I was very stimulated by Adam Crabtree’s article, and also a little embarrassed. I am always preaching to colleagues that you should be sensitive to the implicit and cultural assumptions you make, so how in the world could I have been so blithely ignorant of the cultural assumptions built into the process of defining hypnosis by biased lists of phenomena? I began reading extensively in the hypnosis literature as a young man, and by the time I was in my second (...) year of college was quite well-informed about what was known at that time. I had seen many lists of hypnotic phenomena, and while intellectually I questioned the idea of “Authorities” in general—what young person doesn’t?—at that age I was still pretty accepting that the Authorities1 on hypnosis knew what they were talking about. I was aware that modern writers on hypnosis prejudicially left out any mention of the apparent parapsychological aspects of hypnosis, but I assumed they were otherwise accurate. (shrink)

In his paper Hypnosis Reconsidered, Resituated, and Redefined (JSE 26(2):297–327), Adam Crabtree, a distinguished expert in the history of hypnosis, maintains that contemporary hypnosis research suffers from conceptual disorder. In his words, he attempts to redefine hypnosis in order to provide a stronger ground for future research. We find that his proposed reconsideration of hypnosis as a form of “trance” characterized by a focus on internal stimuli and involving the recruitment of appropriate subliminal resources is neither novel nor helpful to (...) our current understanding of hypnosis. Among the problems we find with his paper is that it is conceptually unclear and is not informed by current research and theory; for instance, it disregards well-established findings such as individual differences in responsiveness to hypnosis and the importance of suggestion for the elicitation of hypnotic phenomena. Historical knowledge of a field is invaluable but is alone insufficient to understand its current status or propose pathways for future research and theory. Keywords: hypnosis—trance—suggestion. (shrink)