Is There Such a Thing As An Unconscious Mind In Hypnosis?
Posted on January 29, 2010 in Uncategorized | 5 Comments
Today I read with interest a mini citing of hypnotherapy as useful for overcomning a germ phobia in this article in the Telegraph.
In this article, hypnotherapist Bonita Rayner-Jones is quoted as saying:
It seems that your son has OCD, an anxiety disorder that commonly develops during adolescence. Cognitive hypnotherapy can help overcome the disorder, as it connects with the subconscious to rework patterns of thoughts and behaviours. Rationalising any ‘catastrophising’ thoughts can also help as they lead to anxiety and a feeling that everything is beyond your control.
It is this bit that I am particularly interested in: “it connects with the subconscious to rework patterns of thoughts and behaviours.”
Any regular human being, or someone outside of the therapy field surely is likely to think “what the heck does that mean? It’s gibberish.”
It is this notion of us all supposedly having a subconscious/unconscious mind that I am writing in depth about today….
As any follower of my work will see, in my books, audio programmes and in much of my therapy, I refer to the unconscious and conscious minds… Over the years, the rationale of clinical hypnosis has depended very much on this simple dualistic representation of the human mind – the conscious and the unconscious.
Is it actually just nonsense? Do these two minds actually exist separately from each other? Or is it, as I tend to favour as a theory, a simple metaphor to help us illustrate hypnosis in action?
First up, here are a couple of quotes from respected people in the hypnosis field:
The conscious mind is the part of the mind which thinks, feels and acts in the present . The unconscious mind is a much greater part of the mind, and normally we are quite unaware of its existence. It is the seat of all our memories, our past experiences, and indeed of all that we have ever learned. In this respect it resembles a large filing cabinet to which we can refer in order to refresh memory whenever we need to do so.
Hartland, 1971, p 13.
Because of the dual nature of the human mind (i.e. conscious and unconscious) memories and details that may have been repressed or else simply escaped detection by the conscious mind may not have escaped the unconscious mind.
Yapko, 1990, p 74.
In essence, Erickson … viewed the interspersal technique to consist of two components:
1) fixation of attention on the conscious level, followed by
2) appropriate suggestions to the unconscious.
Otani, 1990, p 41.
Erickson: Your unconscious knows how to protect you …. Your unconscious mind knows what is right and what is good. When you need protection, it will protect you.
Erickson & Rossi, 1979, p 296.
For those of us that have been followers and admirers of Ericksons work, the existence of an unconscious mind is essential… We often refer to the resources of the unconscious mind, and being able to rely on the unconscious mind to make changes happen… Isn’t that a bit of a cop out though? And wh is it that so many people who use this metaphor think it is actually real?
From a wide variety of writings in hypnosis literature, there emerges a model of unconscious phenomena that seems to be mapped out as truth. From this school of thought, we learn that the unconscious mind is the larger part of the human mind, the other, much smaller part being the conscious mind, and assumptions are typically made that:
- The unconscious mind controls autonomic actions, those things that we do that we believe to be habitual, automatic and compulsive, as well as emotional and so on.
- The unconscious mind is a vast storehouse of memories, learning, skills and emotions too.
- The unconscious mind has great knowledge and wisdom.
- The unconscious mind processes information in a way different to the conscious mind.
- The unconscious mind communicates purposefully with the person’s conscious mind and to other individuals.
- It receives communications from the person’s conscious mind and from other individuals.
- It protects the conscious mind: that is, it acts intentionally to promote the well-being and survival of the individual.
These are common elements that are believed by proponents of the unconscious mind. Then when we come to the field of hypnosis, it goes another step forward. It is then believed that hypnosis enables us to:
- Communicate with the unconscious mind.
- Ask or direct the unconscious mind to do certain useful things.
This notion leaves me a little bit worried at times… Can there be any potential problems with this way of thinking?
There does not necessarily have to be, I mean I use this model hugely throughout many aspects of my work. Yet I see it being used by many whereby the therapist believes this is the truth and teaches their client to believe the same.
This model and train of thought can provide a rationale for treatment, that is, a simple metaphor to illustrate what we do in the therapy room, but they are not necessarily valid explanations of what is actually going on.
Therefore, I think it acceptable within the context of therapy to tell our clients, for example, that we are ‘implanting suggestions deep in your unconscious mind so that they work for you in the future.’ Ok, there is no real harm done here and it extends our metaphor for understanding in therapy.
What I think could be problematic is when hypnotherapists like the one I quoted right at the beginning here today say things like hypnosis ‘connects with the subconscious to rework patterns of thoughts and behaviours‘ because it tends to suppose that once you have left the therapeutic relationship, this working model of the mind is literally and universally accurate. They treat it as if this is empirical truth and that we all have two totally separate minds doing totally separate things.
That the mind is divided into these two parts, the conscious and the unconscious, is an oversimplistic and potentially very misleading idea and one that unnecessarily limits our progress in understanding human psychology and hypnosis in particular. Let me explain…
Ok, so anyone who has studied NLP and the language patterns contained therein, will know about nominalisations. A nominalisation tends to be a verb that we have turned into a noun. Someone might say they got many ‘learnings’ from the training, rather than saying they learned a great deal, for example.
We all tend to commonly say that we have thoughts, ideas, memories, images, perceptions, and so on. Like they are things we can carry around in a wheelbarrow. We say such things as ‘I have just had an excellent idea‘; ‘I had a great thought today‘; ‘I have a vivid image of this person‘; and ‘I have happy memories of my childhood‘.
In reality, what we are describing here are activities that we have engaged in. Processes that we have just done. It is more appropriate to say that we think rather than that there are things called thoughts that we have. Likewise, we imagine rather than have images. We remember rather than have things called memories. When we stop remembering, the memories do not go anywhere. They are not stored away as files are stored in a filing cabinet. Though it may seem that way when we do the process of remembering… And I have used that metaphor of the filing cabinet often in therapy.
Ok, to illustrate what I am ranting about today, take the example of a physical activity taht you do regularly, such as shaking hands. Whilst you are shaking hands, you might say that you are ‘doing a handshake’. You might refer to ‘the handshake’ and describe ‘it’ in various terms — ‘a firm handshake’, ‘a wet handshake’, ‘a welcoming handshake’, ‘a meaningful handshake’, and so on. But this does not make the action of shaking hands any more real.
Once you have stopped shaking hands, you would not ask where the handshake has gone to and then start examining your hands to see where it went or if it is stored there. When you later shake hands again, you would not then ask whether the same handshake has been retrieved, or if it is a different handshake, would you? (Don’t say yes to be obnoxious!)
Exactly the same reasoning should be applied to the activities of thinking, remembering, imagining, and so on. All of these are represented by neural activities that are, in an as yet unknown (and maybe ultimately unknowable) way, associated with the conscious experiences that we call ‘having memories, thoughts, images, and so on’.
Suppose that, having decided you have done enough reading for the moment, you switch off your computer and go and do something else. However, later on, you start to think about some of the ideas that I have written about here. Surely you can only do this if there is something, some representation of this material — a memory — that exists in your mind and which you retrieve, when you decide to, as you would draw a file from a filing cabinet?
We can say that this is so ‘only in a manner of speaking’, but a more accurate and potentially less misleading description is to say that, as you are reading this, neurobiochemical changes are occurring in your brain that enable you, in the future, to engage in the activity of recalling this material.
But do not these observable neuronal properties constitute your memory of this information? Recall again the example of shaking hands. An anatomist may perform a careful examination of a person’s arm and hand and, from its macro- and microanatomical properties, conclude that indeed the arm is designed to shake with ease. Put energy into it and it cannot fail to do the handshake process. But nowhere in the arm will the anatomist locate ‘a handshake.’ It is not a thing that exists, is it?
So what relevance does this have to the concept of the unconscious mind? In a few words… It is simply that the unconscious mind does not exist. There, I said it.
That said, hypnotherapists can work very well with this metaphor to understand and help people in distress. But it is only a metaphor, a tool that is at the disposal of hypnotherapists, to use as and when they feel it will assist their therapeutic desirable outcome.
I tend to think it best then, to conceive of hypnosis itself as something that people do, rather than something that people are in, or under, or come out of, and so on. it still gets me having to bite my tongue when people refer to ‘going under’ when talking about hypnosis – under what exactly?
I think that is enough for today… Next week, I am going to offer up what I believe to be some really good alternatives to the notion of the unconscious mind… In the meantime, have a marvellous weekend :-)
References:
Erickson M H, Rossi E L 1979 Hypnotherapy: An exploratory casebook.
Hartland J 1971 Medical and dental hypnosis in its clinical applications.
Heap M and Aravind K 2002 (4th edition) Hartland’s Medical and Dental Hypnosis
Otani A 1990 Structural characteristics and thematic patterns of interspersal techniques of Milton H Erickson
Yapko M D 1990 Trancework
The whole of reality as we (commonly assume) it to be is a model or series of sensory artefacts that science is proving are far less real than assumed for sanitys sake – modeling is a necessary (”conscious mind”) survival instinct – one that we hypnotists routinely explode in deep trance.
For hypnotherapy to need a base model to function is as necessary as the more celebrated and often less effectual “medical model”. It is, en soi, solely the base from which to stage the play – further analysis may be meaningless.
In the end, as the saying goes, it’s results that count, and hypnosis has barely begun to scratch the surface of its potential to do what science has long held impossible. Long may that continue, and long may the base of our model be as simple as “all reality is subjective – let’s treat you on that basis”.
Fine piece of epistemology Mr Eason – a sojourn in ancient Greece in your tours of the multiverse? :)
Posted by Adam on 2nd February, 2010 at 5:48 am.
Thanks for your contribution Adam – very much appreciated and enjoyed :-)
Posted by Adam Eason on 2nd February, 2010 at 8:06 am.
I have followed your work closely and do admire the quality and content of your work. I have always wondered, however, why you use only 2 levels of the mind-conscious and unconscious. I have always believed that there are three levels-conscious (normally beta and high alpha brainwaves) subconscious (typically beta and theta brainwaves) and unconscious (delta brainwave level) where only the brain-stem is functioning to keep the body alive but no thinking or dreaming takes place. In fact, I believe this to be a necessary state for without delta sleep (an unconscious mind) the brain is deprived of this necessary state and without it results in problems like insomnia and sleep-apnea.
Posted by Stan Pontiere on 5th February, 2010 at 1:54 pm.
Whether or not the Unconscious mind physically exists, I believe that it practically or logically exists. In the early days of multiprocessing in computers we had foreground processes that interacted and changed in real time with the human user – akin to conscious processes, one might say – and background processes that just ran pre-programmed routines to process things like payroll, accounts and stock control. These background processes included decision making routines based on the historical experience of the programmers and the business processes – effectively a map of the business. That sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
The other thing that’s particularly interesting is that the background processes in these computers used up most of the available computing capacity and ran as fast as the computer physically allowed. The foreground processes were originally found to take significantly less processing power overall, because they were dependent on the real time responses of the human beings involved. However, as programming skills increased these foreground processes became more and more flexible and complicated and, as a results, slower and more resource hungry. Again this sounds familiar when we think about the apparent relative speed of conscious and unconscious actions.
I’ve been reading an interesting article in New Scientist about a recent study that explains why the good cowboy often shot the bad cowboy first in a gunfight because rather than despite the good cowboy letting the bad one draw first. The study proved that the goody’s reaction time to seeing the baddie start to move his hand was faster than the baddy’s action time to draw and shoot. Maybe this is because the baddy’s making a slower conscious action and the goody’s executing – an appropriate term, perhaps – a much faster unconscious reaction. If that’s correct, then this research seems to support the argument for differences between the conscious and unconscious. You can read the article at http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18463-draw-the-neuroscience-behind-hollywood-shootouts.html.
So does any of this support the notion of us having distinct conscious and unconscious minds? I think that depends on whether you are talking about multiple minds or multiple brains. The original computers had just one central processors and the foreground activities were free to compute while the background processes were waiting for data to be transferred to and from the, in computing terms, considerably slower tapes, disks, printers, etc. A single central processor effectively ran multiple foreground and background programmes. So it’s not too difficult to think of a single physical brain running both conscious and unconscious “minds”.
Continuing the computing analogy, when computers started to have multiple central processors, the foreground and background programmes could generally use whichever processor was available when they needed it. However, certain basic functions had to be run on specific processors to allow the system to function effectively. In those early days, the individual disks, tapes and printers could only be connected to a single processor, much like our individual ears, eyes and limbs are connected to the left or right sides of our brain. In addition, individual processors could be dedicated to handling particular programmes or clients. Again, not unlike the way certain functions of the mind like language are generally handled by one side of the physical brain. In neither case does it mean that the other side of the brain or the other processor couldn’t do the job just that it was set up that way. In the human brain we have the concept of plasticity to allow reconfiguration of processes between left to right hemispheres in the event of damage. Similarly, multi processor configurations were able to switch dedicated processes to other processors if one failed.
Phew, I hope that wasn’t too technical and I know that it’s going a bit far to compare the early multi-processor computers to the human brain. However, it does provide an analogy for how a multi-processor physical human brain can functionally deliver radically different conscious and unconscious minds.
For us hypnotists, I feel that what matters most is that we understand the different ways that the brain runs programmes – what we call conscious and unconscious minds or processes. Practically, it’s also useful to know, for the specific client in front of us, which physical hemisphere of their brain executes the processes we traditionally associate with the Right and Left Brain functions.
Posted by Andrew Fogg on 6th February, 2010 at 2:41 pm.
Thanks for your input Stan, very much appreciated. I suspect that much of this is down to semantics and differences in the notions of what should be included within our terminology. I enjoyed reading your own thoughts as to what should and should be considered within any model of understanding.
Andrew – what a wonderful and considered response… I like your defence of the unconscious mind ‘logically’ existing and I thoroughly enjoyed reading the article, very good indeed.
I think most importantly, we need to consider what we tell our clients and what they are led to believe by our description of how the mind works and functions, in relation to themselves, their therapy and the field of hypnosis. So it is a valuable debate.
Posted by Adam Eason on 8th February, 2010 at 3:46 pm.