Some highly hypnotizable individuals are capable of age regression in the trance state in which they relive some part of their life as though they were at that age. When tested, they respond to vocabulary ques-tions like 2-year-olds, deny knowledge of the current president, and giggle when tickled as though they were children. Some even become nonverbal when regressed to age 6 months and may, without specific instruction, develop the grasp and rooting reflexes that characterize the partially developed nervous system of an infant. Many such indi-viduals seem to retain layers of memories analogous to the layers of a city uncovered by archeologists. These primitive reflexes and childish emotional responses remain stored in the unconscious, and in some
individuals they may be tapped using hypnosis (H. Spiegel et al.
1945), as in the following example.
A 25-year-old man was hypnotized in a demonstration of hypnotic age regression. When he was regressed to various ages, he responded without difficulty, until he was signaled to place himself back to his twelfth birthday. When asked for his name (as was done previously at older age levels), he re-sponded with some confusion and tension but did not an-swer. When pressed for an answer, he looked about and inquiringly uttered a word that sounded like “Vas?” It then became apparent that he did not understand English, and he had been saying “What?” in German (“was” pronounced
“vas”). A third person who spoke German served as transla-tor. The subject seemed quite relieved, and the interview and planned test program continued. The interpreter was subse-quently necessary for every age level up to and including the thirteenth birthday. At age 13 years, he had escaped from Vi-enna to the United States, and by the time he was 25 years old, his fluent English showed no trace of his native German tongue—a language that he had learned to despise to the ex-tent that he had difficulty with both speaking and under-standing it. Even his handwriting reverted to German script at any age younger than 13 years. From age 13 to 18 years, while under hypnotic regression, his spoken English revealed a gradually disappearing German accent.
Yet, despite this need to use an interpreter when interview-ing him at ages younger than 13 years, he could understand and respond without evidence of confusion to instruction re-lated to his state of trance. For example, while being inter-viewed at the 10-year-old level, he was told, “When I touch your forehead, your eyes will close” and “You are now going back into the years; you are now 6 years old—this is your sixth birthday.” His response was so clear that there was no doubt whatsoever that he understood exactly what was said.
Again, at the 6-year-old level, when asked, “How old are you?” he looked around with confusion and asked, “Vas?”
This case illustrates both the layering of memories that are later tapped by the trance regression and the dual focus that characterizes the trance. The subject relived the world as he had experienced it at
age 12 years in German and at the same time understood trance in-structions in English as a 25-year-old adult. This rather strange situa-tion seemed to provoke little tension or puzzlement for the subject.
For reasons that are not clear, some individuals may retain their precognitive capacity to relate in an intense way to sensorimotor ex-perience, whereas others lose or so thoroughly transform their pre-cognitive capacity into pre-cognitive terms and functioning that it becomes more or less inaccessible. Influences that occur at an im-printlike level may in part be responsible. In any event, the experien-tial intensity of the trance experience suggests an individual’s capacity to get in touch with early foundation experiences. The im-portance of primacy (rather than recency) of experience for imprint learning and the important role of factors that make for a profound experience—such as pain and massive sensory input—combine to suggest that trance experience taps some earlier developmental expe-rience. The ability to tap earlier developmental experience by trance experience seems to change relatively little over the adult life span ex-cept in cases in which psychological or neurological dysfunction is involved. It is becoming clearer, as we discuss in Chapter 5, The Per-son With the Problem: Apollonians, Odysseans, and Dionysians, that the trance mode involves a different kind of language from our usual cognitive verbal functioning.
Summary
Hypnosis is essentially a psychophysiological state of aroused, atten-tive, receptive focal concentration with a corresponding diminution in peripheral awareness. The capacity for this state varies among individuals and is relatively fixed throughout the adult life cycle. This capacity may be genetically determined or perhaps learned early in life, and it can be tapped and invoked in three ways: spontaneously, in response to a signal from another person (formal hypnosis), and in response to a self-induced signal (self-hypnosis).
A spontaneous trance can be either internally aroused (e.g., day-dreaming, fugue state [see Chapter 1, Naturally Occurring Trance Phenomena and Related Myths]) or instigated by external cues (e.g., fear, seduction, intense concentration). The individual is generally unaware of his or her shifting into and out of this kind of trance
ex-perience, and hence it is unstructured and undisciplined. For exam-ple, a person can become so absorbed in watching a movie that he or she is surprised to discover where he or she is when the show ends.
Formal hypnosis differs from spontaneous trance in that it is con-textually an interpersonal mode of communication. The subject maintains a sensitive, attentive responsiveness to an operator during the trance state. Technically, the authentic hypnotic experience can be defined as formal hypnosis only when it is knowingly induced by the operator; responded to by the subject in a sensitive, disciplined way; and terminated by the operator’s signal. Using the HIP, one cer-emony for signaling trance, the operator actually tests for trance ca-pacity and, while measuring it, simultaneously enables the subject to identify this special state of attention as hypnosis. The operator can, when relevant, instruct the subject to shift knowingly into the hyp-notic state (self-hypnosis), which differs from spontaneous trance in that it is effected by the individual’s conscious design. Self-hypnosis can be learned by instruction or discovered intuitively. It is instigated and terminated by the subject him- or herself rather than another person.
In reality, all hypnosis is a form of self-hypnosis. In the formal in-duction of a trance, an individual enters a state of sustained, atten-tive, receptive concentration, in response to either an inner signal or a signal from another person, that activates this capacity for a shift of awareness and permits more intensive concentration in a designated direction.
In Chapter 3, Rationale for a Clinical Test, and Chapter 4, Admin-istration and Scoring, we describe the HIP, a clinically useful method for rapidly inducing the trance experience and systematically measur-ing the individual’s response to it.
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