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International Journal of Clinical

and Experimental Hypnosis
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Reflections on Some Unresolved

Issues in Hypnosis
Theodore R. Sarbin

University of California, Santa Cruz

Published online: 16 Feb 2007.

To cite this article: Theodore R. Sarbin (2005) Reflections on Some Unresolved Issues in
Hypnosis, International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 53:2, 119-134, DOI:
10.1080/00207140590927581
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Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 53(2): 119134, 2005

Copyright Taylor & Francis Inc.
ISSN: 0020-7144 print
DOI: 10.1080/00207140590927581

REFLECTIONS ON SOME UNRESOLVED

ISSUES IN HYPNOSIS1

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THEODORE R. SARBIN2

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University of California, Santa Cruz

Abstract: Reflections guided the author in the preparation of this

paper. Having worked in and around the construction hypnosis for
two thirds of a century, he can claim the privilege of offering reflections rather than presenting new data or revised theories. His reflections include some autobiographical accounts that help illuminate
how he came to construe the conduct traditionally subsumed under
the hypnosis label as the enactment of a social role mediated by skill
in imagining.

Reflections, the initial word in the title, served as my guide in the

preparation of this paper. Having worked in and around the construction
hypnosis for two thirds of a century I can claim the privilege of offering reflections rather than presenting new data or revised theories. My
reflections include some autobiographical accounts that help illuminate how I came to construe the conduct traditionally subsumed under
the hypnosis label as the enactment of a social role mediated by skill in
imagining (Sarbin, 1950; Sarbin & Coe, 1972).

REFLECTIONS ON IMAGINING, AS IF,

AND HYPNOTIZABILITY SCALES
My first involvement in hypnosis, in 1937, was in response to a plea
from a fellow graduate student, Joseph Friedlander, to help him in
developing a scale for assessing the depth of hypnosis. We succeeded in
creating such a scale with acceptable psychometric properties (Friedlander
& Sarbin, 1938). At that time, both of us held the belief, consistent with
what has come to be called a special mental state theory, that the
Manuscript submitted November 3, 2004; final revision received November 3, 2004.
1
Invited address prepared for delivery to Division 30 at the 112th annual convention
of the American Psychological Association, Honolulu, Hawaii, July 28August 1, 2004.
My thanks to Gerald Ginsburg for stimulating conversations some of which are reflected
in the text; to Ralph Carney, John Chaves, Helen Crawford, and Karl Scheibe for their
critical reading of an earlier draft; and to James Council for supplying me with materials
from his 2002 APA presentation.
2
Address correspondence to Dr. Theodore R. Sarbin, 25515 Hatton Road, Carmel,
CA, 93923. E-mail: trs85@aol.com
119

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THEODORE R. SARBIN

observed phenomena could be attributed to the hypnotic trance.3 Like

nearly all researchers, we were impressed with the apparent disjunction
between the relatively benign stimulus conditions, i.e., talk, and the
often dramatic contranormative responses, i.e., catalepsies, age regression,
memory deformations, posthypnotic actions, dissociations, analgesias,
and so on. Our scale included exemplars of tasks that invited the subjects to perform such contranormative acts. The prevalence of psychological theories that flowed from Cartesian mentalism facilitated
explanations that a postulated mental state intervened between the
experimenters verbal instructions and the performance of the
observed dramatic effects. It was assumed that the effects were happenings presumably under the control of the mental apparatus. This
assumption had no place for the subject being an agent.
I have found it useful to construe instances of hypnosis as episodes
with a temporal feature. I employ the term episode to convey that the
phenomena under study must be located along a time line. The proximal
region of the episode contains contranormative acts such as age regression, catalepsies, posthypnotic acts, changes in sensory responses,
amnesias, analgesias, and measurements of internal bodily conditions,
including brain scans. The history of mesmerism and hypnotism
makes clear that observations of the proximal serves as the central feature of the episode around which theories have been formed. The distal
features include identifiable skills of the subjects and their expectancies
derived from media and other cultural sources. Distal features include
Table 1
Hypnosis Episode Involves Both Proximal and Distal Features
Proximal Features
Contranormative Acts (catalepsies, eye closure,
finger interlock, etc.)

Self-reports (pain, amnesia, hallucination, etc.)

Bodily Changes (including brain scans)

Distal Features
Cultural Beliefs
Meanings of Induction
Discourse
Embodied Imaginings
As If Skills

3
It is sometimes argued that the trance states observed by ethnographers provide a
warrant for applying the term trance to the contranormative behavior of hypnosis subjects.
The reports of members of some Native American tribes, for example, who practice the
vision quest can be understood in terms of imaginings and expectancies, reinforced by
fasting, sleeplessness, and fatigue. Other groups ingest plant extracts that have pharmacological properties. Explanations of such trance states would benefit from incorporating
what we already know about dramaturgical constructions and about the psychology
and sensory physiology of attention and disattention.

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beliefs that have been transmitted over at least the last 2 centuries. The
distinction between proximal and distal regions of the hypnosis episode
is necessary in order to evaluate current theories that rely primarily on
electrophysiological measurements. Such theories tend to emphasize
the proximal and to downplay the contribution of the distal features of
the hypnosis episode.
In the early 1940s, I was centrally involved in research that
attempted to show the reality of hypnosis. By this time, most researchers
had accepted the interpretation that performances such as contractures, catalepsies, posthypnotic suggestions, and so on did not require
a hypnotic induction and were no longer credible warrants of the postulated hypnotic state. Rather than continuing to employ contranormative
acts as the proximal exemplars of the hypnosis episode, researchers
turned to exploring more subtle ways of demonstrating the proximal
features. One path was to use hypnosis interventions to modify bodily
processes; another was to assign credibility to self-reports of subjective
experience such as hypnotically induced analgesia and hallucinations.
To show how a shift in emphasis from the proximal to the distal
redirected my sensemaking of the hypnosis episode, I review some
work in which I participated some 60 years ago. This account illustrates how paying attention to the distal features contributed to the formulation of a nontraditional theory. Many contemporary researchers
and clinicians continue to support variants of Cartesian mentalism in
focusing their attention on the proximal features of a hypnosis episode,
such as brain scans and self-reports of contranormative experience,
and minimize or ignore the distal features, such as the degree of skill in
using as if formulations or the agentive effects of the meanings conferred by the subject on the hypnotists discursive acts.
Beginning in the 1930s, numerous experiments demonstrated that
traditional responses such as catalepsies and other motoric phenomena
could no longer serve as the diacritica of hypnosis. Such traditional
responses could be elicited without the intervention of the hypnotic
induction and, on the prevailing theory, without the adoption of the
causal properties of the hypnotic trance. In addition, the spectacular
growth of interest in psychosomatic medicine was a contextual factor
that influenced researchers to turn their attention to studying the
effects of hypnotic suggestions on physiological processes.
The belief is still prevalent that changes in bodily processes, including
measurements of cerebral activity, provide a convincing demonstration
of the validity of the claim that the hypnotic trance is more than a
poetic metaphor. For example, some experimenters, on the basis of a
statistical association between EEG tracings and hypnosis, proclaimed
the reality of hypnosis as a cerebral function. In 1938, Flanders Dunbar
published a compendium on psychosomatic research, summarizing
numerous clinical and laboratory studies that demonstrated the effects

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of psychological conditions (including hypnosis) on somatic processes.

In most of the studies reviewed, subjects were regarded as without
agency. Unbridled enthusiasm for the demonstration of mind-body
relations obscured critical flaws in methodology such as the absence of
control groups, the failure to recognize base rates, and implied generalization from single-case studies.
Within this historical context, I participated in a study of the effects
of hypnosis on a specific physiological processgastric hunger contractions. The research was carried out in collaboration with Dr. Julian
Lewis, a research professor in the medical school at the University of
Chicago. Dr. Lewis had had experience with the balloon manometer
procedure for recording stomach contractions, having himself been a
subject in A. J. Carlsons famous experiments on hunger conducted
early in the 20th century (1916). Subjects learned to swallow a balloon
to which a small-bore flexible tube had been connected. The other end
of the tube was attached to a recording device. The balloon was then
inflated. Stomach contractions compressed the inflated balloon and
were recorded on a spring-operated kymograph.
The subjects came to the laboratory in a fasting condition. We first
established the subjects pattern of contractions. During a session in
which the subject had been hypnotized and tested on the FriedlanderSarbin scale, he or she was instructed to eat an imaginary meal of preferred food items. The details of the study need not concern us save to
report a substantial relationship between the scores on the hypnotizability
scale and inhibition of the gastric contractions (Lewis & Sarbin, 1943).
We concluded that gastric hunger contractions were inhibited most
frequently in subjects who scored high on the Friedlander-Sarbin scale,
less frequently in the moderately hypnotized subjects, and not at all in
the nonhypnotized subjects. Implied was the claim that hypnosis was
the antecedent condition for producing the physiological effects. Our
findings could have been cited as support for the special-state theory of
hypnosis. Figures 1 and 2 are from the Lewis and Sarbin (1943) article.
After the publication of our research, a serendipitous event made it
necessary to restrain ourselves from unqualified support for the specialstate theory. In preparing for a study of pain control, I retrieved the
notebook that we had used in the study of gastric hunger contractions.
This notebook contained qualitative notes written by Dr. Lewis
describing the behavior of the subjects during their eating a fictitious
meal. Impressed with the findings as shown in the kymograph tracings,
we failed to consult the qualitative notes. A belated review of the notes
revealed that the subjects who were the best responders had engaged
in attenuated eating movements during the fictitious meal. Smacking
of lips, swallowing, and chewing actions were noted for the responsive
subjects but not for the unresponsive subjects. This serendipitous finding
suggested that the agentive behavior of the subject was a more likely

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Figure 1. A typical pattern of contractions without hypnosis. The staircase effect is the
typical ending to the contraction cycle.

Figure 2.

Total inhibition of the contractions during the eating of an imaginary meal.

antecedent for the inhibition of gastric contractions than the undefined

hypnotic trance. We speculated that the motoric acts set off peristalsis,
a condition closely connected to the inhibition of gastric contractions.
These qualitative findings influenced us to change our theoretical

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stance. The observed embodied imaginings that were performed by

the subjects led us to conclude that the inhibition of gastric contractions followed from a doing rather than a happening attributed to an
undefined mental state.
Our published paper was consistent with the tradition of focusing
on dramatic outcome variables, the end result of a complex social psychological sequence defined as a hypnosis episode. Our failure to
incorporate the data contained in the behavioral notes followed from
the traditional practice of placing emphasis on the proximal features of
the episodethe modifications of the gastric contractionsand not
attending to the distal antecedent and concurrent conditions.
The serendipitous finding sensitized me to explore more fully the
distal region of the hypnosis episode. I was guided by the question:
What are the antecedent conditions for the contranormative performances that for a century or more had attracted the attention of psychologists and physicians, not to mention entertainers and self-styled
magicians?
Before suggesting answers to the question, I point to a bit of history
that throws some light on the development of criteria for hypnosis.
The last century witnessed the efforts of psychologists to develop
scales that purportedly measure hypnotizability more reliably than the
clinical judgment of the experimenter. As I mentioned before, in an
attempt to construct a scale with acceptable psychometric properties,
Friedlander and I borrowed items from two brief scales that had been
created a decade earlier. (Parenthetically, the Friedlander-Sarbin scale
served as the basis for the widely used scales developed by Weitzenhoffer and Hilgard in 1959.) Hypnotizability scales contain invitations
for performances that have emerged as the defining criteria for hypnosis.
Performing such acts as eye closure, finger interlock, brushing away an
imaginary fly, hearing someone calling the subjects name, posthypnotic acts, etc. became the criteria for experimenters to identify subjects
in terms of the degree of responsiveness. (Some writers, incidentally,
continue to use the word, susceptible, reflecting adherence to a perspective that the subject is without agency.) If we look upon hypnosis
as a conception that arose from identifiable cultural conditions
and upon the subsequent creation of scientific assessment scales, we
cannot avoid the inference that hypnosis and hypnotizability are social
constructions.
What is the origin of the performances that make up these scales? At
the time of Anton Mesmer and the magnetizers on the European continent, the criterion performance was a crisis, something resembling a
bodily seizure. In England at the time of James Braid (1843), the criterion
performance was a set of actions resembling sleep. Neither of these
performances has survived as a criterion for hypnosis, although drowsiness is sometimes included in the induction. What have survived are

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contranormative tests such as contractures, catalepsies, hallucinations,

etc. I suggest that these criteria emerged from two sources: The first
was Jean-Martin Charcot (1889), the distinguished French neuropathologist, who invited performances that resembled the behavior of
patients diagnosed with hysteria, such as contractures, sensory anomalies,
and catalepsies. These performances were consistent with his theory
that hypnotic phenomena were forms of artificial hysteria. The second
source was the entertainment world: entertainers of various stripes;
traveling magicians; circus sideshows; self-styled hypnotists; and
authors of fiction, most notably George duMaurier (1894) who created
a novel about an evil hypnotist, Svengali, and the victimized Trilby
(about which more will be said later). Entertainment goals, whether in
a circus sideshow or in a novel, could not have been achieved had not
the subjects dramatically performed the contranormative acts suggested by the hypnotizer. To the general public, the contranormative
acts performed under the apparent power of the hypnotizer became
the criteria for a purported state that first carried the label mesmerism
and later hypnotism. Through the process of cultural diffusion, beliefs
about the remarkable powers of hypnotism filtered into the public
lore. Psychologists and medical practitioners were not immune from
the unexamined and uncritical acceptance of hypnotism as the mental
or cerebral base for remarkable contranormative feats. Like most
recent scale developers, Friedlander and I failed to inquire into the
social origin of the contranormative items the performance of which
served as markers for hypnosis.
From my present perspective, I would defend the proposition that
the construction of hypnotism or its antecedent, mesmerism, would
never have taken place had there been no observed disjunction
between the dramatic qualities of the contranormative responses and
the benign qualities of the stimulus events as presented in the form of
ritualized talk.

REFLECTIONS ON THE HYPNOTIC INDUCTION AS AN

INVITATION TO ACT AS IF
A discourse analysis of the hypnotic induction would lead ineluctably to the conclusion that the hypnotic induction is an invitation to
engage in imaginal behavior, to adopt a dramaturgical set, to act as
if. Some inductions are explicit in conveying the request to act as if
you are reading a good book or watching a movie. The sentences are
sufficiently ambiguous to allow for interpretations that are guided by
prior and concurrent beliefs. The folklore about hypnosis together with
the ambiguous (sometimes contrary to common sense) instructions
provide the background for the performance of an identifiable role
the social role of the hypnotized subject.

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Cartesian mentalism in modern dress is not the only thought model

available to students of silent and invisible processes. An alternative
view construes human beings as active, exploring, inventing, doing
creatures, instead of being the envelope of a passive mind. Human
beings, within limits, construct their worlds. Our constructions of reality
depend upon the skill to function at various as if levels. This skill
makes it possible to distinguish between self-reports that reflect ordinary
perception (I heard my mother calling me), imagining (It is as if I
heard my mothers voice), and metaphor (I heard the voice of conscience). This hierarchy of hypothesis-making skills liberates human
beings from the constraints of the immediate environment. With this
as if skill the subject can interact both with observable events and with
fictively constructed events that may be spatially distant and temporally
remote.
The behavioral act of constructing fictional objects and events is the
referent for as if or hypothetical construction. Such an act can occur
only when the person has achieved some skill in using fictions, such
skill following from the acquisition of sign and symbol competences.
My reference to skill entails the implication that the subject of the
experiment is an agent, unlike the implication of using the vocabulary
of mental states. The as if skill, like all skills, is variable from person
to person and from time to time. It remains to be seen whether the skill
is exclusively a product of practice, as in Josephine Hilgards observations
of book-reading habits of subjects who score high on hypnotizability
scales (1979) or Sarbin and Lims observations of the superior as if
skills of drama students (1963) or of Joseph Juhaszs observations of
students engaged in multiple forms of imagining that he identified as
hypothetical instantiations (Juhasz, 1972).

REFLECTIONS ON THE EMBODIMENT OF IMAGININGS

My theoretical efforts over the years have taken as a starting point
that to act as if, i.e., to imagine, is to perform acts that are embodied.
I employ the term, embodiment, to refer to the bodily actions that constitute the subjects attenuated role taking during his or her participation
in the hypnosis interaction. If the hypnosis setting were to involve the
subject in a story of sadness, for example, embodiments would be
experienced such as a lump in the throat, tears, postural adjustments,
facial displays, and asynchronies of speech. Such attenuated actions
generate proprioceptive sensory inputs in the musculature, sensory
inputs that make their way to the brain and become part of the complex
electrophysiological activity that is monitored by high tech imaging
machines. This formulation suggests that brain scans are the proximal
effects of the embodied imaginings that are part of the distal features
of the hypnosis episode. With few exceptions, theorists who base their

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explanations exclusively on proximal data give little attention to the

distal features of the episode. In a discipline that still privileges worldviews based on Cartesian mentalism, the exclusive attention to the
proximal region of the hypnosis episode, in continuity with the exclusive
attention of 19th-century scientists to dramatic contranormative acts,
facilitates the adoption of mental-state explanations. The thrust of my
argument is that electrophysiological measurements, not unlike my
early kymograph tracings, reflect embodied imaginings rather than the
existence of a mysterious mental state transformed into the vocabulary
of brain architecture.
What are the psychological events that intervene between the induction and the often-profound behavioral effects? In the report of the
18th-century commission that investigated the validity of the claims of
the early magnetizers, the imagination was cited as the process that
intervened between the magnetism story and the enactments of contranormative acts. Some contemporary answers reframe the observation
as the subject projecting himself or herself into the hypnosis drama.
The observation invites metaphors such as trance and absorption. These
are colorful descriptive metaphors but contribute little to our understanding of the psychological processes that lead to being entranced or
absorbed. These descriptive metaphors are not primitive terms, therefore it becomes necessary to explore the psychological parameters of
imagining.
Note my use of the gerund imagining rather than the substantive
imagination. The term imagining connotes an active process, something
the imaginer does. In contrast, the substantive imagination suggests a
thing-like entity or a property of the mental apparatus.
My constructions bear a strong resemblance to the motor theory of
consciousness, a staple of psychological theorizing in the early part of the
20th century (Washburn, 1916). To provide empirical data to support the
motor theory, in the 1920s and 1930s Edmund Jacobson reported a series
of experiments that supported the claim that imagining reflected minimal but invisible movements of skeletal muscles (see, e. g., Jacobson,
1930). Typical of his experiments was the recording of action currents
when a right-handed subject was told to imagine throwing a ball. Action
currents were generated in the muscles of the right arm but not the left.
Support for my claims is contained in an extensive review of the
experimental literature by Gibbs and Berg (2002a, 2002b) in cognitive
psychology, neuroscience, and psycholinguistics to warrant the claim
that imaginings are embodied. Neuropsychological studies have
shown that the cerebral processes associated with embodied action are
activated even when no obvious movements are observable. These
studies are reminiscent of those of Jacobson, mentioned previously,
save that the technologies for assessing activation are more refined.
Positron emission topography (PET) studies, for example, have shown

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that specific areas of the cortex show activity when subjects imagine
making different body movements.
The conclusion of Gibbs and Berg is relevant to the proposition that
embodied imaginings are among the distal features of the episodes
that produce electrophysiological changes: The various behavioral
and neuroimagery findings highlight that motoric elements are
recruited whenever the perceived or imagined object is conceptualized
in action-oriented terms (2002b. p. 8). Rather than attributing the
changes in electrophysiological parameters to unspecified mental
states, the previous arguments and the supportive conclusions of
Gibbs and Berg direct us to consider attenuated motoric actions that
comprise embodied imaginings as a significant distal antecedent.
To recapitulate before moving to my final remarks: the proximal
outcomes of a hypnosis episode flow from antecedent distal events,
namely embodied imaginings, as-if skills, and identifiable beliefs. A
credible theory to account for proximal phases of the hypnosis episode
must take into account both proximal and distal features. Unlike the
claims of mental-state theorists, this conclusion would be subject to
empirical validation or falsification.

REFLECTIONS ON THE HYPNOSIS EPISODE AS A DISCOURSE

I return to the claim that the hypnosis interaction is an episode that
takes place over time. We can focus on the proximal events (the terminus
of the episode), or on the distal, or on both. When serious researchers
came to realize that proximal contranormative acts could be elicited without the hypnosis induction, they turned to self-reports of the hypnosis
experience as the source of data to validate the mental-state theory. To
assess subjective experience, we have had no alternative but to rely on the
subjects verbal reports of pain, hallucination, amnesia, or sensory anomalies. Few will disagree that the experience and the report of the experience
are not isomorphic. When, for example, the subject reports the transparency hallucination, I see the chair through the transparent body of
Mr. X, what interpretation should the observer place on the verb to see?
The Oxford English Dictionary lists scores of meanings for the word see,
many of them problematic. The difficulties in using self-reports as the criteria for establishing the power of hypnotic suggestions have been made
plain in the well-known pain-ablation experiments conducted in the laboratory of the late E. R. Hilgard. The self-reports at Time1 differed in substance and meaning from the self-reports at Time2 after the hidden
observer metaphor had been introduced (1977). Variations in the richness
of ones vocabulary play a part in describing complex experiences. Experimenters must be cautious in generalizing from self-reports that can be
contaminated by the use of idiosyncratic metaphors, by harboring secrets,
by intentions to deceive, even by self-deception (Sarbin & Coe, 1979).

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Only a start has been made in applying the techniques of discourse

analysis to self-reports of the hypnosis experience. In a previous paper
(Sarbin, 1997), I tried to make the case that the interaction of hypnotist
and subject fits the criteria for a conversation. The hypnotist employs
primarily verbal acts; in turn, the subjects respond verbally if the
request is to describe experience, nonverbally if the request is to perform contranormative acts such as finger lock or age regression. Selfreports are not coterminous with the actual experience partly because of
impoverished vocabularies for communicating about events stimulated
by the as-if set and partly because of difficulties in making sense of a
fictional world. It is a commonplace that all of us interpret everyday
conversations from the perspective of multiple layers of meaning, why
not the conversation between the experimenter and the subject?
In the early days of psychological research on hypnosis, investigators
regarded the induction as a stimulus and the behavior of the subject as
a response; the contranormative behavior of the experimental subjects
was the principal focus of interest. In the tradition of positivist science,
the subject was perceived as a laboratory specimen whose responses
were generated by the induction. The effect of this positivist paradigm
was to treat the subject as a laboratory specimen without agency. For
this reason, abstracting the meanings of the sentences in the induction
was of little interest. Shifting the role of the subject from a passive processor of inputs to an active agent has opened the way for studying the
hypnosis interaction as a discourse, a conversation. Sociolinguists and
conversation analysts have developed methods that would help to
identify the meanings that subjects attribute to the induction and to
other contextual features (Wood & Kroger, 2000). I made a modest
beginning with the use of the semantic-differential method in which
subjects assigned meanings to the sentences in a standard induction.
The meanings assigned by the responsive subjects were different from
the meanings assigned by the nonresponsive subjects. For example,
responsive subjects were more likely than nonresponsive subjects to
interpret the induction sentences as probable, influential, harmonious,
believing, and voluntary (Sarbin, 1965).
Historical accounts make note of the fact that at different times, hypnosis was construed as animal magnetism, nervous sleep, conditioned
responses, prestige suggestion, dramaturgic skills, role-taking, absorption,
expectancies, dissociation, and entrancement. Some of these constructions, for example, entrancement, continue to serve their advocates as
metaphors to describe the self-reports and contranormative behavior of
their subjects. To this list now may be added discursive conceptions,
constructions that are likely to supercede the others. In this formulation,
subjects construct meanings that are always context-dependent and influenced by rhetorical and other communicative features abstracted from the
hypnosis situation. A more complete understanding of the phenomena

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subsumed under the label hypnosis, then, will begin from observations
that are construed as a discourse between hypnotist and subject, the
discursive partners engaging in dramaturgical and rhetorical actions,
including a critical understanding of the metaphorical messages contained in the ambiguities of the induction. A close semiotic examination of the behavioral-episode items in scales that presumably measure
hypnotizability supports the conclusion that the induction is an
entrance ritualan invitation to engage in as-if behavior, an invitation to enact a particular social role.
I close my paper with a review and an appreciation of a study
reported by James Council and his collaborators (2002). Besides being a
contribution to the history of popular music, it throws light on how a
social role can be shaped as an unintended effect of providing entertainment. Before radio and television, to entertain themselves people
would gather around a piano and sing songs, the notes and lyrics of
which were printed on sheets, hence the label sheet music. The popular
art form had its start in the mid-19th century. Toward the end of the
19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, the composition, publication, and distribution of sheet music had become a veritable industry.
The songs were said to be products of an urban venue called Tin Pan
Alley, a reference to a neighborhood in New York City that housed
music publishers. Analyzing the lyrics in the songs, Council et al. found
themes that reflected current and recent events, for example, the thenpopular interest in the theories of Emile Cou that recommended autosuggestion as the road to happiness. In addition, Council et al. identified instances of folk psychology in a category called eye songs that
centered on the central importance of gaze in the achievement of
romantic goals. Council et al. abstracted from the sheet music collection
a number of songs that refer to the powers of the hypnotizer. The lyrics
were usually in the service of romance, sometimes implying thinly
veiled seduction. In the period from 1909 to 1912, no less than six popular songs were published with colorful titles that referred to the powers
of hypnotism or mesmerism; The Hypnotizing Rag; That Mesmerizing
Mendelsohn Tune; Hip, Hip, Hypnotize Me; That Hypnotizing
Man; Youve Got Me Hypnotized; That Hypnotizing Strain.
Millions of these sheets were printed and sold. I propose that the
content of the lyrics helped to shape the publics beliefs about a little
understood phenomenon, thus creating, or at least shaping, a social role.
Not only the musical world but the world of popular literature provided stories that told of the powers of hypnotism. The novel, Trilby, by
George duMaurier, was a huge success. The story is about a manipulating hypnotist, Svengali, who uses hypnotic powers to create an operatic
singer out of Trilby, a simple young woman who previously had no
musical skills. The book, published in 1894, had a large readership. A
silent movie based on the novel, starring the talented John Barrymore,

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was produced in 1921 and seen by thousands, perhaps millions, of

movie-goers. It is reasonable to assume that, like the Tin Pan Alley
songs, the movie helped to shape the beliefs and attitudes of the general
public. During the presentation of their paper, Council et al. showed still
photos taken from the silent movie. Among other things, Svengali made
hand and arm passes toward Trilby that conveyed the message that
invisible powers were being transmitted from his body to hers.
I was 10 or 11 years old when I saw the movie. My friends and I would
mimic Svengalis passes, directing them to one another and, in a low
voice, would intone, you are in my power. None of us was successful
in creating a Trilby, and we concluded that we did not have Svengalis
magnetic powers. It is clear to me now that my beliefs when I made my
first entry into the study of hypnosis (when I was 26) were in great measure a residue of my involvement in the duMaurier novel as interpreted
in the movie. I hasten to add that my subsequent studies turned me away
from Svengali as a model, and I became critical of the special-state theory
as unwittingly advanced by the songwriters and novelists.
I dwell on the Tin Pan Alley songs and the Svengali movie as exemplars of important distal features of the hypnosis episode. They illustrate
a medium for people to acquire beliefs and also suggest the readiness
of students of the phenomena to adopt mentalistic explanations. The
social history of hypnosis provides relevant information that must be
taken into account in trying to understand not only how the social role
was shaped but also the origins of hypotheses with which hypnosis
theorists have engaged in their particular brand of sensemaking.

MY REFLECTIONS SUMMARIZED
It is something like a moral imperative for me to recommend to my colleagues that they enlarge the scope of their investigations; to look upon
the conduct of the subject and the experimenter as comprising an episode
that has a temporal dimension with both proximal and distal features. It is
one thing to identify the proximal events, whether in the form of selfreports, psychophysiological scans, or contranormative acts; it is another
to identify the immediate and remote distal features. My reflections make
the case for recognizing that the hypnotic induction has no occult properties but is an entrance ritualan oblique way of inviting the subject to
engage in imagining, to act as if. I also try to make the case that imaginings are embodied, that the embodiments provide the inputs that are the
antecedents to cerebral or other bodily measurements. For a complete
theory, we must take into account the social history of the beliefs that
guide both subjects and theorists in their efforts at sensemaking.
A final word: In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Theodore X. Barber,
whose theoretical perspective was parallel to mine, published a number
of papers in which he inserted quotation marks around the word

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hypnosis (see, for example, Barber & Calverley, 1962). This common
editorial practice is an oblique way of telling readers not to take literally the word or its ontological implications. From the content of my
reflections, one might expect that I would recommend restoring Barbers
practice. Such a recommendation would most likely fall upon deaf ears
because the word hypnosis has become entrenched in our vocabulary. The most I can hope for is that my colleagues will assign some
credibility to my reflections and that they would imagine surrounding
the word hypnosis with quotation marks. Such a silent strategy
would signal that using the naked word without the imagined editorial markers might lead to misleading conclusions.

REFERENCES
Barber, T. X. & Calverley, D. S. (1962). Hypnotic behavior as a function of task motivation.
Journal of Psychology, 54, 363389.
Braid, J. (1843). Neurypnology: Or the rationale of nervous sleep considered in relation to animal
magnetism. London: Churchill.
Carlson, A. J. (1916). Hunger in health and disease. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Charcot, J. -M. (1889). Clinical lectures on diseases of the nervous system. London: New
Sydenham Society.
Council, J., Grove, R., & Watt, C. (2002, August). Tin Pan Alley and hypnosis. Paper presented at the 110th annual convention of the American Psychological Association,
Chicago, August 15, 2002.
duMaurier, G. (1894). Trilby: A novel. New York: Harper.
Dunbar, F. (1938). Emotions and bodily changes. New York: Columbia University Press.
Friedlander, J. W., & Sarbin, T. R. (1938). The depth of hypnosis. Journal of Abnormal
Psychology, 33, 457475.
Gibbs, R. W., Jr., & Berg, E. A. (2002a). Finding the body in mental imagery. Journal of
Mental Imagery, 26, 82108.
Gibbs, R. W., Jr., & Berg, E. A. (2002b). Mental imagery and embodied activity. Journal of
Mental Imagery, 26, 130.
Hilgard, E. R. (1977). Divided consciousness. New York: Wiley.
Hilgard, J. R. (1979). Personality and hypnosis: A study of imaginative involvement. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Jacobson, E. (1930). Electrical measurements of neuromuscular states during mental
activities, IV: Evidence of contraction of specific muscles during imagination.
American Journal of Physiology, 95, 703712.
Juhasz, J. B. (1972). An experimental study of imagining. Journal of Personality, 40, 588600.
Lewis, J. H., & Sarbin, T. R. (1943). Studies in psychosomatics: The influence of hypnotic
stimulation on gastric hunger contractions. Psychosomatic Medicine, 5, 125131.
Sarbin, T. R. (1950). Contributions to role-taking theory I: Hypnotic behavior. Psychological
Review, 57, 23570.
Sarbin, T. R. (1965). Hypnosis as a medium of behavior change. In L. Krasner & L. P. Ullman
(Eds.). Research in behavior modification: New developments and their clinical implications.
New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Sarbin, T. R. (1997). Hypnosis as a conversation: Believed-in imaginings revisited. Contemporary Hypnosis, 14, 203215.
Sarbin, T. R., & Coe, W. C. (1972). Hypnosis: A social-psychological analysis of influence
communication. New York: Holt, Rinehart &Winston.

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Sarbin, T. R., & Coe, W. C. (1979). Hypnosis and psychopathology: On replacing old
myths with fresh metaphors. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 88, 506526.
Sarbin, T. R., & Lim, D. T. (1963). Contributions to role-taking theory X: Some evidence
in support of the role-taking hypothesis in hypnosis. International Journal of Clinical
and Experimental Hypnosis, 11, 98103.
Washburn, M. (1916). Movement and mental imagery: Outlines of a motor theory of the complexer mental processes. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin.
Weitzenhoffer, A. M., & Hilgard, E. R. (1959). Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale, Forms
A and B. Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press.
Wood, L. A., & Kroger, R. O. (2000). Doing discourse analysis. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

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berlegungen zu einigen ungelsten Problemen der Hypnose

Theodore Sarbin
Zusammenfassung: berlegungen leiteten den Autor bei der Erstellung dieses
Artikels. Nachdem er etwa zwei Drittel eines Jahrhunderts mit Arbeit im und
um das Gebiet der Konstruktion des Themas Hypnose zugebracht hat, kann
er das Privileg fr sich reklamieren, berlegungen anstelle von neuem
Datenmaterial oder berarbeiteten Theorien anzubieten. Seine berlegungen
beinhalten einige autobiographische Darstellungen, welche dabei helfen,
aufzuklren wie er dazu kam, Verhalten, das traditionell unter der Bezeichnung
Hypnose zusammengefasst wurde, als Handeln im Rahmen sozialer Rollen zu
interpretieren, welches durch Vorstellungsvermgen vermittelt werde.
RALF SCHMAELZLE
University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany
Rflexions sur quelques problmes irrsolus de lhypnose
Theodore Sarbin
Rsum : Des rflexions personnelles ont guid lauteur lors de la rdaction de
cet article. Ayant travaill sur les tenants et aboutissants de lhypnose pendant
2/3 de sicle, il peut se permettre doffrir quelques rflexions personnelles
plutt que de prsenter de nouvelles donnes ou de revoir des thories. Ses
rflexions sont constitues de cas autobiographiques pouvant aider clairer
comment il en est venu interprter la conduite habituellement classe sous
ltiquette dhypnose comme linterprtation dun rle social facilit par une
aptitude limagination.
VICTOR SIMON
Psychosomatic Medicine & Clinical Hypnosis
Institute, Lille, France
Reflexiones sobre algunos asuntos no resueltos en la hipnosis
Theodore Sarbin
Resumen: Agunas reflexiones guiaron al autor en la preparacin de este
artculo. Habiendo trabajado en y alrededor del constructo de hipnosis
durante unos 60 aos, el autor puede asumir el privilegio de ofrecer
reflexiones en lugar de presentar datos nuevos o teoras revisadas. Sus

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THEODORE R. SARBIN

reflexiones incluyen algunos eventos autobiogrficos que ayudan a iluminar

cmo vino a interpretar el constructo tradicionalmente encapsulado bajo la
etiqueta de la hipnosis como la actuacin de un papel social mediado por la
habilidad imaginativa.

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ETZEL CARDEA
University of Texas, Pan American,
Edinburg, Texas, USA