I have a question for the list. Do members agree that a child at play is "dissociated". If so, then does it make any sense to talk of "dissociation" rather than Play? Can anything useful ever be achieved by the use of this word as an explanation of events? It sounds like an explanation but in fact explains nothing.
Subject: Hypnosis Religion and Play
Bill's response to my paper demands a riposte. He writes;
"To suggest a parallel between the concept of the hidden observer and guardian angels is stunning. The first concept (hidden
observer) exists or (does not) on the basis of being an experimentally falsifiable hypothesis. The notion of guardian angels exists, for those who choose to believe, within the domain of religion. The existence of guardian angels is not a falsifiable hypothesis."
Reply:
These matters have been discussed fully elsewhere by a mind greater than ours and I can do no better than to refer readers to "Pluto's Republic" by Peter Medawar (1984) Oxford University Press - especially the chapters on "Induction and Intuition in Scientific Thought" and "Hypothesis and Imagination". The notion of Hidden Observer exists, for those who choose to believe,within the domain of Hypnosis.
Bill writes "Houston seems to arbitrarily place ideas together in thereby assumes a connection e.g. post hypnotic suggestion, e.g. Monica Seles and religious murders."
Reply:
Nothing arbitrary about it at all. What could be more precise, given the model, than to link stabbing in hypnosis to stabbing in religion and stabbing in play; then to attempt to find a common explanation.
Bill writes "He then offers an explanation for her assailant's state of mind. I would assume that he has never met this person"
Reply:
Got me there Bill ( but see later in " Interviewing the Cat " ).
He then writes "Houston says 'It seems to me that each row constitutes a logical and definable area for research...' In the absence of data, this is sinply nonsense"
Reply:
Come on Bill, since when was a theory nonsense because of the absence of data? The proof of a theory or it's refutation might be nonsense in the absence of data.
I am fascinated by the discussion on Hypnosis and the use of American Sign Language(ASL) To me the crucial thing about ASL is the absence of the verb 'to be ' a characteristic, a correspondent tells me, it shares with Hebrew. Perhaps it is itself a form of becoming. Following is a small piece I wrote three years ago. Call it free association, call it creativity, call it nonsense; I don't know.
Serendipity
A few weeks ago I presented a paper on hypnosis in which I discussed the use of words in an hypnotic induction procedure. I had hit on the verb 'to be' as being the most important and I related this to hypnosis, to religious experience and to play, suggesting that play was the correct model for hypnosis and also for much religious experience. I regarded hypnosis as the experiencing of a story, the story being our beliefs and expectations. It seemed to me that all life was led through a story or pseudology and that hypnosis itself and theology were merely pseudologies which could be experienced, depending on the culture from which they emerged and depending on the keeper of the word , such as the hypnotist, the priest, the rabbi or mullah.
About the same time a family of starlings had nested in my roof and I was being bitten severely at night by bird lice. I blocked off the nest and was surprised to find that the youngsters had moved downstairs to the eaves where they were trapped by some chicken wire through which the roof was ventilated. The parent starlings were managing to feed the youngsters and had been joined in their efforts by other starlings who seemed to be responding to the youngsters' cheeping. Their distress was manifest and my neighbour and I had taken some grim satisfaction in watching their antics for three days. His wife, however, became quite upset and it was obvious to us both that she would be much happier with us if I were to release them. I unblocked the entrance to the nest and within hours the birds had flown. I was struck by how the birds had managed to communicate.
About this time I happened upon an advertisement from a local book shop and was surprised to read that a man called Theodore Xenophon Barber had written a book called The Human Nature of Birds. Now T.X. Barber is THE authority on hypnosis. Why was such a man writing such a book? Thirty years earlier he had written a book called Hypnosis: The Scientific Approach. His seventy "Empirical Generalisations" had struck the hypnosis establishment like Luther's ninety-five theses and had systematically destroyed the notion that hypnosis was a special state. The book had forced me to rethink almost all I had been taught at a course on hypnosis.
In the dedication to "The Human Nature of Birds" T.X.Barber told of his illiterate Greek grandparents who had shown him that there is an intelligence that is deeper than words. Within the book I found that in American Sign Language there was no mention of the verb 'to be' . Fascinated, I took up my copy of Oliver Sachs' book, Seeing Voices, only to find that ASL was not just a language but that it involved a spatial representation of words akin to pantomime. This brought me in my mind, round in a circle when I realised that Milton Erickson, one of the gurus of hypnosis, had a pantomime technique.
What is going on here? I don't yet know, but I intend to find out. Does anybody catch my drift and can anyone help?
Subject: Credulity. Old and New Testaments
There seems to have been a sudden outbreak of credulity on this list. May I suggest the antidote?
There is no God and there is no hypnosis.
The "God experience" as Bishop Spong puts it, is culturally determined, and so is Hypnotic experience.
The "God experience" is defined by the priest, mullah and rabbi, while the Hypnotic experience is defined by hypnotists some of whom seek to be scientific by so doing. There can be no objectivity where subjectivity reigns, particularly when one is working within a story framework. Objectivising one's subjectivity as R.D.Laing would have put it,cannot succeed in any meaningful sense. It's like being inside the layers of an onion. You have to step outside the onion in order to see the other onions.
The only sense in which Hypnosis is real is the sense in which Play is real. I sometimes think that those among us who loudly proclaim how scientific they are, may be the most credulous of all.
We need to recognise that Hypnosis was culturally determined for us by (among other things) the antics which occurred at the Salpetriere in Paris last century when Charcot hypnotised actresses and hysterics. Just the right place for Lady Di to end her days.
In this regard Graham F.Wagstaff's brilliant book "Hypnosis,Compliance and Belief" is worth reading especially the last section entitled THE BIGGEST MYSTERY
The only sense in which Hypnosis is real is the sense in which Play is real.
Some might like to have a look at my Home Page for a really skeptical view of Hypnosis. No doubt, in parts, I too have mistaken illusion (that which is in play) for reality
From Reg Reynolds:
It has been suggested both that there is no such thing as hypnosis and that everything is hypnosis. Similarly re God.
You might enjoy "Stolen Lightning: the Sociology of Magic" by O'Keefe, which is a very interesting statement about the social context of reality.
At one stage on the List a number of theorists ventured opinions as to what hypnosis was. One said it was "AS IF" behaviour, another that it was "BELIEVED IN IMAGININGS",another that it was "DISSOCIATION" and yet another that it was "NEO-DISSOCIATION"
Subject: Interviewing the Cat
In one of Desmond Morris' films about Man he shows footage of a cat playing with a leaf. That cat was playing with the leaf AS IF it was a bird or a mouse. In that cat's BELIEVED IN IMAGININGS the leaf was a mouse or a bird. Dammit,that cat was DISSOCIATED or maybe it was NEO-DISSOCIATED. Leaf, mouse and bird were three in one (Trinity).
Hark! I hear someone calling and it's Bill saying " How can you infer all that when you haven't interviewed the cat?" Good question Bill and one which is worth answering. Unfortunately this option of interviewing the cat is not open to us but what use would it be? How would that cat rationalise it's behaviour. It would only confuse the issue.
For cat substitute human being. For leaf substitute bread and/or wine. Then you can interview the human being and find out what his theories are. This is theology
For bread and/or wine, substitute another culturally determined idea, namely hypnosis, and again interview the person. The result is some of the theories of hypnosis.
To all theoreticians, clinical therapists and researchers I suggest that we always bear in mind that we are interviewing the cat.
In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play. -
Friedrich Nietzsche
"History I believe furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance, of which their political as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purpose." -- Thomas Jefferson to Baron von Humboldt, 1813.
The representation of a wish is, eo ipso,
the representation of its realization.
But magic brings a wish to representation;
it expresses a wish.
Wittgenstein
"If there were a verb meaning "to believe falsely," it would not have
any significant first person, present indicative."
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
I suspect that Christian objections to Hypnosis stem from the suspicion that they themselves are in some way hypnotised.
Looked at objectively, Christianity consists of taking a man who died 2000 years ago, and talking about him in the present tense, as though he were alive. This is akin to a hypnotist taking his subject back in time (age/time regression) in order to experience a deceased relative. The Bagwan Rajneesh left a directive to his followers, after his death, always to refer to him in the present tense. The streets of Memphis are full of people who speak of Elvis Presley in the present tense who refuse to believe he is dead. Some in my parent's generation refused to belive that Rudolph Valentino was dead. Now on the 31st of August 1997, we have the death of Diana the Princess of Wales.
Theology is literally "what is said about the gods". Thus we have Christology and Mariology. Could we not now have Presley-ology and even Diana-ology. My son Edward, after the funeral said that the thing which kept going through his mind was "what if the coffin is empty?" Time and again,at Diana's funeral, the public said that it did not hit home to them that Di was really dead, until they actually saw the coffin.
If one were to compare the secular deaths of, for example, Rudolph Valentino, Elvis Presley and Princess Di one would notice that the belief that they still live, tends to die out when the time of their natural life expires about 40 years later. This is the time when false diaries can arise as they did with the death of Jesus, Adolph Hitler and Mussolini.
What distinguishes the religious story from the secular, is the story of the Empty Tomb. Only this allows for a story of death and resurrection.
Note however that the empty tomb is a function of the requirement that the god lives and not the other way round. If Di's coffin were empty then people could claim that the absent body was proof of her bodily resurrection. This is the central con of Christianity.
No wonder the church and the authorities want it to be seen that the Hero is dead and buried. For it secures the Status Quo and their continuing legitimacy and employment.
Imagine that you are a religionist faced with the recurrent problem of famous people dying young and the public refusing to believe that they are dead.It was the Roman custom to make gods of their Emperors. Someone somewhere came up with the contrivance of a story involving an empty tomb(or coffin) leading to the resurrection story and allowing for immortality of the person.
Was it a Roman administrator who devised the story or did it evolve in the Eastern Empire? Administrators always want control and with control comes power. State and Religious establishments seek to bury potential rivals to maintain the Status Quo.
Very apt topic with the approach of Easter.
Hypnosis and Memory:
I too have been watching the debate and delighting in the clarity of thought and expression, the academic brilliance and erudition. I'm loath to step into the ring with these heavy-weights but, here goes.
There is abundant a priori evidence that hypnosis is play, but no empirical evidence that I am aware of. I have likened amnesia of intra-trance events to a tennis player who forgets what the score is in a tennis match, and whose turn it is to serve.
There are many forms of play and some of them involve memory as a strong feature. Could the claimed hypermnesia for pre-trance events found in clinical,legal and forensic practice, be likened to the playing of chess or bridge? Take bridge for example: You have fusional elements between the partners; the bidding of a contract in the expectation of taking a number of tricks; the necessity of recall of the bidding pattern and cards played ; total absorbtion etc.
There is a different system analysis of course and a different social setting and no confabulation (one hopes) from one's partner, but still the parallels to me, are compelling. Would it be possible to find some psychological measures which correlate between hypnotic subjects and chess or bridge players?
( See John Kihlstrom's reply below.)
It seems to me that the only objective way is to regard Hypnosis as play behaviour and look at it from the viewpoint of an anthropologist, sociologist or some such other. Some theorists have the right idea, for example the roleplaying theorists and social/cognitive-behavioural theorists who are correct as far as it goes. It's just that this needs expanding to cover all the manifestations of play. I suspect that even within the constraints of hypnosis as defined by some,there are still different games being played.
It is time to emerge from this pseudo world of our own imagination,in which we can stay satisfyingly immersed till the end of time. It's time for a new model and I think that Play, in all it's wider manifestations, proves the model which (as Bobby Fisher might have said) 'holds in all variations'.
If hypnosis is illusion then the things that follow from it, are delusion and the reality of what is really going on, is elusive. The answers are out there for the observant.
From James:
As a clinician who first got some training in hypnosis 30 years post-residency (psychiatry), I'm struck by Andrew Houston's observations on play. Having been beaten at chess by my cousin who played"blindfolded" (not viewing the board), and having watched Koltanowski play several blindfold games at once, I now wonder at the virtuoso capacity for dynamic imagery these minds possess. Does that, plus narrowing of focus, equal trance-in-play? On a lighter note, I recall a New Jersey physician defining masturbation as the thinking person's television...
E. James Lieberman, M.D.
George Washington U. Sch. of Medicine, Psychiatry and Esperantic Studies Foundation
A propos of nothing I am reminded of Omar Khayyam's quatrain (and here I quote from memory)
Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Master and sage and heard great argument
About it and about
But ever more came out
The door which in I went.
It is possible to be a scientist and not know what the words a priori and empirical mean. It is also possible to know the above and even the whole philosophy of science and yet not be a scientist. I argue that knowledge of the philosophy and techniques of science enables one to pretend or to play at being a scientist. I assert that this is exactly what has occurred within the community dedicated to scientific enquiry into hypnosis.
The physicist Richard Feynman described what he termed "Cargo Cult" science, a reference to events in Melanesia during the second world war, when the natives set up pretend airports and control towers in order to attract American planes filled with goods.
He said :
" So we really ought to look into theories that don't work, and science that isn't science.
I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw air planes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas -- he's the controller -- and they wait for the air planes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No air planes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land."
( from "Cargo Cult Science", Last chapter in "Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman" by Richard P.Feynman . Publ. Vintage 1992)
In our case too the planes don't land because we're only going through the motions of quasi-scientific study of hypnosis. We're not scientists - we're playing at being scientists. We don't recognise that our enquiry is illusory ( literally that which is in play ) and that is why it is elusive,ludicrous and riddled with delusion. I look forward to the day when some bright psychologist/anthropologist writes a paper equating the antic phenomena of Hypnosis, Religion and Play and demonstrates their equivalence. The answers lie not totally in the Psychology lab but also in a comparison of religion, cultural anthropology, sociology, drama, theatre and play. Our study of hypnosis is crying out for cross fertilisation from the above disciplines in order to rid it of cargo cult science.
For example, last summer I was in England and was talking about hypnosis to a young student of theatre . She described an exercise within one of the theoretical schools of acting which sounded very much like the Experiential Analysis Technique. Such a comparison might add some concrete to the EAT which would not otherwise be available if one stays entirely within the discipline of Psychology. A walk along the corridor to discuss hypnosis with a colleague from another department, might bear fruit.
From Mike:
Dear all,
I think Dr. Houston has made some good points.
I wonder if anyone can enlighten me on this. People who disagree over the nature of hypnosis carry out and publish their respective laboratory experiments which they say support their position and disprove opposing theories and claims.
Then their opponents assert that the methodology is flawed and the research doesn't discredit their theory at all. And so it goes on. And on. And on.
I have this REALLY GOOD IDEA. Why don't the opposing camps get
together BEFORE they carry out their experiments, and come to an agreement on
the appropriate methodology, procedure, analysis, etc. which will test which of their
respective theories is the correct one. (This approach is used when testing people who claim to have paranormal abilities, so afterwards, when (as it seems always to happen) they fail, then they can't claim that the experiment was unfair.)
Well, I did think it was a good idea, but when I put it to one of the most eminent academic and clinical authorities on hypnosis he said it couldn't possibly work because the opposing parties would never agree on what should be an appropriate experiment to test their theories.
Does this mean we all ought to go home and do something else?
Yours
Mike Heap
John has said elsewhere that Hypnosis is a delusion and in this he is quite correct. To delude someone is to "befool the mind or judgement of, so as to cause what is false to be accepted as true" (SOED Third Edition 1944) One is also deluded if one thinks that what is in Play is real. And that is, I think ,what happens in Hypnosis. One must therefore re-think the concept of Suggestion. To understand Suggestion one should witness children when they are negotiating a play scenario. One makes suggestions that the other agrees to and the other makes counter suggestions which are in turn agreed to. These decide how the game will be played.
Children typically start such conversations with " Let's make it that ..."
Hence make-belief.
In Hypnosis the play arrangements are - " Lets make it that I'm the hypnotist and you're the patient. You sit in that chair over there and I'll talk to you..etc etc."
This is how I make sense of the otherwise bizarre phenomena of hypnosis.
Regards Andrew
Etymology can be misleading. If I were investigating assassination it would probably be unhelpful to observe that the word assassin means literally "Hashish eater". The case for Delusion is different because here I think the etymology is crucial to an understanding of Hypnosis. It means literally "from play" and it is failure to take this insight seriously that results in much futile "research ". The research and statistics you do when you don't know what you're doing. ( to paraphrase Martin Seligman)
Let me make two predictions. If and when physiological markers are found for Hypnosis, the exact same markers will be found for Play.
If a "God centre" is ever found it will also turn out to be a 'Play centre"
Depth, dissociation (another unhelpful word), suggestions and relaxation can be just as much a feature of play as they can be of hypnosis
Dear Andrew,
Thanks. Also, Josie Hilgard in her classic work found relationships between hypnotizability and certain types of play (eg, imaginary playmates). The connection you are arguing for may well lie in absorption and fantasy involvement. You can explore the literature further through medline (www.nih.gov -- it is free access). Here is one of many references:
Correlates of hypnotizability in children: absorption, vividness of
imagery, fantasy play, and social desirability. AUTHORS: Plotnick AB; Payne
Regards
Prayer is easily understood. It is simply talking to an imaginary friend. A child who talks to an imaginary friend is playing. An adult who does it, is deluded. Hypnosis is a form of play, misunderstood - another delusion.
Readers who are interested might like to turn to my home page for a consideration of the whole issue of Hypnosis Religion and Play.
The first point I should make clear is that I am an excellent hypnotic subject and so it may strike you as odd that I should be arguing that hypnosis does not exist. I well remember my first hypnotic experience at Noosa in 1985. I came away from the experience feeling very different and there was this tremendous feeling of exhilaration at having overcome my paranoia and of having experienced something that I had not done for a long time. That "something" I now understand to be Play. There was a ripple effect on other aspects of my life.
Secondly I should also make it clear that I am an explicit atheist and that if I use the word god it is only for reasons of shorthand and explication and should not be taken as implying that such a thing exists.
The third point I want to make is that the words illusion and delusion derive from the Latin verb Lud