therapy assumes that per-sonality is an expression of past conditioning. It is a brain’s physiological hab-its. The basic techniques of behavior therapy are observable behavior rather than on what their patient thinks. Behavior therapists focus on treating a
specific symptom, rather than freeing up a wide range of unconscious feelings, as a Jungian or Freudian thera-pist might do. Thus, behavior therapy emphasizes symptom removal: “Get rid of the symptom and you have eliminated the neurosis.” (Eysenck, 1959, p. 65) If the symptom goes away, that means, to a behaviorist, that the treatment was a good one.
Some behavior therapists depend heavily on relaxation and imagery inductions followed by sug-gestions or image manipulations. A behaviorist is not interested in spontaneous images which a subject may generate. The goal of this type of therapist is to cause the subject to visualize only the specific images which he tells him to visualize.
Block
- A suggestion given under hypnosis that pre-vents any later hypnotic suggestion is called a block.For example, a sealing suggestion blocks induction by any other hypnotist.
Brief Therapy
- Because hypnotherapy can go so quickly to the root of the problem, one school of hyp-notherapists calls it brief therapy. But some “brief”therapists keep their treatment far briefer than others do. The time requested by a hypnotherapist to solve a subject’s problem can range from one session to months, or even years, of sessions.
C
Catatonic
- A catatonic state involves suggested muscular flaccidity or rigidity.Clinical
- Literally, clinical means “bedside.” Clini-cal training is actual internship in a mediClini-cal setting as contrasted with learning from books and lectures.Cognitive Dissonance
- We defend our mental and life status quo against whatever seems to threaten it. Leon Festinger first pointed out the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance.The word “dissonance”, in its ordinary mean-ing, refers to an inharmonious, inconsistent, discrepant relation between two things. The usage in the theory is similar to this. A cogni-tion is something a person knows about him-self, about his behavior, or about his surround-ings. Dissonance is said to exist when two
cognitions, occurring together, are inconsistent with each other according to the expectations of the person...These expectations of what goes with what are built up on the basis of past experience, including notions of logical rela-tions, cultural mores, and learned empirical cor-relations among events.
The central hypothesis of the theory is that the presence of dissonance gives rise to pres-sure to reduce that dissonance, and that the strength of the pressure is a direct function of the magnitude of the existing dissonance...
Dissonance is conceived as a motivating state comparable to other drive states. Successful reduction of dissonance is, for example, com-parable to successful reduction of a state of hunger. (Festinger and Bramell, 1962, p. 256)
People also emphasize the best of what they have chosen in the past and automatically deprecate what they have rejected in the past. We prize consis-tency in our thought. When a survivor of criminal hyp-nosis, first recovered a memory associated with am-nestic sexual abuse, she refused to continue the pro-cess of remembering. She said that what she was remembering was not possible. It did not fit with what she had believed about her life before that moment.
She was suffering from cognitive dissonance.
Conditioning
- Pavlov originated the view of men-tal function as based on natural and acquired menmen-tal reflexes. He taught that mental reflexes can be cre-ated deliberately, or erased. He called that process conditioning. Conditioning is a type of training meant to take hold in your unconscious as a reflex. Hypno-tists, during and after the fifties, began to use the behaviorist’s word, conditioning, to also mean sug-gestions given under hypnosis.The study of conditioning theories, methods, and applications is now far advanced. There are four types of conditioning: 1) direct programming of a sub-ject in trance using conventional forms of communica-tion, 2) Pavlov’s classical conditioning, 3) Skinner’s operant conditioning, and 4) Thorndike’s solution learning. All four types create habits, which are un-conscious reflexes.
Classical conditioning happens automatically.
In operant conditioning—also known as learning theory--you learn because of the result of your act.
Operant conditioning is the carrot-and-stick, reward-and-punishment, system. Your operant learning may be initially conscious, but it soon turns to habit (uncon-scious).
Glossary 443 Conscious Mind
- There are parts of the brainas-sociated with the conscious mind, and parts associ-ated with the unconscious mind. The conscious is closely linked to the somatic nervous system (volun-tary muscles) via the cerebral cortex (the outermost layer of the cortex). Your thinking, reasoning site is at the extreme frontal area of the cortex. Some psycho-analytic psychologists call the conscious the ego, or
“Ego.”
The job of consciousness is to deal with things for which no habits yet exist or which cannot be left to habit. Consciousness is a luxury in terms of using available mental circuits. We use it sparingly. Most of our mental activity is unconscious (automatic and out of awareness). Stopping at a red light is something you do consciously the first few times. You shift to doing it unconsciously as soon as it becomes habit.
When you make an automatic response based on habit, choice is not involved. The act is unconscious.
Choice is the most important role of the con-scious part of your mind. Concon-sciously we look at new possibilities, consider reasons and circumstances, fac-tor in our emotions and hopes. If you are denied con-sciousness, you are denied much of your capacity for free choice, free will.
Consciousness can only work with what data is available to it. Repressed, denied, amnestic data is out of reach for the conscious mind. Therefore, it can-not be factored into conscious analyses preceding choices. The better we understand all the unconscious factors that influence our behavior, the freer and wiser we can be in our behavioral choices. On the other hand, it would be cumbersome, inefficient--if not over-whelming--to consciously process all our sensory in-take, data evaluation, and responses.
Therefore, we need both our conscious and unconscious minds. The conscious mind, or ego, is our analyzer and decision-maker. The id (libido) pro-vides hormonal, instinctive goal directions that drive (in the sense of impel) the brain system. The super-ego contains the rules we have been taught, and those learned by experience. It forces the drive to play the game by those rules. The deep unconscious is a vast data bank and data processor whose program never finishes running.
Contagion
- Induction by contagion means induc-tion by unconscious acceptance of an unconsciously perceived suggestion to enter trance and behave in a way you have heard mentioned or seen modeled by someone else.Context Clues
- A hypnotic subject may recog-nize a past hypnosis incident because of context in-consistencies or inappropriateness. For example, Zebediah realized the hands of the clock had inexpli-cably jumped forward.Control
- ”The concept of control is at the center of all psychological research,” Ms. Higgins lectured my Developmental Psychology class. The goal of behav-iorist, “scientific” psychology has been the prediction and control of behavior.The fundamental moral issues in behavior con-trol do not change, of course, no matter what technology develops around them. They are now, as ever, only these: Who shall be con-trolled? By whom? How? (London, Behavior Control, pp. 180-181)
The inability to make somebody else do what you want frustrates; the dream of omnipotence lures.
Society tends to be a hierarchy of controllers and controlees. The healthy counterbalance to control is autonomy, for the opposite of control is autonomy.
Autonomy is fundamental to identity (and knowing one’s true identity is fundamental to autonomy).
Human beings typically give up some au-tonomy. Why? They do so in order to bond, network, and create a safe social shelter in which to live. The loss of autonomy is scary, yet also attractive, because we are a naturally cooperative species whose coop-eration helps us and our descendants to survive. It is the nature of our lives that we have to work together to accomplish almost anything.
Control always looks better in a context of one human being taking responsibility for the welfare of another. As long as our trust is fulfilled and not be-trayed with exploitation it is a trade-off that can work for both sides. Control can be predatory, or altruistic, or set up for fair-sharing of power and rewards.
Some psychologists look for ways to control people. Some look for ways to set people free. Some do both. Different schools of psychology have differ-ent inclinations. Behaviorists are generally more trolling, Jungians more freeing. Brainwashing is a con-trol technology. Hypnosis can be used either to concon-trol or to free.
To a behaviorist, the means to control a life form is to control its environment. To acquire complete control, you completely control the subject’s environ-ment. The “mountain tribes,” the “country people,” have
been throughout history a source of annoyance to ur-ban centers of political control. Rural populations tend to be more independent-minded because they are ac-customed to more control over their own environment.
They grow some of their own food and livestock, per-haps hunt. They situate and build homes somewhat more freely than urban folks. They live, perhaps, be-yond observation.
The control of a person’s environment, above all, is based in control of their data input. We are what we know (or what we think we know). Whoever influ-ences, or controls, the press, the media—what is said on the 5 o’clock news—influences, or controls, the mind of the nation. People who refuse to watch TV, who do not read conventional newspapers or listen to regular radio stations, and who homeschool their children, are most threatening to central programmers. They avoid
“knowing” what everybody else “knows.” That allows them to develop some point of view or belief that is uncomfortable to the media-controllers.
Conversion
- This has two meanings:1) To change belief systems. Conversion is the goal of every form of persuasion from advertising to evangelism to brainwashing. The prize is your be-lief because, from your bebe-liefs, come your behav-iors, your choices in religion, politics, economics, child bearing, and child rearing. In every contact and context, you experience persuasion—and prob-ably also exert it.
2) “Conversion” is also a term used by hypnotists to mean switching one symptom or behavior (or be-lief) for another.
Corroboration
- Additional independent evidence that supports the original evidence is corroboration. For example, nonhypnotic evidence that supports evidence from a rehypnotization is corrobation and is consid-ered important if a case of criminal hypnosis comes to trial.Cue
- The cue is the sensory trigger for a previously implanted posthypnotic suggestion. It instantly trig-gers a trance state, which is a continuation of the pre-vious trance, and which is focused totally on the ac-complishment of the cued task.Cybernetics
- When the brain and nervous system are thought of as an electronic machine—and when machines are thought of as possessing intelligence, even consciousness—this is cybernetics.D
Daydreaming
- Daydreaming occurs in a lowered state of consciousness-- more to certain types of people than to others. Some daydreamers make up their own stories. Some simply let it happen; that is autono-mous imagery.Delirium
- An oldtime word for a somnambulistic trance.Deprogramming
- A person who has been brain-washed and then undergoes a rebrainwashing directed at undoing the previous one is said to be deprogrammed.Densitization
- Desensitization is a behavioral therapy technique for dealing with anxiety-provoking ideas. It can cure phobias. Desensitization usually starts with relaxation training to create a trance, but formal trance does not have to be involved. After do-ing induction traindo-ing, the therapist presents a series of imagined situations, involving the phobia, in a pro-gression from least to most anxiety-causing. He first asks the client to imagine only little challenge in the problem category, but then moves on to suggest the imagining of bigger, and yet more difficult scenes. (The same behavior-shaping system can be used to sneak up on any goal.)The hypnotic abreaction of a traumatic, re-pressed memory is accomplished in a similar way.
When the memory is first encountered, the subject perhaps can be there and suffer the feelings for only half a minute. Then he is brought forward to a happier time for relief. The therapist then returns the subject back to the traumatic scene for about 30 seconds--on that same day, or on a later one. After enough brief visits to the traumatic material, it will be desensitized.
Why did Candy agree to welcome a stranger into her hotel room in San Francisco? She was a long-term responder to patriotic appeal. Every request in the desensitization series that the CIA used to entice her into their hypnoconditioning trap involved the patri-otic angle:
1. Will you (help the law and) give me information about the burglary? (“Yes,” she said.)
Glossary 445
2. Will you let the FBI receive letters here? (“Yes.”) 3. Will you call this number everytime something comes
for us in the mail? (“Yes.”)
4. Will you personally carry a letter to a man in San Francisco? (“Yes.”)
Candy’s recruitment to CIA hypnoprogrammed courier status was proceeding in a systematic way too:
1. Candy agrees to receive letters for the agency.
2. She agrees to personally carry a secret letter to some unknown man who would knock at her hotel room door in a faraway city.
3. She is then invited to officially become a CIA cou-rier.
4. Ultimately, she carries messages on paper, or in her mind, consciously knowing, or unknowing.
Disorientation
- This technique aids induction, deepens trance, and strengthens operator control. For more information, see Operation Often in Part II.Drive
- The deeply rooted needs that push you are called drive. In the brain, “drive” equals energy. Emo-tion causes drive. Sex and aggression are brain drives which are usually inhibited or limited to a permissible form of expression. Primary process (unconscious) thinking is sometimes also called “drive,” when it is bound up with deep-level drive emotions. We are most likely to repress, “forget,” mental thoughts or data which are drive-related, having sexual or aggressive asso-ciations. The way our brain is wired gives drive-related thoughts a capacity for indirect, unconscious expres-sion.E
Ego
- The ego is your conscious mind. It is the part of you that has the responsibility of making choices, your “I wills,” and “I won’ts.” It sets goals for the uncon-scious. It is skeptical and analytical, a good reality tester. It holds the reins to retrievable memories (the continuity of experience by which you define yourself).The ego is not always in control. (See Rationalization,
the lies we tell to ourselves.) Reality and fantasy are difficult for an unconscious to distinguish if deprived of its ego’s supervision and abilities. That is because, to an unconscious, all data is “now” and “real.”
F
Feedback
- Observing cause and effect, noting good and bad outcomes, and revising our behavior accord-ingly, is our feedback loop. Self awareness lets you exercise self-control. With feedback, people can ac-complish marvelous feats of learned self-control. On the other hand, if the feedback function is blocked--as by suggested amnesia-- the subject is prevented from reforming problem programming in his mind.Forensic Hypnosis
- This is the study of the use of hypnosis in a trial setting.Freudian Hypnotists
- Although many aspects of Freud’s theories have been revised or discarded by later psychologists, his concepts of the function of the unconscious, of repression and other defense mecha-nisms, and the importance of impressions in early child-hood, have successfully withstood the test of time.Some Freudian hypnotists performed psychoanalysis under hypnosis, which they called hypnoanalysis, in-stead of using Freud’s long talking method of psycho-analysis. During World War II, some Freudian psychia-trists used drug inductions followed by abreaction, a process which they called narcoanalysis.
Both narcoanalysis and the theories of the Freudian hypnotists are important in the history of mind control.