attributed to Mesmerism could be explained as due to imagination and the workings of the imagination.

Franklin’s report were long misunderstood.  Instead of  regarding the imagination as a unique and powerful set of mental abilities, most people tend to think of the word imaginary as meaning the opposite of the word real -- which implies that nothing which has "imaginary" causes can have  "real" effects.  Thus, for many decades, hypnosis was largely left to the province of charlatans and stage entertainers; and it was not until the mid-1950's that so many undeniably real effects of hypnotic treatment were observed that the American Medical Association approved hypnosis as a legitimate area of investigation.    

But a lot of people still aren't ready to accept the reality of the effects produced by hypnosis, even though the A.M.A. has endorsed its use. Big pharma, for example, would like to keep the illusion going, because if we can prove that people are helped by hypnosis, they won't need to go around drugged up all the time! 

Don 

Michelle Braun said:

 Regulation will come about once the medicos and likely big pharma accept what Marc Whipple said below:  real changes happen from hypnosis.   

Marc Whipple said:

...

Hypnosis is very much one of those "nobody really knows" things. We're *just* starting to see physical evidence that it's a real thing biologically speaking, that it really does have physical components. (It's a shame we've had to argue about it for this long: we've known about stigmata for centuries. Obviously it's a real thing.) But that still doesn't tell us what it is, and the metaphors that we use to describe it now (conscious/subconscious mind, expectational role-fulfillment,) like the metaphors we used in physics in days gone by (epicycles, phlogiston, ether) may very well turn out to be, well, just wrong. That's okay. The only thing a real scientist likes more than being proven right is being proven wrong in an interesting way. (There is an old saying that the true birth-cry of discovery is not, "Eureka!" but "That's funny...")

The "mainstream" mental health professionals are going to have to come to grips with the fact that hypnosis is real, it's not a parlor trick, and it offers real tools for examining the mind and ameliorating mental dysfunction. The mainstream medical profession is going to have to get used to the fact that a functional mental issue can cause organic symptomology. And the hypnosis advocates are going to have to come to grips with the fact that despite the fact that hypnosis has been around for millennia we're going to learn that a lot of what we thought we knew about it may not be so - may be fundamentally wrong, in fact. Don't be defensive about it. Be excited.

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Permalink Reply by Don on February 17, 2012 at 3:33am

I just realized that sacred cows do not die all at once. Their numbers just gradually decrease as society changes. Believe it or not, there still is a  Flat Earth Society!

Don

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