1. Induction, Trance and Suggestion
Written on Aug 18, 2025
Hypnosis is usually an interaction between one person - the 'hypnotist' - and another person (or sometimes a group of people) - the 'subject'. The hypnotist makes suggestions to the subject about what they are doing, perceiving, thinking, and feeling. The subject's responses to these suggestions are experienced as realistic and as occurring automatically, without deliberate effort or conscious strategy to achieve the desired effect.So when, for example, the hypnotist suggests that a subject will feel less pain while their hand is immersed in icy water, the subject is not aware of, say, distracting themselves at the time. Similarly, with a suggestion of amnesia for some information. And when the hypnotist suggests that they are reliving an incident from childhood, it may seem very real to them - the experience simply 'just happens'.
When I started training in hypnosis in the late 1970s, the dominant theory - at least in clinical practice - was that responsive hypnotic subjects were in an altered state of awareness in which they were highly suggestible. This altered state, referred to as a 'hypnotic trance', was thought to result from the hypnotist conducting a 'hypnotic induction', usually consisting of verbal suggestions of relaxation and the focusing of attention by the subject on the hypnotist's voice and the ideas and images being suggested.
Thus, 'being in a trance' provided an explanation for the subject's greater suggestibility following the hypnotic induction. However, there was never any agreed or coherent account of what this trance actually was. It was assumed that one day a neurophysiological account would emerge from studies of brain activity in subjects during hypnosis. More on that in a later blog.
Meanwhile, it was becoming apparent - through behavioural studies of hypnosis - that the enhancement of responsiveness to suggestion following an induction was, overall, quite modest, if it occurred at all. Moreover, there appeared to be a limitless number of induction procedures that achieved the same enhancement in suggestibility as the traditional 'trance-inducing' methods. The conclusion of these findings is that the key ingredient of any effective induction procedure is its ability to enhance the subject's commitment and their expectation of a positive response to the suggestions that follow.
The results of this research have been used by some to support the claim that 'hypnosis does not exist', but this is not the case. What it does mean is that whatever the utility of the concept of the hypnotic trance, it is not useful as an explanatory device for what constitutes the hallmark of hypnosis - namely, enhanced suggestibility.
Future reflections: More blogging on the ramifications of all this to follow in due course.
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