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.” The media is filled with articles whereby hypnotherapists are quoted as saying very similar things. In fact, in my experience, the vast majority of frontline hypnotherapists explain hypnosis in this way. Is it true though? Is it accurate?
It is this notion of us all supposedly having a subconscious/unconscious mind that I am writing in depth about today….
Is it actually just nonsense? Do these two minds actually exist separately from each other? Or is it, as some 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 students of Ericksons work, the existence of an unconscious mind is essential… They 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 why 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 used this model hugely throughout many aspects of my work in the early days of my career. Yet I see it being used by many whereby the therapist believes this is the truth and teaches their client to believe the same.
Many advocates of the conscious/unconscious model and train of thought tell me that it 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 can understand why some think it acÂceptable 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, many would believe there is no real harm done here and it extends our metaphor for understanding in therapy. This is often referred to as the iceberg metaphor, whereby the conscious mind is the tip of the iceberg and the vast resource beneath the surface is the unconscious mind.
When someone says to me “Your mind is like an iceberg” – I simply say; “no it isn’t.”
It is misleading and potentially problematic (Heap & Aravind).
I no longer discuss conscious and unconscious at all – I simply explain hypnosis (to my clients) as a mindset comprising certain attitudes, expectancies and assuredness – which then becomes a learnable skill. I have Barber’s evidence and Robertson’s resources to support that along with the support of virtually the entire academic fraternity of the hypnosis field.
I recommend reading Donald Robertson’s book ‘The Discovery of Hypnosis’ containing the works of James Braid, the creator of the field of hypnosis as we know it today. He (Braid) does not refer to a subconscious mind at all when he explains hypnosis. It is just not mentioned, let alone used to explain hypnosis – this is the man who created out field!!
“If you examine the depths of research in the field of hypnosis over the last century, from major contributors such as Hull and White in the 1930s and 1940s, Hilgard in the 1950s, Barber and Orne in the 1960s, those engaged in the theory wars of the 1970s such as Barber and Spanos and all the way up to the 1990s with authors such as Kirsch, Lynn, McConkey and Sheehan – none of them discussed the unconscious mind or suggest that hypnosis is a means for accessing the subconscious mind. It is not even mentioned.”
Eason, A (2013) The Science of Self-Hypnosis. Awake Media Publishing.
It (the notion of a subconscious mind) just has not forged a part of academics understanding of hypnosis. Neuroscience and cognitive scientists firmly dispute the notion of dualism – that of us having a conscious and subconscious mind. EEGs. FMRIs, PET scans show us much of interest in our field, but have still not discovered any centre of consciousness.
Our students leave our courses knowing both sides of the debate and are respected enough to subsequently make their own minds up about how and if they use such a notion in their professional work. If you are dogmatically entrenched in a single perspective without knowing the full debate, then you are doing the field and your own professional hypnotherapy career an injustice.
What I think is even more 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 that 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 examÂÂining 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 unknowÂable) 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 accurÂate 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 personally do not even think it is accurate or useful, and potentially misleading and problematic to use it as a metaphor and prefer alternate explanations of what hypnosis actually is that are supported by evidence.
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
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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? 🙂
Thanks for your contribution Adam – very much appreciated and enjoyed 🙂
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.
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.
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.
Yes it does exist. It has been called “the potentiator of the mind” and is paired with the “matrix of the mind”. the same holds true for the body and spirit. it is extremely common for people to confuse the potentiator of the body with the potentiator of the mind, since they work such close tandem. there are more aspects. I do not wish to give these metaphysical keys away, because surely the profane are listening, but with these key words you are invited to discover the source alluded to.
Hello ‘Cosmos’ – thank you for taking the time to add your thoughts on this subject. I’ll level with you here – I don’t really understand what you have written here so am struggling to debate or further the discussion with you. Stating “yes it does exist” and then following up with notions of “it has been called” – who is calling it these things? Is there any evidence to support the notions you present? Why would you take the time to write this on my blog but then state “I do not wish to give these metaphysical keys away”? … And with regards to your comment “with these key words you are invited to discover the source alluded to” – I simply do not understand what that actually means.
I’d love to discuss it, I value and welcome everyone’s contribution and am very open to learning more myself; I just need something a bit more substantial and substantiating from you. In the meantime, I send you my very best wishes, Adam.
Adam. Does that mean you find that all mental processes is inside our concious reach (deciting when to get scared, emotive etc.) and if not – What do you call what’s outside our concious awareness?
Best 🙂 Kasper
Hello Kasper,
There is a big difference between ‘doing things unconsciously’ and having something called ‘an unconscious mind’ with it’s benevolence, ultimate wisdom and it’s own set of characteristics. Just because we do things unconsciously, or out of awareness, this does not mean that we have an unconscious mind.
If you want to discuss it further: http://www.adamshypnosishub.com/topic/35/is-there-an-unconscious-mind
Best wishes to you too, Adam.
I think the article is great food for thought, fodder for feeding a great discussion, more like a bunch of quotes thrown together like a pile of puzzle pieces which don’t fit together as a whole but are each beautiful in their own way. I find statements or conclusions to be illogical or plain incorrect facts. For example, fact: James Braid said something but he was not the “creator of our field”. Hypnosis was being used back in the days of Ancient Egypt and beyond, in any case, long before James Braid was born, although it was called by a different name. In any case, just because someone is considered by many to be an expert doesn’t mean everything they say is true, nor that they know everything about the subject. For example, my father was a very talented professional musician, but never learned to read music. If he were the first musician historically, one might say he invented music, yet still wouldn’t have a clue what a sheet of music says. He played entirely by ear. And as for being the creator of the field, even if it were James Braid, usually the “creator of the field” knows less than the ones who follow. For example, in the earliest days, whomever invented cardiopulmonary resuscitation, I forget, but in the Civil War era, it used to be done by blowing tobacco smoke up someone’s rectum. Hardly the “inventor of CPR” who one quotes today. Not too many would want to be CPR certified in that method! The average person on the street understands CPR better today than the guy who invented it, and still CPR changes significantly over the past two decades alone. As for arguing conscious mind versus unconscious mind, nobody still can explain or define consciousness very well… so how to be sure what it is not? To me it is similar to the argument about “brain dead” or not. Look up the medical definition of “brain dead” and you will find that no experts agree and the legal medical definition of how to determine the state of mind “brain dead” varies across the USA so much so that were one to be determined “brain dead” on the west coast and then be driven to the east coast, the person would be considered legally “brain dead” or “not brain dead” alternately in every state the person crossed in the journey. You won’t find anyone in a hurry to give a definitive description either because it opens a whole can of worms about organ donations, because it raises the question of whether or not anesthesia should be administered while organs are being removed, because if one can perceive pain of organ removal surgery, how can one be considered brain dead? Yet many anesthesiologists will tell you that they recognize the biological manifestations of pain in “brain dead” people during organ removal surgeries. I personally believe that the unconscious mind is not located in the body at all so it is very much separate from the biological “brain” and I believe my idea, that it is non-physical, yet still explains why PET scans can light up in hypnotic states even though it’s a non-physical unconsciousness causing it to light up, but this would be a whole new article to explain why, so I won’t do that here, now. I’m just saying what happens in PET scans during hypnosis doesn’t mean anything about hypnotism to me.
Hello Deborah,
Firstly, thank you for taking the time to respond as you have done.
Re: For example, fact: James Braid said something but he was not the “creator of our field”. Hypnosis was being used back in the days of Ancient Egypt and beyond, in any case, long before James Braid was born, although it was called by a different name.
I think many would consider what was being done in Ancient Egypt and subsequently right up to Mesmerism to be ‘historical precursors’ rather than full blown hypnosis as we know it today. I do not think they were doing hypnosis per sé. Dream temples, chanting, Mesmeric states are some way away from the hypnosis that Braid researched and concluded as the art and science of suggestion. He coined the term hypnosis, an adaption of the word neurypnology as it originally was. I think it therefore makes sense for me to refer to him as the creator of the field of hypnotism. However, I’d happily refer to him as the ‘Father of modern hypnotism’ instead 🙂
I suspect that much of what we’d subsequently discuss here would also come down to the way in which we conceptualise hypnosis. I for one do not explain it in terms of being an altered state of consciousness, neither did Braid, and neither do the vast majority of researchers and academics who have explored this field.
Re: In any case, just because someone is considered by many to be an expert doesn’t mean everything they say is true, nor that they know everything about the subject.
I agree. I agree absolutely, though I have not once suggested that anyone “knows everything” about this subject. On the contrary, I doubt I will ever come close to knowing everything about this field and continue to happily research it, write about it and mine it – all of which I’ll be happy doing for the remainder of my days. I do love this field.
Re: And as for being the creator of the field, even if it were James Braid, usually the “creator of the field” knows less than the ones who follow.
Again I agree, however, the field of hypnosis is famous for having a huge amount of myth and misconception spread about it and many still explain hypnosis in ways that are a far cry from what Braid had intended. In fact, I think there are a great many frontline hypnotherapists who still today proliferate much myth and misinformation about the field and who are wholly ignorant of the depth and breadth of evidence and research we have, evidence that I think Braid would be pleased about.
Re: I personally believe that the unconscious mind is not located in the body at all so it is very much separate from the biological “brain” and I believe my idea, that it is non-physical,
You have stated that you ‘believe’ this. I think the field of hypnosis would benefit greatly, really greatly, if we were to separate beliefs from facts. Or in the absence of full scientific facts, that we at least attempt to separate our beliefs from what the best evidence would suggest. Believing something does not make it true, that is ‘critical thinking 101.’
Re: yet still explains why PET scans can light up in hypnotic states even though it’s a non-physical unconsciousness causing it to light up, but this would be a whole new article to explain why,
I’d love to read such an article and would love to read the sources supporting this theory. Some of what you say here does fly in the face of what many neuroscientists have demonstrated, so again, I’d love to read any article that disproves that and will happily yield in the face of strong evidence that favours what you have written here.
I do appreciate the analogies you have given in your reply, but I think they are non sequitur and I am not sure if they are wholly relevant. So I have not responded directly to them. You are right, the article is a tad jumbled, and was not really attempting to be exhaustive on the topic or to give a full on answer to the questions it poses, it was meant as stimulus, especially when so many hypnotherapists believe in the notion of an unconscious mind.
I’d also add that I do not think hypnosis is really anything to do with consciousness or altered states of consciousness, I am well known for having a leaning towards a sociocognitive explanation towards hypnosis, where it is a cognitive skill set, and not really anything to do with intangible ‘trance states.’ That said, I’ll repeat myself, I am not attempting to be ‘right’ or ‘correct’ and will always yield in the face of better evidence that supersedes where I am at or what I have researched myself prior to now.
Heck, this is a contentious issue, mainly because so many hypnotherapists are so invested in the idea of an unconscious mind – their training told them this and they have explained hypnosis this way for a long time. This type of theme that I wrote about here (some years ago now, I hasten to add) tends to ruffle feathers as a result. Some of the points you have made here do run the risk of promoting much of the myth and misconception that plagues our field.
Finally, just because people do not agree on points, does not mean they cannot be friends. This goes for the entire hypnosis field. As I wrote earlier, I really appreciate you taking the time to write and share your thoughts which I respect greatly, I send you my very best wishes, Adam.
No- there is not a “sub conscious mind’, within or without hypnosis. There is only consciousness, non-consciousness and memory.
You know that you are conscious, you feel that you are in the act of knowing because the subtle imaged account that is now flowing in the stream of your thoughts exhibits the knowledge that your proto-self has been changed by an object that has just come become salient in your mind. You know that you exist because the narrative exhibits you as protagonist in the act of knowing.
Within consciousness is the core self and the autobiographical self. At a non-conscious level is the proto-self.
The core self is the first basis for the conscious you are a feeling. It comes from the non-conscious proto-self that is in the process of being modified within the account of that which established the cause of the modification. (The feeling of knowing). (Damasio, 1999) The proto-self is an interconnected and temporarily coherent collection of neural patterns, which represent the state you are in moment by moment, at multiple levels of the brain, at a non conscious level.
The core self is transient but some residue remains after many emergences of core self. We have a vast memory capacity and the fleeting moments of knowledge in which we discover our existence are facts that can be committed to memory to be categorized and related to other memories of the past or the anticipated future. This develops in the autobiographical memory.
Thanks for your amazing article adam.
I want to ask.
if the unconscious mind does not exist, is positive affirmation have any scientific prove?
And
If unconscious does not exist then why we can breath without consciousness and why our heart still can pump our blood without our will?
Is that mean, that sigmund freud theory about unconscious mind is wrong?
Thankyou adam.
Hello Taufiq,
We can and do may things automatically and without thought. We are able to do many things without thinking about doing them – yes, we do many things unconsciously. These are actions and processes that we are doing beneath awareness. This is not being disputed.
I dispute that there is such a thing as “an unconscious mind” – a thing which is at the centre of it all doing all of these things for us. I dispute that it is a “thing” that has characteristics and is some kind of all-wise, all-seeing benevolent force within us. I dispute that nominalising or objectifying and creating a mythical unconscious mind. There is no evidence to support this.
Additionally, even if there were such a thing, what does this have to do with hypnosis? Bo academics or researchers or neuroscientists ever refer to an unconscious mind to explain hypnosis or the way the mind works.
With regards to Freud – his theories are just that – theories. They are greatly questioned. As far back as the early 1960s, researchers such as Hans Eysenck offered up a great critique of Freud’s explanation of mind and the way his therapy worked and today, most credible authors I have encountered tend to regard his work and contribution as pseudoscientific.
Go research it for yourself, you’ll come up with the same answers when you do so 🙂
With my very best wishes to you,
Adam
Great read, Adam. Thoroughly hypnotized me because I, too, love the field. Have you read any publications by Sid Koudier at http://www.lscp.net/persons/sidk/ to prove that the unconscious mind exists? Have you read John Bargh’s new book, Before You Know It, on amazon.com? Also, you might enjoy reading his articles at https://acmelab.yale.edu/. After reading the studies, the unconscious brain exists in different routed and rerouted neural pathways in the brain. The overall effects of neural activities may be the mind? Harari proves in his book, Homo Deus, that God does not exist, we do not make conscious decisions and that machines, robots, and biotechnology will overtake the world. It’s all subconscious. So really, are we living an illusion? 😉 Good reading!
Hello Pierre,
Thank you, I am aware of some of what is presented by the authors you recommend – evidence of us processing unconsciously is not evidence that we have “an unconscious mind” – I concur that we do much unconsciously, but there is no really evidence to suggest that we have a centre of consciousness in the way that is presented by many hypnotherapists.
Nobel award winning psychologist Daniel Kahnemann makes similar points that we have systems of cognitive funations, one that is beneath conscious awareness – again, I do not dispute this.
I dispute that there is a nominalised, objectified “thing” that is an unconscious mind and that is somehow a benevolent, all-wise, all-seeing force for good residing within us. As is characterised by many hypnotherapists. There is no evidence to support this premise.
And yes, I am often confronted with the notions that we are living an illusion, and that we lack free will because what we are doing this exact second was decided upon within our brain 10-20 seconds ago and science proves this to be true too.
However, what on earth any of this has to do with hypnosis, hypnotherapy and my field is beyond me. I am no neuroscientist and do not profess to be so. As a hypnotherapist and hypnosis lecturer, I simply dispute that most of this premise and related ideas and contest greatly what they actually have to do with hypnosis – very little in reality 🙂
Thank you for taking the time to write this, it is greatly appreciated. Best wishes, Adam.