William James Symposium WILLIAM JAMES and HYPNOSIS; a Centennial Reflection John F

PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE William James Symposium WILLIAM JAMES AND HYPNOSIS; A Centennial Reflection John F. Kihlstrom^ and Kevin M. McConkey^ "University of Arizona and ''Macquarie University Like many other early psychologists, orders of consciousness—as observed, search, and left a legacy of 142 unper- William James was fascinated by hypno- for example, in the "somnambulistic" formed experiments that would make a sis and related phenomena. For James, states of hysteria and delirium. serviceable grant proposal even today. hypnosis was both an experimental tech- Soon after publication of the Princi- Except for its use as an adjunctive nique for creating divisions of conscious- ples, hypnosis entered the modern pe- technique in psychotherapy, interest in ness, and a laboratory model of natu- riod of its history, which brought the in- hypnosis waned in the years surrounding rally occurring disorders of awareness. terest of psychodynamic psychiatry in World War II. But beginning in the late James' treatment of consciousness in unconscious mental life in contact with 1950s and early 1960s, there occurred a hypnosis presages contemporary inter- the interest of experimental psychology virtual explosion of activity, with the es- ests in dissociation and implicit cogni- in methodological rigor and quantifica- tablishment of several major laboratories tion, and underscores the role ofthe self tion (for comprehensive reviews, see devoted to hypnosis research (for an in conscious mental life. At the same Hilgard, 1987; Shor, 1979). At the very overview, see Sheehan & Perry, 1977). time. James recognized the complexity beginning, this period was marked by a At Stanford, the laboratory led by E.R. of hypnosis as an interpersonal process. high level of clinical activity centered Hiigard and J.R. Hilgard conducted sys- In the end. James' views suggest how a around Morton Prince, James' colleague tematic investigations of individual dif- rapprochement between the cognitive at Harvard. Prince founded both the ferences in hypnotizability, their corre- and social approaches to hypnosis might Harvard Psychological Clinic and the lates, the hypnotic control of pain, and be achieved. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psy- many other topics. Other laboratories chology (now the Journal of Abnormal were established at Harvard and later at Psychology). The Clinic declared the in- Pennsylvania, by M.T. Orne; at the The suggestion-theory may therefore dependence of personality and abnormal Medfield Foundation near Boston, by be approved as correct, provided we psychology from psychiatry and medi- T.X. Barber; at Sydney, Australia, by grant the trance-state as its prerequi- cine; the Journal was the first periodical J.P. Sutciiffe; and at Berkeley, by T.R, site. (William James, 1890/1981, p. devoted to experimental psychopathol- Sarbin. Interest in hypnosis remains 1201) ogy, and served as the prime venue for high, and nearly all of the currently ac- the publication of clinical and experi- tive investigators in the field can trace Like many other psychologists at the mental studies of hypnosis—a tradition their intellectual lineage more or less di- tum ofthe century, including Pavlov, Bi- that continues today. rectly to to one of these major enter- net, Janet, and Freud, James was fasci- In 1923, a surge of experimental work prises. nated by the phenomena of hypnosis and began with a Harvard doctoral disserta- related states. With his students in the tion by P.C. Young (supervised by THE MAJOR PHENOMENA Harvard Psychological Laboratory, he WiUiam McDougaii), consisting of 21 ex- carried out experiments on sensory and periments on various aspects of sensa- OF HYPNOSIS motor functions in hypnosis; and he em- tion, perception, and memory. Later, ployed hypnosis in the investigation and James construed hypnosis as a social Henry Murray, Prince's successor at the interaction in which one person (the hyp- treatment of certain cases of mental ill- Harvard Psychological Clinic, instigated ness that came to his attention. For notist) offers suggestions to another (the a series of studies relating hypnosis to subject) for experiences involving alter- James, hypnosis was the technique of personality functioning. Other investiga- choice for creating divisions of con- ations in perception, memory, and vol- tors, such as George Estabrooks (at Col- untary action. In his discussion of these sciousness in which two or more streams gate) and Milton Erickson (at Worcester of thought proceeded simultaneously, "symptoms of the trance," James cov- State Hospital), also developed exten- ered all the classic phenomena: ideomo- one in awareness, the others not. For sive programs of hypnosis research. The this reason, James considered hypnosis tor and challenge suggestions, positive early phase of modern hypnosis research and negative hallucinations, age-regres- to be a sort of laboratory model for the culminated in Clark Hull's massive pro- investigation of naturally occurring dis- sion and other delusions, posthypnotic gram, largely carried out at Wisconsin, suggestion, and posthypnotic amnesia. and leading to 32 published papers and In discussing the sensory alterations in- many more unpublished experiments, all duced by hypnosis (grouped under the Correspondence and reprint requests to: of which were summarized in his book John F. Kihlstrom, Amnesia and Cognition broad category of anesthesia), James Unit, Department of Psychology, University (Hull, 1933). Hull introduced the concept noted that hypnotic analgesia is powerful of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721. of hypothesis testing to hypnosis re- enough to employ in surgical proce- 174 Copyright © 1990 American Psychological Society VOL. l.NO. 3, MAY 1990 PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE John F. Kihlstrom and Kevin M. McConkey dures. And he correctly discounted pur- search concerned with the effects of hyp- a state of affairs is not possible given ported demonstrations that hypnotic nosis on learning and memory. theories of the mind that identify con- suggestion can coerce antisocial or self sciousness with attention, and the higher injurious behavior. He was also aware, mental processes involved in perception, as many others of his time were not, that COGNITION AND ALTERED memory, and thought (Kihlstrom, 1987). all the effects of hypnosis are the result CONSCIOUSNESS IN HYPNOSIS The problem continues to vex psychol- of suggestion, and that little or nothing of James was quite clear that the phe- ogy today, as seen in the current contro- interest happens if subjects are merely nomena of hypnosis represented disrup- versy over the limits of preconscious se- given a hypnotic induction without fur- tions of the monitoring and control func- mantic processing. ther intervention or instructions from the tions of ordinary waking consciousness. James wrestled with this paradox, but hypnotist. In the case of hypnotic anesthesia (by he did not solve it. Based on the doctrine Occasionally, James' description which he meant the abolition of felt sen- of esse est sentiri (to be is to be sensed), went wide ofthe mark. For example, he sation in any modality, not just tactile), James held that the idea of unconscious appears to have thought of posthypnotic he noted that they were frequently con- thought was a contradiction in terms. amnesia as a spontaneous, rather than tent specific—for example, it can be sug- But he was equally clear that conscious- suggested, phenomenon. Perhaps for gested that the subject is blind to one ness—thought—could be divided into this reason, he repeatedly identified hyp- object, or one class of objects, but not two or more streams. Each stream of nosis with sleep and somnambulism—a others. In a clever series of demonstra- consciousness is identified with a self reasonable error, given the fact that the tions, James suggested blindness for a that can engage in the full range of men- analogy with sleep gave hypnosis its single line drawn on a sheet of paper. tal life. However, only one self can be very name. And while he made passing When the retinal image of the line was represented in phenomenal awareness at mention ofthe difficulties encountered in doubled by means of a prism, the subject any time; the others may be thought of as hypnotizing young children, the mentally was able to see the duplicate but not the dissociated. The self that is accessible to ill, and the mentally retarded, James original; when the prism was removed, awareness at any given moment may be largely failed to appreciate the impor- the duplicate disappeared from view. thought of as primary, the others second- tance of individual differences in hypno- Nevertheless, the subject was able to see ary, tertiary, etc. Thus, in contemporary tizability (Hilgard, 1965b)—a fact that other lines subsequently drawn around terms, infonnation can be processed by plays a critical role in contemporary re- the original; and when the unseen line these dissociated selves that is unknown search, whatever the predilection of the was incorporated into the drawing of a or unappreciated by the primary self. In investigator. new object, it was seen clearly. order to avoid the negation of conscious- By and large, however, James' de- On the basis of evidence such as this, ness implied by the adjective "wncon- scription of hypnosis would seem famil- James inferred that such effects were not scious." James preferred to speak of iar to any contemporary observer. One sensory in nature. Of the anesthetized "co-conscious" or "•5'«/?-conscious" mark of the advances made by the field subject, James concludes: mental states. over the past 100 years is the develop- Like Janet, on whose work he drew, ment of a large experimental literature He has felt it, but not perceived it. ... James believed that such a division in that attempts to understand these effects [PJaradoxical as it may seem to say so, he consciousness, so dramatically apparent and their underlying mechanisms using must distinguish it with great accuracy ... in in cases of hysteria and multiple person- the conceptual and methodological tools order to remain blind to it.

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