A Study in Hypnosis with an interview with E.R.Hilgard

A study in hypnosis; director of Stanford's Laboratory of Hypnosis Research for more than 20 years, Hilgard paved the way for the growing respectability of hypnosis - interview with Ernest R. Hilgard
Psychology Today, Jan, 1986 by John Wolkes

A Study in Hypnosis

Two hundred years ago, pioneering hypnotist Franz Anton Mesmer was hounded out of the unsympathetic scientific communities of Vienna and Paris for his experiments in "animal magnetism.' Today, hypnosis is solidly established in medical schools and research universities throughout the United States and Europe. Much of the present respectability of hypnosis, as well as much of the new knowledge in the field, can be credited to Ernest R. Hilgard, Stanford University professor emeritus of psychology. The past quarter-century of research in hypnosis has been strongly influenced by work done at Stanford's Laboratory of Hypnosis Research, which Hilgard founded in 1957 and directed until 1979.

Two years after he opened the laboratory, Hilgard and a colleague, Andre Weitzenhoffer, produced the most widely used experimentally derived scales for measuring hypnotic susceptibility. Those scales, later refined, have provided the foundation for a wide variety of studies in hypnotic response, including Hilgard's own and those of his wife, Josephine Hilgard, an emerita professor at Stanford and a well-known researcher in the field of hypnosis.

talked with Hilgard for two mornings in his sunlit Stanford office overlooking the entrance to the university's main court, around which the sandstone Spanish colonial buildings of the original campus are arrayed. When I arrived for our first meeting, he was sitting at his portable typewriter, finishing up the last of 3,000 references for his forthcoming book, a history of psychology in the United States, to be published this year by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. In an open-necked shirt, casual slacks and loafers, he was as vigorous and enthusiastic as a graduate student. At 81, he has been president of the American Psychological Association and the International Society of Hypnosis, and a member of the Stanford faculty for more than half a century.

Hilgard's path to Stanford should relieve anyone of worry about changing career fields. He received his undergraduate degree in chemical engineering from the University of Illinois at 20 and published his first scientific paper on spontaneous combustion in coal. His next stop was Yale Divinity School, where he found that he could handle philosophical and ethical matters with as much success as science and mathematics. Underlying all his intellectual interests, however, had been an unquenchable curiosity about human motivation, so after a year of religious and philosophical study, he turned his attention to experimental psychology. He earned his Ph.D. at Yale University in 1930.

Although it was another 27 years before he began his research in hypnosis, he already felt constrained by the strict behaviorist approach favored by researchers of the 1930s and 1940s. "We psychologists were afraid of people as human beings in those days,' he said. "Human problems were too sticky. We wanted something we could study physiologically. We wanted to look like other scientists.'

In the early 1950s, Hilgard's prominence as an experimental psychologist with broad interests was recognized by the Ford Foundation, which selected him to head a committee, in collaboration with the Social Science Research Council, to design a comprehensive mental-health program. The Ford Foundation granted $15 million for the program. Dubbed "Hilgard's Atomic Bomb' by his colleagues, the program contained a provision for systematic study of hypnosis. "No one came in for the hypnosis money,' Hilgard explained, "so I requested some of it for my own research.' With it he founded Stanford's Laboratory of Hypnosis Research. For instruction in how to hypnotize and for the "lore' of hypnosis, he brought in Weitzenhoffer, a former stage hypnotist who had gone on to complete a doctorate in psychology. Thus began what Hilgard calls "the most baffling and the most satisfying part of my career.'

John Wilkes

Wilkes: Stage hypnotists have always aroused my skepticism. Are their acts entirely genuine?

Hilgard: Yes, in most cases they're bona fide, although some exaggerate a bit. Responsive people can be hypnotized quite readily, and a really good stage hypnotist chooses the most likely subjects and has them do the kinds of things that experienced hypnotists know they'll do. He'll get a large number of volunteers, then do a few simple tests with them: He has them all sit, hold out an arm, close their eyes and pretend they're hypnotized. He'll say, "All right, now your arm is stiff and you can't put it down.' A few arms will stay up. That's pretty good test of hypnotizability, if their arms will stiffen that quickly. So he picks those people to go on with, and has them do some simple things like fishing off the edge of the stage and making the motions of pulling in a fish. Or he might tell them they're naked, and they'll clasp their hands over their genitals.

I remember one stage hypnotist's assistant who thought it was all fake. One evening his boss was ill, and he took over. He had watched the performance so often he executed it flawlessly and was surprised when the people really became hypnotized.

Wilkes: So it takes no special talent to hypnotize a person?

Hilgard: The qualities that make for a successful hypnotist are very, minimal. We have found that a great variety of people, even people who speak only broken English, can successfully hypnotize people. Hypnosis is a technique, like using a stethoscope, and what you do with it is more important than the routine skill. You have to develop ways of responding to someone who can't be hypnotized at all, to let him go away without feeling frustrated. And you have to learn what to do to make sure the highly hypnotizable people come out of it. But once you've developed the technique, anyone can use it--if not always wisely. It's noteworthy that psychologist Martin T. Orne and some of his colleagues wrote a script to be read aloud as a group scale for testing hypnotizability. It was read by a radio personality who had a good voice but who knew nothing about hypnosis. He just read the words with proper expression, and it worked.

Wilkes: What does "hypnotic response' refer to, exactly? That is, what are the mechanisms of hypnosis?

Hilgard: One is the muscular action that is controlled psychologically, such as the gradual lowering or raising of the arm in response to hypnotic suggestion. We've done studies which show that the hand of a hypnotized person moves up at the same rate that it moves down--gravity has nothing to do with it, in other words. We call this phenomenon "psychomotor action.' The 19th-century psychologist William James called it "ideomotor response.' James discovered that if a person in hypnosis kept the thought of a movement very strongly in mind, and blocked any contradictory thoughts, that thought would tend to lead to the movement. He described the phenomenon as well as anyone ever has.

Another mechanism of hypnosis is hallucination. There are two basic types: positive and negative hallucination. In the first, in the case of visual hallucination, you see something that isn't there; and in the second, you don't see something that is there. For example, you can imagine a rat running around on top of my desk if you're not hypnotized, but you won't actually see it. Under hypnosis, the imagination is augmented to the point that, if you're highly hypnotizable, you'll perceive the rat as real. An example of negative hallucination would be my suggesting to you, when you were hypnotized, that this tape recorder did not exist. You would then look right at it without being able to see it.

A third mechanism of hypnosis is that activities, especially acts of the imagination, seem effortless. For example, I had a student who was very clever at inventing stories, even without being hypnotized. He was a natural fiction writer; give him a setting and he'd begin spinning a tale. If I told him he was back in the days of ancient Rome, he would imagine himself down in a big, dusty pit, using a heavy wooden mallet and a long steel chisel to quarry stone for St. Peter's Cathedral. Then he would be climbing a roped-together scaffold to look closely at the fit of the blocks in the new wall. In hypnosis, he would develop the same sorts of stories, but without any awareness of his making them up, of looking ahead and constructing them.

Wilkes: What about the physiological mechanisms of hypnosis? Do electroencephalograms show anything special going on in the brain during hypnosis?


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Hilgard: Split-brain studies have shown marked differences in operation between the right hemisphere and the left. In the hypnotic state, the right hemisphere--the one associated with spatial perception, musical ability and the imagination in general--is the more active. As my wife, Josephine, found in her studies of personality and hypnosis, people who have a rich fantasy life from childhood onward tend to be highly hypnotizable, and EEG tests show that in hypnosis their right hemisphere is more active than their left. The phenomenon is complicated by a number of factors, though. The main one is that highly hypnotizable people, even when they are not hypnotized, generally show more right-hemisphere activity than do people with little talent for hypnosis. So we're not sure whether we're measuring fantasy or hypnosis. But evidence is accumulating that hypnosis augments the activity of the right hemisphere.

Wilkes: What predicts a person's hypnotizability?

Hilgard: Josephine found that the ability to absorb oneself in fantasy is the most important factor. Highly hypnotizable people are able to set ordinary reality aside for awhile and become deeply immersed in reading, music or whatnot. We've had hypnotized people imagine listening to a phonograph record, and when we tell them the record has stopped, they get on their knees and beg it to go on. But it's temporary; it can be turned off. It's the kind of flexibility seen in a physicist who writes science fiction.

Wilkes: Just how vivid are these hypnotic hallucinations?

Hilgard: Suppose that I introduce a stranger, John, to my hypnotized person, Ben. Then I say, "Ben, when you open your eyes, John will be sitting in that chair next to you.' If I have signaled John to stay where he is--in a chair on the other side--Ben, if he is hypnotically responsive, will see John sitting in the empty chair. I'll say, "Tell me about him. What's he wearing? Ask him some questions and tell me what he says.' Ben will give a detailed account.

Now, people who are only moderately hypnotizable have no trouble telling that the person seen in the empty chair is hallucinated. They'll say, "Oh, I can see right through him.' It's as if they were seeing a ghost. They simply accept this circumstance as being real, with the ghostlike figure moving around and talking. But if they're very responsive to hypnosis, they don't see the hallucinated person as a ghost. They can't see through him, and they can go over, feel his hand and say it's warm.

Wilkes: The prospect of losing control of one's mental processes to that extent is a bit scary to me. Can a hypnotized person be induced to commit a crime?

Hilgard: No, not unless you're a criminal to start with. You don't really do anything that's against your basic value system. If you're instructed to do such a thing, you simply come out of hypnosis. For example, if you ask a person to strike someone else with a paper dagger, he'll do it. Give him a real dagger, and he'll drop it.

A standard case of this goes back to the 19th century. Pioneering French psychologist Pierre Janet reported that medical students once asked a hypnotized nurse to take her clothes off in front of their group, and she came out of hypnosis. That can't always be counted on to work, however, as a colleague of mine at UCLA discovered. He was going to demonstrate the Janet experiment for a class, but when he asked the hypnotized young woman to take off her clothes, she began to unbutton her blouse. It turned out that she worked as a nightclub stripper. He stopped her, of course.

Wilkes: Do some people resist hypnosis altogether?

Hilgard: One of the cliches in hypnosis is that nobody can be hypnotized against his will. But as with all cliches, you add a footnote. In this case you say that people can sometimes be tricked into hypnosis. When someone is resisting hypnosis, you can have him bring in a friend who does these things very naturally. The person wants to do some of the same things and gradually may become hypnotized.

Wilkes: Can people really learn to hypnotize themselves?

Hilgard: Many people, once they have been hypnotized successfully, readily learn to hypnotize themselves. Some people are even more successful at self-hypnosis than they are at being hypnotized by another person. I remember one subject who simply hated being told what to do. When he was taking flying lessons his instructor yapped at him constantly, and he became nauseated. But when he flew solo, he felt no nausea at all. Under hypnosis, too, he got a little nauseated while the hypnotist was controlling him. But he learned to hypnotize himself quite successfully--with no symptoms of disturbance.

Incidentally, the use of self-hypnosis is therapeutically very valuable. If you want to control a headache or something of that sort, you don't have to run back to your hypnotist. You can just do it yourself.

Wilkes: How effective is hypnosis for curing people of bad habits, such as smoking?

Hilgard: If you're really determined to do it, hypnosis can strengthen the will in a beneficial way. It's not automatic, though. You can't trust hypnosis to cure you of all your desires. One old method that was used to stop people smoking was to tell them that cigarettes taste bitter. That doesn't work because it wears off. The scores on hypnotic cures are mixed, but it's established that they can work for people who are moderately hypnotizable. Highly hypnotizable people tend to accept the magical solution when hypnotized, yet may have difficulty integrating it with ordinary experience.

Wilkes: What else can hypnosis be used for?

Hilgard: One of the most promising uses is in the control of pain. Using experiments involving immersing a subject's arm in ice water or stopping circulation with a tourniquet, we found that people's ability to reduce their awareness of pain correlated directly with their hypnotizability. Hypnosis doesn't actually reduce the physical reactions involved in pain, however-- only the subject's awareness of it, as our experiments showed. That finding initially frightened some people. They thought that people under hypnosis in surgery were feeling a lot of pain after all. The patients were really registering the pain, yes, but not feeling it--they weren't suffering. The distinction is essential, because the hypnotized person who registers pain without suffering will not go into shock as people in pain sometimes do (see "Medical Mesmerism,' this issue).

Wilkes: How would you compare hypnosis and meditation?

Hilgard: They're not the same thing at all, though they require some of the same qualities. In standard Zen meditation, for example, you don't want to be interrupted by instructions, whereas hypnotized subjects wait for the hypnotist to tell them what to do. In meditation, you empty your mind; but under hypnosis you can figure things out, make a speech and do all kinds of things.

Wilkes: What if you faked a hypnotic state? Could you fool a hypnotist?

Hilgard: If someone really wants to fake hypnosis, it's very hard for even an experienced hypnotist to tell the difference. One wishes a little light came on in the subject's temple to show when he was hypnotized. But there's no physiological sign of it, not even the degree of relaxation. You have to rely on the general honesty of people. For instance, you'll hypnotize someone and say, "Your hands are moving together. Pretend you have magnets in your hands that are pulling your hands together.' And their hands will gradually move together. Then you'll ask them, "How was it?' And they'll say, "It didn't seem to be happening, so I just kind of started it a little bit. Then all of a sudden it took over, and my hands moved by themselves.'

Those reports are so honest and, after you've done as many experiments as I have, so convincing--especially the puzzlement the subjects show looking back over the experience-- that you don't have any doubts. It's hard to put this in a way that will satisfy the skeptic. But if you just assume everybody's lying from the start, you don't find out anything.

Wilkes: If a trained hypnotist can't tell if a subject is faking, then I would expect some psychologists to question whether there is really such a thing as a hypnotic trance.

Hilgard: There was a group calling themselves the "nonstate' theorists and the rest of us the "state' theorists. The "nonstate' theorists wrote the word "hypnosis' in quotation marks; for them, it didn't signify anything very different from fantasy or "believed-in imagination,' in the words of Theodore Sarbin, a pioneer in the development of scales for measuring hypnotic susceptibility. They held that if you believed in these things enough, you'd do everything a hypnotized person would, and yet not be in a special state.
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Their arguments became very sophisticated, yet it had always been clear to me that you can't explain the successful use of hypnosis in surgery by saying the patients are just gritting their teeth and trying to please the hypnotist.

The division between "state' and "nonstate' seemed to me too simple, a verbal dodge. So to counter it I went back to the concept of dissociation, which Janet introduced in the 19th century. Here's an example of dissociation: Imagine yourself driving along in your car and carrying on a spirited conversation with a friend. You'll stop at the traffic lights, but you might miss your turn. The part of you that's driving the car is dissociated from the part that's talking. So you can have a couple of tracks going on at once, even if you're not at 100 percent efficiency in either of them.

Wilkes: Can you give me an example of dissociation under hypnosis?

Hilgard: Sure. When you do hypnotic age regression--ask someone, say, to go back to the first grade in school--some subjects will describe their childhood experiences vividly and minutely yet will say afterward that they felt their adult self present somehow, watching everything. One woman relived a time when she was a little girl and got separated from her grandmother in a large, busy department store. She said afterward, "It's funny. I felt so sorry for that little girl crying there, but I knew from the beginning she'd find her grandmother and would be all right.'

Wilkes: Dissociation--the ability to operate a mentally on more than one level at a time--would seem an excellent nonmystical way to describe the hypnotic state. Given that definition, it's not surprising that people who are able to involve themselves in fantasy have a talent for hypnosis. Are there any qualities linked with hypnotizability that have surprised you?

Hilgard: There have been some surprises, yes. When Josephine and her colleagues were trying to predict which students would be most hypnotizable before they were hypnotized, they found it very difficult. Many seemingly plausible predictors just didn't work. For example, they assumed that the hypnotist became a parental figure to the subject. So subjects who had good relationships with their parents and had developed a basic trust in people should be most highly hypnotizable. That couldn't be demonstrated. As a matter of fact, some of those who had received severe physical punishment in childhood turned out to be more hypnotizable than some who had been raised on kindness. That's probably because they had learned early to escape into fantasy to avoid pain.

Also, you would expect gullibility to be a good predictor, and it isn't. You'd think that people who respond strongly to advertising, or who are openly suggestible in social behavior, would be more highly hypnotizable, but they aren't. There's a degree of suggestibility in hypnosis, to be sure, but it's not gullibility. Hypnotizable people are quite rational in most of their relations in life.

Wilkes: It's interesting that gullibility correlates poorly with hypnotizability. What's behind partly mental medical treatments such as acupuncture and the placebo effect?

Hilgard: The correlation of acupuncture with hypnosis is positive; that is, the people whose pain can most successfully be controlled by acupuncture tend to be the most highly hypnotizable ones. Acupuncture isn't hypnosis, but much of the success of acupuncture depends on suggested factors. A recent study has shown that confidence in acupuncture-- before it is tried--is related to its success in reducing pain.

On the other hand, hypnosis doesn't correspond much to the placebo effect. A placebo usually puts the effect in the object--a pill, a liquid or something--whereas the hypnotizable person really prefers to do it himself. He doesn't readily accept magic inherent in some object, such as a pill. The placebo effect is a form of gullibility, and hypnotic people like a kind of "rational magic.'

Wilkes: How can magic be rational? Aren't you using a verbal dodge here yourself?

Hilgard: Let me give you an example. Let's say you're suffering from lower back pain that you can't control by direct suggestion. I can hypnotize you and tell you to make the palm of your hand numb--that's easy for a hypnotizable subject to do. Then I'll tell you to transfer the numbness to the small of your back, by rubbing it with your hand. Now, of course the numbness doesn't just go from the hand to the back. But trying to put it there helps you to concentrate on the same kind of process that made your hand numb. It will make the small of your back numb, too, if you concentrate enough. That's the rational magic. You can see that rubbing your sore back is a help in any case. It's a little deceptive, but it's no affront to your personality. That's why I use the word "magic.' If it works, the fact that a little magic is combined with science isn't offensive.

COPYRIGHT 1986 Sussex Publishers, Inc.
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