Association between susceptibility to orientation-contingent colour aftereffects, and fantasy proneness and dissociation (original) (raw)

Hypnosis Reconsidered, Resituated, and Redefined

Journal of Scientific Exploration, 2012

The two-hundred-year history of hypnosis and its predecessor, animal magnetism, is replete with stories of unusual phenomena. Perhaps surprisingly, a close reading of that history reveals that investigators and students of hypnosis have been unable to achieve an agreed-upon definition of their subject matter. Because of this failure to describe the essential nature of hypnosis, they resorted to lists of hypnotic phenomena as a means for confirming the presence of a hypnotic state in clinical and experimental situations. However, identification and enumeration of hypnotic phenomena proved to be problematic. The content of these lists varied from era to era and from practitioner to practitioner, and the selection of phenomena seemed to be an arbitrary process. With no agreed-upon definition and no definitive list of phenomena that would apply to hypnosis and hypnosis alone, there was no way to ensure that the "hypnosis" that was being studied in clinical and experimental work was identical from one case to the next. This article offers a definition of hypnosis that is not based on lists of phenomena.