Hypnosis, hypnotic trance and hypnoid states involve a choice. You choose to be hypnotized. That's why you can hypnotize yourself. And that's why we have what is called a waking hypnosis. I'll explain it in a minute.
Hypnosis involves empathizing with another person, a suggestible state of mind, people pleasing, you want to please the hypnotist. In a kind of shared fantasy with role-playing, the role assigned to you is the hypnotized subject, and the role assigned to the hypnotist is the master of your mind.
It is as if the hypnotist interject, the avatar of the hypnotist, the representation of the hypnotist in your mind, is entraining you by repeating mantras and words over and over and over again.
The hypnotist plants in your mind a suggestion. This suggestion could be activated at any minute, even after the hypnotic session is over. This is known as post-hypnotic suggestion.
And now let's delve a bit deeper to all this and to how the narcissists leverages this.
Hypnosis, hypnotic trance, hypnoid states, and entraining to get you into the shared fantasy, never to emerge.
Happy almost New Year.
In the video you're about to watch, I will tackle various aspects of trance and hypnosis or hypnoid states in the narcissist's shared fantasy.
In other words, trance, hypnosis, altered states of consciousness, they are more common than you think in narcissistic abuse and in relationship with narcissists, especially within the shared fantasy, especially in the first few stages of the shared fantasy.
And this is the topic of today's video. Are you being hypnotized? For example, by me.
Probably, yes. Otherwise, why would you be here?
Okay, Shoshanim.
The first thing to realize and to accept because it's not easy is that hypnoid states, hypnotic states, are choices.
We know they are choices because you can hypnotize yourself. This is known as self-hypnosis.
There's also something called waking hypnosis, which means you're fully awake, fully aware of the environment and of yourself, and you are still clinically and technically in a hypnotic state subject to self-administered or other administered suggestions.
So let us remove and clarify one myth. And that is the myth that hypnosis requires a hypnotist. Hypnosis requires someone else, another person, to hypnotize you.
That is completely untrue. It's simply a choice. You choose the state of mind of being hypnotized.
Hypnosis requires empathy. When you hypnotize, you adopt the mindset and the verbal cues, and you are responsive to the body language, micro facial expressions and so on so forth, of your hypnotist, or you are responsive to internal processes.
In any case, you empathize. There's a form of resonance with another person or resonance with yourself.
When you induce hypnosis in yourself, you actually stand aside. You're like outside yourself. You are the hypnotist and you are the subject of hypnosis.
Empathy is a crucial element in hypnosis.
Empathy involves what is known as a suggestible state of mind.
Suggestion is simply a series of verbal or behavioral or environmental cues that induce an altered state of consciousness, a change in your consciousness.
That is suggestion.
Suggestion could be in the here and now, do this or don't do this, feel this or don't feel this. That's a suggestion in the here and now.
But suggestion could be implanted in your mind to be activated later according to a cue.
So there is a suggestible state of mind.
In terms of the object relations theories, it's as if when you're faced with a hypnotist or with yourself as a hypnotist, you create an introject of the hypnotizing party. You create an introject of the hypnotist.
An introject is an internal object that represents the hypnotist in your mind. This internal object speaks to you and because hypnosis involves a repetition of words, ad nozio, a repetition of sounds, it is actually a form of entraining. I mentioned that suggestions, the cue is implanted in your mind, could be activated immediately, instantaneously, or could be activated later. This is known as post-hypnotic suggestion. Now let's go to our favorite character, the narcissist, and he's or her shared fantasy. When you agree, when you make a choice to become a participant in the narcissist shared fantasy and a choice it is it is a decision don't kid yourself you're not an innocent victim who is you know who has been lured or baited irresistibly into a shared fantasy you enter the shared fantasy because there's something in it for you, because it caters to your psychological needs. You are, you collude in the shared fantasy, you're an equal participant, it's a conspiracy. So when you enter the shared fantasy, what you've agreed to do is actually to outsource your reality testing. It's as if you say from this moment onwards, it's the narcissus who decides what is real and what is not. And if the narcissist says that the fantasy is real, then so be it. It is real. And if the narcissist says that reality is not real, I fully conquer, reality is not real.
You have outsourced this critical ego function to the narcissists and the narcissus becomes your interface with reality. It's like a user interface on a smartphone.
You see reality through the narcissist's eyes. You interpret it her minutically through the narcissist's narrative. You deform reality, reframe reality, so as to not conflict with a shared fantasy so you no longer possess the capacity for reality testing or at least the capacity for non-mediated reality testing the second thing is you abide by a script. You fit into a narrative and the narrative contains what we call behavioral prescriptions. The narrative tells you what you could think, what you could believe, how you should behave, and what is out of bounds and beyond the pale. By fitting into the narrative, you adopt scripts written by the Narcissus. And you begin to behave as if you were an actor or actress in a movie, as if you were participating in some theater production the narcissist is a testpian and it's contagious you become an actor as well at that point having suspended reality testing and having become an active participant in the shared fantasy you affirm the reality of the narcissists' delusions and goals. You tell the narcissists what he or she wants to hear, and you do it in a very convincing manner because you yourself have been persuaded. You've been co-opted into the shared fantasy. There's a suspension of disbelief, a suspension of judgment. And all these elements are very prevalent and an integral part of hypnotic states. You're in a kind, you're immured and immersed in a kind of hypnosis and kind of trance there's external regulation your moods your emotions and your very self-concept the way you see yourself are all regulated from the outside by the narcissists as if the narcissist tells you that's who you are that's who you should be that's how you should behave reminiscent of classical hypnosis or at least stage hypnosis and this creates a lot of confusion between internal and external. You see, these functions, reality testing, behavioral decision-making and so on. They're internal usually. In normal, healthy people, they come from the inside. And yet in the shared fantasy, they come from the outside. They're the domain of the narcissist. He is in charge. He is the boss. He's in the driver's seat. And so you begin to confuse internal with external. Their roles assigned to you and assign to the narcissist.
and you play out these roles as if in a dream state robotically and automatically which again is very confusing because it seems as if the narrative has taken a life of its own this piece of fiction has become more real than reality.
And you're embedded in it. You reified in many ways and you can't tell the difference anymore.
You regress to infancy and you become enmeshed with a narcissist in a state of symbiosis it's a merger with a parental figure or a secure base and all this is done in a haze as if you are walking through very thick and dense london fog you're not quite sure if what's happening to you is a nightmare or a dream or if it is reality.
Gradually you sink into an extreme state of dependency where your very existence and the reality of the world crucially depend on someone else not on you and if this someone else were to blink or cast you out of paradise it will all cease to exist.
Simply cease to exist.
And you will be no more.
Now let us delve much deeper into the way the narcissist uses hypnosis and trance and entraining unconsciously, not deliberately, but as inherent, innate strategies, how the narcissist uses all these to get you into the shared fantasy, and then do with you as he or she pleases.
Have fun. Have fun. Have fun. Your eyes are getting opener and opener until you watch this video to your very end.
You know I'm hypnotizing you in my videos, don't you?
That's why you fall asleep to the sound of my voice.
Your eyelids are getting heavier and heavier.
You sink deeper and deeper, and I implant in your mind the hypnotic suggestion of clicking on my videos ever after.
Many of you are sufficiently paranoid to believe all this and develop a conspiracy theory about the Vaknin videos and the hidden messages in them and hypnosis and whatnot.
Indeed, this is the topic of today's lecture, the connection between hypnosis and the narcissists shared fantasy.
Because I propose to apply the framework and the paradigm that we use to understand the interpersonal relationships of narcissists, I propose to apply them to hypnosis.
And who am I to make such a claim?
My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited. I'm a professor of clinical psychology and business management in CIAPS and a former visiting professor of psychology in Southern Federal University.
Wow, that was a long hypnotic message.
Alright, Shoshanim.
Hypnosis and dreaming are the two big remaining mysteries in psychology.
We don't have a clue about them. We don't know anything about it.
We don't know why, we don't know how, we don't know what for, and yet we keep speculating.
And some of these speculations are of interest and some of them have fallen by the wayside, starting with Mesmer in the 18th century and then Charcot and even Sigmund Freud himself.
They've all speculated about hypnosis and they've all or most of them have recanted.
Okay.
So this video, like everything Jewish, is divided in two parts. The first part I'm going to discuss hypnosis in the framework of the shared fantasy. And the second part is definitions. Those of you who are not acquainted with hypnosis and the professional and clinical terms, attendant upon this phenomenon of hypnosis, may wish to first watch the second part of the video, with the definitions, like a dictionary, and then come back to the first part.
So in the description, simply click on the time stamp. It says definitions of terms used in this lecture at and there's a time stem. Simply click on it, click on it, click on it, click on it, click on it now.
Yes, this was an example of hypnotic suggestion.
Okay, I claim that hypnosis exactly like other phenomena which involve sound.
Hypnosis is a form of entraining. I'll remind you about 10 or 12 years ago, neuroscientists discovered that in musical bands, especially rock bands, brainwaves of the players synchronize. The brainwaves of the musicians synchronize as they play along from the same note sheet.
So it seems that music synchronizes the brainways of those who produce it and those who listen to it.
Now music is simply a set of sounds, they're organized in highly specific ways. There's harmony, there's melody, and so on so forth.
But it's literally indistinguishable from certain speech acts, certain patterns of speech.
If I were to repeat the same words over and over and over again, if I were to say a mantra over and over again, or a slogan or whatever, this is the equivalent of music, and this is indeed the foundation of hip-hop and rap in music.
So a repetition of the same sounds, whether they are, whether they contain meaning or not, a repetition of sounds tends to synchronize the brainwaves of everyone around.
And this is known as entraining.
Now, as you remember, in my work, I propose that the narcissist uses verbal abuse, repetitive, recurrent phrases in order to entrain the victim.
And by entraining her, synchronize her brain waves with his brainwaves, allowing him access to her mind and the possibility to install and introject his own voice in her mind.
This is entraining in the narcissistic shared fantasy.
Now when I say his, it's also her, half of all narcissists are women. Remember that as we go along, the gender pronouns are interchangeable.
In hypnosis, we have exactly the same thing. We have a repetition of words, phrases, mantras, slogans if you wish, agreed upon interlocutions.
And this repetition in hypnosis, this leads to what is known as hypnotic and post-hypnotic suggestions.
So it is a process of entraining, the hypnotist entrains the subject, allowing the hypnotist to install, however, temporarily, an interject in the subject's mind.
So the hypnotist introduces his own voice into the subject's mind as a kind of introject, and then this voice operates within the subject's mind and instructs the subject what to do during the hypnotic session and sometimes after the hypnotic session. This is known as post-hypnotic suggestion.
Now this is not just wild speculation, it's not even speculation.
Actually I'm relying on several studies, as is my habit. I always rely on studies. I'm relying on several studies in the field.
Start with a study titled, Are Hypnosis and Dissociation Related? New Evidence for a Connection. It was published in the International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, authors are Cleveland, Cormier, and Gold. And it was published in 2015.
And they said that I'm quoting, there's a heightened, they said that heightened non-pathological forms of dissociation are indeed related to hypnotizability.
Now dissociation is one of the main venues, one of the main conduits of entraining.
When you are being entrained, you dissociate, and it is the dissociation, this gap that opens in memory, that allows the entrainer, the narcissists, the hypnotist, allow them to access your mind through this proverbial gap and install an introject or a voice in your mind, which then maintains some control or some kind of control over you and your actions.
So dissociation, suggestibility, hypnotizability all seem to be connected.
And by the way, there are dozens of studies over the last few decades which have demonstrated this connection.
But more importantly, in August 2022, that's like two years ago, in the Journal of Neuroscience and Behavioral Reviews, Volume 139, there was an article titled Hypnotic Suggestibility in Dissociative and Related Disorders: A Meta- Analysis.
And the authors were Wida, Brown, Thompson, Terhune, and so and so forth.
And the highlights of the study are patients characterized by severe dissociative psychopathology display elevated hypnotic suggestibility.
Elevated, elevated hypnotic suggestibility was most pronounced in dissociative disorders.
Nothing new here, but then the authors actually described entraining without using the word.
These results demonstrate that dissociative disorders and related conditions are characterized by elevated hypnotic suggestibility and have implications for the mechanisms, risk factors and treatment of dissociative psychopathology.
Now this is a groundbreaking revolutionary claim. What the authors are saying is that dissociation itself is the outcome of responsiveness to verbal suggestions.
In other words, the dissociation is brought on by entraining.
And then once you have been dissociated by the entraining process, only then you're open to external interventions, interventions from the outside, which the narcissist abuses and the hypnotist uses.
Hypnosis, therefore, can be safely construed and perceived or reconceived as a kind of shared fantasy with role-playing.
Within the shared fantasy, as you recall, there are several processes taking place.
There's an outsourcing of reality testing by the subject.
In the case of the narcissist, there's an outsourcing of reality testing by the intimate partner or the victim, but in hypnosis, it's the subject of hypnosis.
And what the subject of hypnosis does, he allows the hypnotist to become the reality testing.
The subject interfaces with reality, gathers information about reality, evaluates, appraises, engages reality through the intermediation of the hypnotist, exactly as the intimate partner of the narcissist does within the shared fantasy.
Next, within the shared fantasy, there is the subject of hypnosis or the victim of narcissistic abuse.
They fit themselves. They adapt into a narrative. They assume a role, a role within a script.
And this is exactly what happens in hypnosis.
Whereas the intimate partner of the narcissist would play a role within the shared fantasy in order to aggrandize the narcissist and cater to his fantasies, the subject in hypnosis would play a role within the script of the hypnotist and would obey the commands of the hypnotist in order to maintain the role within the fantasy.
And so the delusions, the delusions incumbent upon and inherent in the narcissist's shared fantasy and the hypnotic state, these delusions are perceived to be realistic within the shared fantasy.
And goals, the goals of the shared fantasy and the goals of the hypnotic state are derived from these delusions. They emanate from them.
In both cases, the shared fantasy and the hypnotic state, there's a suspension of disbelief, a suspension of the ability to judge right from wrong, factual, from counterfactual, true, from false.
The narcissist introject and the hypnotist introject take over these functions. They provide the reality testing.
And consequently, both the narcissist and the hypnotist in their various capacities are able to externally regulate the internal environment of the subject of hypnosis or the victim of abuse.
There's an external regulation of moods, emotions, and cognitions as well as external regulation of a sense of self-worth, self-perception, and self-image.
And this creates a confusion between internal and external, which is very critical in hypnosis.
Because what happens in hypnosis, the subject outsources internal regulatory functions, internal ego functions. The subject outsources them to the hypnotist.
And because these are internal functions, the hypnotist, while perceived as external, is also perceived as internal.
So there is a huge confusion in hypnosis between what is happening internally and what is happening externally, and this is very, very reminiscent of the narcissist's shared fantasy.
And so, it is this confusion between external and internal that renders memories suspect.
I read to you a paragraph from a book about hypnosis.
As for the memories produced under hypnosis, research has demonstrated that they are less accurate than memories produced by the same subjects without hypnosis.
A key element of hypnosis, after all, is an increased susceptibility to suggestion and fantasy, thus making it an inappropriate tool for attempting to recover accurate memories.
Furthermore, people who have recalled an incident under hypnosis tend to be more confident about the accuracy of that memory than they are about their own real memories.
So this is a confusion between internal and external.
Memories are perceived as external and therefore objective and neutral and accurate when actually they are internal and they are subject to all the vagaries and problematics of memory creation internally.
And I recommend if you want to learn more about this I recommend that you watch my video about memory and identity.
Within the hypnotic session, within the hypnotic state, there's a symbiotic merger between the hypnotist and the subject.
The subject is regressed into infancy. The subject becomes infantile while the hypnotist becomes a parental figure.
There's a merger and fusion between the hypnotist and the subject, which allows the hypnotist to control to some extent the subject's cognition and behaviors and memories.
This merger and fusion with a secure base parental figure is also common in the shared fantasy with a narcissist.
Sandor Ferenczi in 1909, which was a bit before my time, elaborated on this, he declared that the hypnotic state was in essence a transference phenomenon.
Some aspects of the hypnotists were paternal, the authoritative position, the forceful suggestions, and some aspects of the hypnotists were maternal in nature, for example, the soothing voice.
So the hypnotist provided a parental dyad and regressed the subject of hypnosis to an infantile state which implied dependence and control.
That is exactly what the narcissists does to the victim.
Now, hypnosis is much more powerful, much more potent in people who have experienced soul murder.
Now you know that I don't believe or I don't use the word soul.
But soul murder in this case is a metaphor which was used in early psychoanalytic literature.
Soul murder is not a diagnosis nor is it a mental health condition. It is a dramatic term.
And I'm quoting from an encyclopedia, soul murder is a dramatic term for circumstances that eventuate in crime, namely the deliberate attempt to eradicate or compromise the separate identity of another person.
The victims of soul murder remain in large part possessed by another, their souls in bondage to someone else.
It can result from childhood abuse, whether sexual molestation or physical beating, leading to overstimulation, terror and anger.
It can also result from deprivation, especially in childhood, in the form of neglect or lack of emotional sustenance, leading to terrifying neediness, a sense of abandonment and rejection.
Now, hypnosis is intimately linked to this, and there is a state known as auto hypnosis.
Auto hypnosis is a set of defensive operations which lead to the alteration of consciousness and a strange state of mind in which one knows and does not know of a thing at the same time, said Freud in 1894.
Schengold, Leonard Schengel, described auto-hypnosis in detail in 1989.
He said that auto-hypnosis comprises three subsidiary mechanisms.
He called the first one hypnotic evasion involving the use of altered consciousness as a defense against libidinal and aggressive drives.
Actually he based his work on Dix in 1965, on Fleiss in 1935, etc.
The idea was that there are drives inside us, they're very strong, they're very primitive, for example, the sex drive, and we hypnotize ourselves and we change our consciousness in order to defend against these drives, because they place us in danger.
Similarly, we use hypnotic evasion according to Schengel to fend off traumatic memories, to somehow defend against the emergence of traumatic memories.
The second mechanism in auto-hypnosis is hypnotic facilitation.
It involves the use of altered consciousness to sanction the discharge of otherwise repudiated impulses.
Exactly the opposite. Facilitation involves the discharge of urges and impulses, but in a way that would not risk the individual.
And number three, auto-hypnotic vigilance, which involves hypercathexis, doubling the emotional investment of certain perceptual functions existing side by side with defensive obliviousness of other environmental cues. This is the closest one gets to dissociation.
Now all these mechanisms of auto-hypnosis exist in people who suffered childhood abuse and trauma and they render such people easier victims, easier targets for the narcissist and for the hypnotist.
Now hypnosis is a benign state. Narcissism, the shared fantasy, they lead to narcissistic abuse.
But both situations, hypnosis and the narcissistic shared fantasy, make use of the victim's auto-hypnotic faculties.
And the more the victim is broken, the more the victim is damaged, the more the victim has been subjected to adverse childhood experiences, the more likely the victim is to self-hypnotize.
The narcissist leverages this auto-hypnotic, auto-hypnosis in order to take over the victims.
Schengold said that an individual using such auto-hypnotic vigilance could come across as an expert witness, even a sensitive detective, pretty naturally alert to clues, but he said it's a completely unreliable observer.
In other words what Schengold is implying in 1989 is that auto hypnosis involves a lot of self-deception. The victim deceives herself that she is in control. She is perceptive. She is perspicacious. She is wise. She is intelligent. She's clever. She is not gullible. She is not naive. She is an observer of human affairs with sharpness and cunning.
But in reality, says Schengold, she is susceptible and vulnerable and an unreliable observer.
And all three mechanisms are regularly employed by the victims of soul murder.
The final adherence or the final coherence between hypnosis and the shared fantasy has to do with self-states.
Now, for those of you who are not aware of my work in the field, so I advise you to search the channel for self-states. Start with the video about IPAM, intra-psychic activation model, ipam, start with this video and go from there.
Self-states simply says that there is no unitary self that we all have an assemblage of self-states which we use in accordance to and which are reactive to environmental cues.
So here's something from a book about the correspondence between self-states and hypnotic states.
The most popular state theory, which insists that hypnosis involves an alteration of conscious awareness, is Ernest Hilgard's Neo-dissociation theory.
According to Hilgard, the mind contains multiple parts that are not all conscious at the same time, and which are ordinarily under the influence of a centralized control structure.
Under hypnosis, says Hilgard, a dissociation or splitting consciousness occurs, in which subjects surrender to the hypnotist some of their usual control over voluntary actions, while gaining some control over typically involuntary processes such as sensitivity to pain.
Control over pain has of course been a major concern of research on hypnosis since James Braid's time in the mid-19th century.
And Hilgard conducted a classic study intended to explain this control of pain in terms of dissociation.
Hilgard had hypnotized subjects and asked them to immerse one hand in ice, ice water, following a hypnotic suggestion that they would feel no pain.
The technique came to be known as cold pressor test.
Subjects were asked to press a key with the other non-immersed hand if they felt any pain.
So there was a hypnotic session, the subjects were hypnotized, they received a suggestion to place one hand in ice-cold water and the other hand on a key or a button.
Verbally, subjects typically reported almost no pain, but they pressed the key. They pressed the key indicating a substantial amount of pain.
It's as if the subject split. One part of the subject experienced pain and was pressing the key. And the other did not experience pain at all because the hypnotic suggestion was you're not going to experience pain.
And so the key pressing said Hilgard indicated a substantial amount of pain.
Hilgard explains, I'm continuing from the book, Hilgard explains that a hidden observer was reporting on the pain, while no pain was experienced by the part of the mind that had conscious awareness.
Hilgard's explanation, however, has recently been widely eclipsed by a non-state view, variously called role theory, the cognitive behavioral view, or the socio-cognitive view, starting with Spanos in 1980.
According to non-state advocates, the view of hypnosis as a dissociative state is simply unnecessary and potentially misleading.
Role theory maintains that hypnotic phenomena can be explained in terms of compliance with social demands.
That's the narcissistic shared fantasy.
And so hypnosis can be explained in terms of acting in accordance with a special social role.
The hypnotized person does behave differently from non-hypnotized people, but this is because he or she has agreed to act out an established role with certain expectations and certain rules.
The hypnotized person does feel less in control and does become far more suggestible, but it happens voluntarily as part of a social ritual.
Furthermore, there is not evidence of any changes in neuropsychological responses during hypnosis, unlike what is seen in actual altered states of consciousness, such as sleep or the effects of psychedelic drugs.
Indeed, continues the book, in studies in which some people are hypnotized and given suggestions, while other non-hypnotized people are asked to do the same things, the same tasks.
A typical finding is that motivated but non-hypnotized volunteers can duplicate most classic hypnotic effects, including such impressive outcomes as limb rigidity and pain insensitivity.
Non-state theories maintain that hypnotic behaviors and experiences represent no change in cognitive processes, but rather reflect the action of normal cognitive processes under special social circumstances.
In 1997, Kirsten Lynn suggested that subjects in hypnotic situations have a generalized expectation of reaction. We could call it a belief or a faith.
And they adopt this belief that if they were to follow the instruction of the hypnotist and produce behaviors that are experienced as involuntary, they're going to be rewarded somehow.
One consequence of this is such as attribute hypnotic reactions to external causes, to the hypnotist.
They experience hypnotic reactions as involuntary.
That is the confusion between internal and external that I mentioned earlier, and it is also experienced massively by victims of narcissistic abuse embedded in shared fantasies.
You're beginning to see the close proximity and close correspondence between hypnosis and the shared fantasy.
One would even venture to say that the shared fantasy and the narcissistic shared fantasy, is nothing but a hypnotic state.
According to Lynn's theory, to Kirsch and Lynn's theory, hypnotic reactions are triggered by the same mechanisms as voluntary reactions.
But how does a hypnotist bring a participant into a state of hypnosis?
Normally there are four parts and they are described in a study in 1994 published by the National Research Council.
But I would like to focus on one or two elements of this because this lecture is not about hypnosis per se, but about the connection between hypnosis and the narcissistic shared fantasy.
So I would like to focus on what is known as the cold control theory of hypnosis.
According to this theory, there is a distinction between control and consciousness.
The theory was first promulgated by Rosenthal's. He created a theory known as higher order thinking theory or hot theory.
According to Rosenthal, we are aware of mental states because we think about them. We are aware of mental states by having thoughts about those mental states.
In other words, we are not directly aware of mental states, but we are aware of thinking about these mental states.
A thought about being in a mental state is what is known as a second order thought because it is a mental state about a mental state. For example, I see that the decad is being black.
There are also third order thoughts. So we have first orderthoughts. We have second order thoughts, and we have third order thoughts.
And third order thoughts is when we become aware of having a second order thought.
So for example, I'm aware that the cat that I'm seeing is black.
One, two, three.
So the cold control theory of hypnosis stays, and now I'm quoting, that a successful response to hypnotic suggestions can be achieved by forming an intention to perform the required cognitive action or activity without training hots on the intent of that action that would normally accompany the thoughtful execution of the action.
In other words, there's a suspension of the control in hypnosis.
Hilgard's neo-dissociation theory of hypnosis is a classical state theory.
He suggests that hypnotic phenomena are generated by dissociation within high-level control systems.
Essentially, hypnotic induction is said to divide the functioning of the executive control system, ECS, into different flows.
Part of the ECS functions normally, but is unable to present itself in conscious consciousness because of the presence of an amnesic barrier.
Hypnotic suggestions affect the dissociated part of the ECS, of the executive control system, and the subject is aware of the results of the proposals, but is not aware of the process by which they were created.
This is as close as you get to narcissism.
Because narcissists are aware of their actions, but they are not aware of the motivations for their actions.
They are aware of what they are doing. They are aware of the consequences of what they are doing, but they are not aware of why they are doing it.
You could say that narcissists are in a constant hypnotic state. You could say that the executive control system of the narcissists is dissociated, is broken.
There is a part that is never accessible to consciousness.
Sorry, whenever I speak about narcissists, I have this reflex, gag reflex.
The social cognitive theory of hypnosis I'm continuing to quote holds that the experience of lack of ease in hypnosis results from participants motivated tendencies to interpret hypnotic suggestions in such a way that they do not require planning and active effort.
In other words, the experience of ease stems from an error of attribution.
The attribution of the will depends on the type of response set that has been put in place.
And if there is a hypnotic set of responses the will is assigned externally.
Simply put hypnosis occurs effortlessly when individuals expect things to be effortless and then they decide more or less consciously to respond with suggestions.
This is an overview of hypnosis and I demonstrated to you the interfaces between hypnosis, narcissism and the narcissistic shared fantasy.
If I'm right and the narcissistic is in a constant hypnotic state, then obviously any extension of the narcissists, any cognitive and emotional extension, for example, the shared fantasy would also constitute a hypnotic space.
And anyone who enters this hypnotic space would be hypnotized.
I think hypnosis could become the explanatory and organizing principle when we try to understand the interactions between the narcissists and his victims and his intimate partners, one and the same.
Now, as I promise, the dictionary part.
I'm going to use the American Psychological Association definitions.
Listen well.
Hypnosis. The procedure or the state induced by that procedure in which suggestion is used to evoke changes in sensation perception, cognition, emotion, or control over motor behavior. Subjects appear to be receptive to varying degrees to suggestions to act, feel and behave differently than in ordinary waking state.
The exact nature of hypnotic suggestibility and its possible therapeutic uses are still being studied and debated.
As a specifically psychotherapeutic intervention, hypnosis is referred to as hypnotherapy.
Okay, waking hypnosis, any technique in which hypnotic effects are achieved without reference to sleep or to a trance. It is induced through an apparently natural but carefully considered choice of simple words, gestures, and directives upon which to focus. A great definition of entraining, by doing.
Hypnotic susceptibility. The degree to which an individual is able to enter into hypnosis.
Although many individuals can enter at least a light trance, people vary greatly in their ability to achieve a moderate or deep trance.
This is also called hypnotizability.
And I remind you that people who have experienced childhood abuse and trauma are more suggestible and more hypnotizable for reasons that I've enumerated in my lecture earlier.
Now we measure susceptibility using the Stanford hypnotic susceptibility scale. It's a standardized 12-item scale used to measure hypnotic susceptibility by means of the participants' responses to various suggested actions, such as fall forward. The subject is asked to perform certain actions, like fall forward, close the eyes, lower an outstretched arm and so.
It was developed at Stanford University by Ernest Hilgard, the aforementioned.
Post-hypnotic suggestion. A suggestion made to a person during hypnosis that they act out after the hypnotic trance.
The suggested act may be carried out in response to a prearranged cue, and the person may not know why they're performing the action.
Hetero-hypnosis is a state of hypnosis induced in one person by another person and it is distinct from self-hypnosis, which is the process of putting oneself into a trance or trans-like state, typically through auto-suggestion.
This is called auto-hypnosis, as I mentioned.
Auto-hypnosis is sometimes perceived as an altered state of consciousness, a state of psychological functioning that is significantly different from that which is experienced in ordinary states of consciousness.
Reports of the experience of altered states of consciousness are highly subjective, but the phenomenon is susceptible to some degree of empirical study.
It tends to be characterized by altered levels of self-awareness, affect, reality testing, orientation to time and space, wakefulness, responsiveness to external stimuli, or memorability, or by a sense of ecstasy, boundlessness or unity with the universe.
Altered states may result from changes in neurobiological functioning due to oxygen depletion or a use of a psychoactive drug, from hypnosis, meditation and sensory deprivation, we also obtain altered states of consciousness. Mystical or religious experiences lead to the same.
Although classical psychoanalysis has tended to regard altered states of consciousness as symptoms of regressive states, other schools of thought, such as Jungian, humanistic and transpersonal psychology, regard altered states, regard all the states of consciousness as higher states of consciousness, and often as indicative of a more profound level of personal and spiritual evolution.
Now, of course, one can engage in auto-hypnosis, as I said, and in auto-hypnosis, there's auto-suggestion.
The process of making positive suggestions to oneself for such purposes as improving morale, inducing relaxation or promoting recovery from illness.
Self-suggestion is sometimes used in autogenic training and self-affirmation.
So this is the dictionary and last comment I would like to make is about hypnotherapy.
And I would like to read to you a segment from a book about hypnotherapy.
Hypnosis may be used in psychotherapy as an adjunct with all types of patients and problems.
It is particularly indicated when one wishes rapidly to establish rapport with a patient as in short-term psychotherapy and to reinforce authoritative suggestions for symptom relief or removal.
Hypnosis permits the re-experiencing or in fantasy of real-life experiences that have consistently provoked avoidance reactions, for example, trauma.
Gradually, patients become immunized to the traumatic events in their everyday lives.
They learn to dampen fantasies of anticipated catastrophic happenings. They learn to control catastrophizing.
Patients are enabled to talk more freely about these experiences and to strip them of their terrorizing connotations.
The therapist may encourage the patient to reenact scenes that stimulate painful emotions.
In those patients who cannot remember dreams, hypnosis often helps to break through their resistance and they begin to talk about even the most repressed elements.
As the patient successfully coexists with his fantasies of aggression, assertiveness and sexuality, the patient is less burdened with the need to suppress and repress. Energy is released for more constructive activities.
A rich background in psychotherapies is an essential prerequisite for hypnotherapy.
Preferably, the therapist should have been schooled in a variety of approaches, including psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy and behavioral modification.
So anyone, any coach online, any self-styled expert who uses hypnotherapy without being a licensed therapist is committing actually a crime. That's a crime.
Psychotherapy is essentially a learning process in which maladaptive patterns are gradually replaced by those that promote an effective and realistic adjustment.
Sometimes the mere induction of a trance will bring out the fundamental problems and defenses of the patient.
The patient's reactions to the hypnotic situation, the induction process, the suggestions made, the patient's reactions to the therapist or the hypnotist are more important than beneficial responses to therapeutic suggestions.
Hypnosis is a fluctuating state, the aberrations of which vary rapidly, which shifts in the individual's physiological and psychological status.
The situation under which hypnosis is induced and the motivations of the patient fashioned the data under investigation.
On the other hand, it may be possible through the use of hypnosis to study such processes as dreams, defense mechanisms, emotions and psychopathological phenomena.
And I refer you to studies by Warburg, especially in 1948.
Thank you for listening. And now snap out of it. One, two, three.
I've implanted a hypnotic suggestion in your mind, post-hypnosis. You're going to do very bizarre things having watched this video. Don't be alarmed or surprise. I am in full control.
Focus on my lips as I speak. Watch my lips in motion. Your eyelids feel heavier and heavier. You're sinking into deep sleep.
I've been told that this happens to most of my listeners. They fall asleep to the sound of my voice. Unbeknownst to them, I'm hypnotizing them. And I am hypnotizing them for nefarious purposes, of course.
Don't take me seriously. At least not at the beginning.
Now today's topic is hypnosis. Can we use hypnosis to cure all kinds of conditions physical and mental? And more importantly, what is hypnosis? How is it connected to entraining and can narcissists be hypnotized? Do narcissists hypnotize you?
Stay awake and listen.
Clinically, the narcissist hypnotizes you. He puts you in a state of trance.
I have discussed in previous videos the phenomenon of entraining. Entraining is when two physical brains synchronize. They display the same wavelengths and wave patterns.
Entraining was first discovered about 10 years ago among musicians. Musicians in a common jig, musicians in a rock band, synchronize their brain waves as they play music.
Similarly, the narcissist uses speech, speech patterns, repeated sentences, kind of mantras to brainwash you and synchronize your brain with his brain.
There are several videos of this channel that I've dedicated to the phenomenon of entraining. Some of them dialogues with Richard Grannon, some of them stand alone, and therefore less interesting videos.
Entraining is of course a subspecies of hypnosis.
And so today I would like to discuss a third possible explanation for hypnosis.
Later in the video, I will describe to you previous attempts at trying to understand this amazing phenomenon.
The trance, the hypnotic state, what are they? How do they come about? Can they cure? Can we use hypnosis to cure? Can we use hypnosis to explore the unconscious? Buried and hidden treasures of memory?
No, I will not go there. Can you use hypnosis to go to previous lives?
Because I don't believe there are any previous lives. Only retouts believe that. And I'm not a retout.
But I will discuss all the other uses of hypnosis and the proposed explanations for it.
However, before I do that, I would like to present to you my thoughts about this phenomenon.
I think hypnosis is an extreme form of empathy. I think hypnosis is a state very much like highly sensitive people.
Hypnosis is when the subject of the hypnosis and the hypnotist synchronize, they become one.
And the subject of the hypnosis, the person being hypnotized, seems to be obeying the demands and dictates and commands of the hypnotist but actually I don't think there's a question of obeying here there's no question of obeisance there's no question of dominant and submissive there's no question of hierarchy.
I think what happens is the two minds synchronize the subject of the hypnosis perceives the hypnotist as an extension of himself or herself.
They become one, they merge and fuse in the most profound sense.
Via heightened empathy, the subject to hypnosis actually empathizes with the hypnotist, seeks to please the hypnotist, adopts the hypnotist preferences and desires and wishes as his or her own.
The subject and the hypnotist become one for all practical purposes.
And so the subject of the hypnosis becomes an extension of the hypnotist.
He follows the hypnotist's commands, instructions, wishes. He even imitates and emulates physical conditions.
For example, the hypnotist can put a cold object on the subject's skin and tell him that it's very hot and then the subject will develop a burn, a physical burn.
Subjects could become inordinately rigid. They can control autonomous functions like heartbeat.
This is the power of hypnosis. It's a mind meld.
They create a hive mind, the hypnotist and the subject of hypnosis and in this sense I don't believe that hypnosis is unidirectional I don't believe that it goes only from the hypnotist to the hypnotized I don't think there's a transfer of some mysterious energy or some mysterious quality, for example, like the one between me and mini.
I believe that hypnosis is a reciprocal state.
The hypnotist focuses on specific cognitions and specific emotions and then shares them with the subject of hypnosis verbally, but in a way both of them are hypnotized, both of them are subject to suggestion.
So this is my theory of hypnosis. It's a heightened state of empathy, a heightened state of empathy leading to a mind melt, to a merging of the minds, to fusion, and therefore becoming at least temporarily a single cognitive emotional entity, if not organism.
In order to survey the literature and go there, we need to start with the origins of hypnosis.
My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited, and a professor of psychology.
Up until the end of the 19th century, hypnosis was regarded as a parlor trick, something magicians do on stage. The basis of mind-boggling shows when volunteers seem to enter a special state of mind, a trance, and in this trance start to behave in bizarre or embarrassing or comic ways.
Freud, Zygmunt Freud himself, traveled all the way to Paris and actually spent three years there studying under hypnosis, such as Charcot and others.
Hypnosis was a big thing in the psychology of the late 19th century.
People like Mesmer, Charcot and others used hypnosis to unveil the mysteries of the unconscious, to somehow reach unreachable or inaccessible patients, to ameliorate and mitigate states of anxiety, depression and psychosis.
And of course they did all this with a flair for the spectacular and the ostentatious.
And so, hypnosis started as a stage show. It started as a form of circus performance. You go to a holiday resort and people go on stage and then obediently follow orders and they start to act as a baby or they become super rigid, poised onto chairs or they display burns when they shouldn't have, or they do crazy things.
And so how to explain this?
There is a recent rise in interest in hypnosis, psychedelics, and alternative means of treating mental illness.
And the reason is, of course, because we failed. We have failed. Psychiatry and psychology are failed disciplines. We do not provide the appropriate support and healing to those in need.
I will deal with this in another video where I will discuss the P-Factor, the newest theory about mental illness.
But take it for granted at this stage or take it from me, that psychology and psychiatry are in a bad state.
So the profession is very interested in alternatives. Psychedelics is one direction and hypnosis is another.
Hypnosis clearly has some medical value. For example, recently there have been amazing results with irritable bowel syndrome and the use of hypnosis in various medical settings. Hypnosis helps. It helps people to stop smoking, to lose weight, to give birth without pain-killing drugs, and so on and so forth.
And yet, we don't have a clue how hypnosis works.
My suggested theory or hypothesis that hypnosis is a form of entraining, a form of synchronizing of brains, a form of heightened empathy is number three. It's a third theory.
And none of these theories, myself included, can account or does account for the majority of phenomena associated with hypnosis.
We don't understand what's going on. We don't understand how hypnosis benefits people. We don't understand the concept or the mechanism of suggestion, let alone auto suggestion or post suggestion.
Suggestion is actually the command, the verbalized command given by the hypnotist to the hypnotized. And suggestion can be auto administered.
In other words, you could administer suggestions to yourself. You can self hypnotize.
There's also something called post-suggestion, where you are subject to a suggestion while you're hypnotized, and then you act out the suggestion after you've woken up from the hypnosis.
No one knows how these things work.
We do know, however, that narcissists and psychopaths are less amenable to hypnosis. They are less suggestible.
And so this seems to indicate some affinity or some correlation between empathy or empathic skills and hypnosis.
But on the other hand, people with histrionic personality disorder and people with borderline personality disorder are more suggestible than the general population. They are more amenable to hypnosis.
And in both these disorders, especially in histrionic personality disorder, empathy is impaired.
So this seems to contradict my hypothesis, seems to falsify it.
Anyhow, one thing that is known is that to derive any long-term benefit from hypnosis, you need several sessions.
And another thing we know for sure is that hypnosis doesn't work with everyone. Not everyone can be hypnotized. There are many people who are resistant to hypnosis.
Are they control freaks? Possibly, do they lack empathy? Yes, in the case of narcissists and psychopaths.
Is there another problem perhaps? Should there be a match in personalities between the hypnotist and the subject of hypnosis? Is it a form of bonding or attachment?
We simply don't know.
It's not that we haven't been trying to understand hypnosis for the last 150 years. It's not that there is a shortage of ideas on how to explain hypnosis.
I counted in the preparation for this video, Minnie and I counted at least 30 different, that's three zero, different theories of hypnosis.
Generally speaking, there are two types of theories.
The first idea is that when people are hypnotized, their brains enter a special state where they become unusually suggestible or more likely to follow instructions.
My theory of hypnosis is an offshoot of this idea.
In my theory, people do enter a special state, a state of synchronization.
The brain of the hypnotist and the brain of the hypnotizee become one. Their waves and frequencies are synchronized. It's a process of entraining via empathy, and then the hypnotizee becomes an extension of the hypnotist. They merge and fuse, the boundaries blur, and they become a single mind, mind meld, or a mind hive.
So this is one form of thinking about hypnosis. It seems to be a state of focused attention coupled with relaxation and loss of awareness of other external influences, kind of blocking out the world.
But this is one camp, one group of ideas.
The other group of ideas is that during hypnosis, people don't enter any special state. There's no special state.
They behave as they do because of simple societal pressures, social expectations to follow the hypnotist requests. It is simply more awkward, less pleasant, and more embarrassing to disobey the suggestions, the requests, the wishes, and the commands of the hypnotist.
In other words, the second camp, the second group of ideas attempting to explain hypnosis actually say that hypnosis is a self, is a people pleasing experience. The hypnotized person tries to people please. He tries to please the hypnotist.
So these are the two battling or conflicting groups of ideas. Special state of mind or it's a social people-pleasing behavior.
It's very difficult, as far as I'm concerned at least, it's very difficult to accept the idea that hypnosis is an exercise of people pleasing. We don't feel the slightest desire to obey other people.
If you were to be approached by a random person in the street and he started barking orders at you, you are not likely to obey. On the contrary, likely to develop defiance or reactance.
But it is true that there are specific situations where we do start to behave in ways that other people want us to or ways that other people expect us to.
There are special social situations where we do tend to people please, even if we are not people pleasers by nature.
For example, how many times were you approached by a waiter after a meal in a restaurant and asked, did you like the food? Many times. How many times did you tell the truth?
No, I did not like the food, it sucked.
Very few times.
So you were trying to people please. You were trying to please the waiter. You were telling the waiter, I love the food, even though you hated it.
How many times at the end of a theater show or a concert or a play, everyone stood up and there was a standing ovation, how many times did you remain seated? How many times did you defy the audience, the behavior of the audience?
Not many times.
Peer pressure does alter behavior, and peer pressure is a form of people pleasing.
It is nearly impossible to defy the combined societal and cultural pressure emanating from the audience in a stage show of the hypnotism.
The audience expects the hypnotized subject to collaborate with the hypnotist and to deliver entertainment. This is huge pressure.
British illusionist, Darren Brown, who used to be a hypnotist himself, has written a book called Tricks of the Mind, published in 2006, an amazing book in which he explains this dynamic.
Same with magicians, by the way. Magic, stage magic, I mean, relies a lot on peer pressure expectations and a modification of a state of mind to cohere with the ambience.
So I think that both camps actually agree that there is an altered state of mind. Only they disagree on the nature of the change.
The first camp believe that the hypnotist mind takes over the hypnotized mind. The hypnotist takes over the subject.
I believe it's done via entraining, the synchronization of the wave function of the two brains. They become one. They merge and fuse.
Others believe that the suggestion itself creates a special state of mind, where a person is more amenable to following and obeying instructions.
And yet others believe that peer pressure, expectations, social context, and the need to perform, they all collude to produce a people-pleasing state of mind.
Peer pressure cannot explain all the strange things that people do under hypnosis.
I describe, for example, the case of a burn manifesting suddenly on the skin, having been touched by a cold object. I describe people who are rigid enough to support an enormous weight, they become rigid enough to support a normal weight or regulate their heartbeat.
So this is very difficult to explain these feats and accomplishments only via the construct of peer pressure, but it's not impossible because non-hypnotized people actually replicated all these things.
They were not subject to suggestion, but they were subject to peer audience public expectations. They had to perform somehow. They had to people please, even though they have not been hypnotized, and they were not exposed to a suggestion by a hypnotist, and yet they replicated all these things.
It is possible to act like a baby, for example. If you're in a social situation where this is expected, for example, you're an actor in a play, or during certain sex practices.
So it's very difficult to work out which of these competing ideas is correct.
Because when you question people after they have been hypnotized, they say that they felt compelled to obey the instructions, but they can't tell you why.
Some researchers, of course, subjected hypnotized people to brain scans. And they compared these scans to the brain scans of those carry the same tasks while merely pretending to be hypnotized.
So there were studies where there was one group of people pretending to be hypnotized, carrying out all these functions, doing all these things, replicating all these acts, but they were not actually hypnotized. They were never exposed to hypnotists.
And there are a second group of people who were subject to suggestions by a hypnotist and did the very same things.
And so they scan the brains of these two groups and they did find differences in brain activity.
These studies are new, relatively new, and they are not conclusive. The samples are too small and so on so forth.
And there's also a bigger problem. There is the growing realization that brain scanning research in general is unreliable. And I'm going to discuss it in a separate video. Brain scanning MRIs, fMRIs falling out of favor.
So how can we investigate hypnosis?
If you can't use brain scans, if you can't ask the hypnotized person directly, if hypnotists themselves don't know what they're doing and can't explain how they hypnotize? If the theories are unfalsifiable, non-verifiable, if they are not-verifiable, if they are not replicable experiments, is this a science? How can we ever say anything meaningful about hypnosis?
And on the other hand, can we deny the existence of hypnosis?
Over the last 150 years, there have been millions of documented cases in support of the contention that hypnosis is unusual behavior and an unusual state of life.
What is it? We are not sure. But we are sure that it is.
There was a study in 2017 which supported the special state idea. And this is the first, I think, pretty conclusive study to have emerged.
And so it seems that we are veering towards, we're gravitating towards, a special state of mind explanation of hypnosis.
Hypnotherapy is not a medical panacea. Only a small fraction of people, perhaps 10%, are highly hypnotizable. And you need to be highly hypnotizable to react to medical suggestions.
Similarly, hypnosis or hypnotherapy did not prove to be very useful in the treatment of numerous mental health conditions, and that includes anxiety and depression where hypnosis is the most efficacious, and still not very efficacious.
Hypnosis, of course, cannot be used to treat complex or hyper-complex conditions like personality disorders.
And there is also a question of whether hypnosis is a proxy.
Take for example irritable bowel syndrome. We know that there is a strong connection between IBS and stress. We also know that in a state of hypnosis there is a relaxation of the stress.
It's a little like meditation. All these are allied conditions. They are somehow interconnected: entrancing, trans, meditation, hypnosis, they all have something in common, a factor in common, which we should find one day. Maybe we will call it the H factor.
So hypnosis reduces stress. Perhaps in the treatment of irritable bowel syndrome, it's not the hypnosis that is helpful. It's the reduction in stress that is a prerequisite for hypnosis. The relaxation that accompanies hypnosis.
Hypnotherapy is a much neglected area. And medical doctors, psychiatrists and psychologists even prefer mindfulness, relaxation techniques such as meditation or yoga to hypnotherapy or listening to relaxation tapes.
There is an aversion to hypnotherapy because there is a relinquishing of control to an outside agent. Hypnosis sounds a little sinister, a little wrong. Same with psychedelics. Psychedelics trigger in us the association of drugs. And so psychedelics strike us as illegal somehow or dark.
But both hypnotherapy and psychedelics are at the frontiers of treating mental illness, and they should be treated with respect, investigated thoroughly and put to use.
Now I hope I haven't hypnotized you with this lecture. But let me tell you something. You never know.