Introduction: The Unconscious Mind

There is a long history of discussions of mediumship as related to dissociation and the unconscious mind during the Nineteenth Century. After an overview of relevant ideas and observations from the mesmeric, hypnosis, and spiritualistic literatures, I focus on the writings of Jules Baillarger, Alfred Binet, Paul Blocq, Théodore Flournoy, Jules Héricourt, William James, Pierre Janet, Ambroise August Liébeault, Frederic W.H. Myers, Julian Ochorowicz, Charles Richet, Hippolyte Taine, Paul Tascher, and Edouard von Hartmann. While some of their ideas reduced mediumship solely to intra-psychic processes, others considered as well veridical phenomena. The speculations of these individuals, involving personation, and different memory states, were part of a general interest in the unconscious mind, and in automatisms, hysteria, and hypnosis during the period in question. Similar ideas continued into the Twentieth Century.

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Social Constructionism and the Role of the Unconscious in Hypnotic Responding: A Single Case Experiment

Behaviour Change ◽

10.1375/bech.28.3.156 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 28 (3) ◽

pp. 156-163

Author(s):

David P. Fourie

Keyword(s):

Social Constructionism ◽

Cognitive Process ◽

Single Case ◽

Alternative View ◽

The Unconscious ◽

Socially Constructed ◽

Wide Acceptance ◽

The Subject ◽

Unconscious Mind

AbstractThere seems to be wide acceptance by both professionals and lay people that hypnotic and especially hypnotherapeutic responding is based on the long-standing but still hypothetical dichotomy between the conscious and unconscious minds. In this simplistic view, hypnotic suggestions are considered to bypass consciousness to reach the unconscious mind, there to have the intended effect. This article reports on a single-case experiment investigating the involvement of the unconscious in hypnotherapeutic responding. In this case the subject responded positively to suggestions that could not have reached the unconscious, indicating that the unconscious was not involved in such responding. An alternative view is proposed, namely that hypnotherapeutic responding involves a cognitive process in which a socially constructed new understanding of the problem behaviour and of hypnosis, based on the client's existing attribution of meaning, is followed by action considered appropriate to the new understanding and which then confirms this understanding, leading to behaviour change.

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