Hypnotic Cinema: Chapter 2 Part of
THE BIG PICTURE: A POST-JUNGIAN MAP OF GLOBAL CINEMA
by James Whitlark, Ph.D.
Tracing Trance
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…Jung was working in the tradition of Charcot, who used hypnosis to study hysteria, and throughout most of the nineteenth century, “artificial somnambulism,” induced by hypnotism, had been regarded as the best way of gaining access to the unconscious mind. Even earlier, as Ellenberger points out, mentioning the scene in which the sleepwalking Lady Macbeth gives away her secrets, interest in somnambulism had spread beyond medicine into literature and philosophy. —Ronald Hayman, A Life of Jung |
Freud and Jung began with crude versions of hypnosis and found them unsatisfactory: not all patients could reach the deep trance presumed necessary, information from the entranced was unreliable, and suggesting away one symptom often led to another because the cause remained uncured. Freud substituted the couch, which inclined his clients toward a hypnogogic state; nonetheless, he did not call it “hypnosis” but “psychoanalysis.” Jung eventually developed what he termed “active imagination”: patients would access previously unconscious metaphors and images, which he considered healing wisdom (rather than as disguises for sexual perversion—Freud’s presumption). Without realizing it, Freud was making a small step and Jung a slightly larger one toward the new hypnosis, which was formulated largely by Milton Erickson as a way to help the unconscious heal itself.
Only about twenty-percent of the population are susceptible to
the old approaches, which have become a joke. As late as the 1940s, they were still
the standards, given definitive formulation in George Estabrooks’ Hypnotism
(1943). At that time, however, Erickson was already experimenting with more indirect
techniques and establishing a reputation that dominated hypnotherapy by the 1980s.
Through confusion, humor, and ambiguous narratives he took advantage of any break
in consciousness to lead his patients to a “transderivational search,” their listening
attentively to try to guess what his discourse had to do with their problems. In
other words, he resorted to the same artistic devices literature and film employ
to inspire suspense and interest, except for one significant difference: the situation
inspired the patients to look for curative application. This difference, though,
is diminishing as books and programs remind the public that the arts can function
in this way (as music and drama did in Classic Greece). Imagining this reaction causes
it to happen—in the same way that seeing a movie immediately after learning of Freudian
analysis turns it into a sequence of sexual symbols.
Is there a danger that making the hypnotherapeutic potential of cinema obvious and public might weaken it? The “old” hypnosis tried to trick subjects into trance, so that it was less effective when the techniques were known. It, of course, was not truly as old as tribal, self-induced trances, which once, presumably were wide-spread institutions. A 1979 study reported, for instance, that over ninety-seven percent of Native North American societies conducted ceremonial inductions of altered states (Ergil et al 132). In some ways a modernization of these, the hypnosis of Erickson (as well as of some other innovators, such as Dave Elman) is ultimately self-hypnosis. Patients’ cooperate with the hypnotist’s induction and choose to change buried states surfacing through the hypnotist’s art, which consists of a communication so rich that it transcends ordinary understanding. Considering, for instance, that Jung devoted much of his time with patients to recounting myths, telling his own dreams, and lecturing on comparative metaphysics, one should not be surprised that they altered their state sufficiently for active imagination.
Indeed, any presentation of an ota-like big picture, by stretching the imagination beyond the petty concerns of daily life, enlarges awareness in much the way Ericksonian hypnosis leads away from small fixations and self-imposed limitations. Stephen Wolinsky writes of the latter:
The more you shrink your focus of attention in therapeutic trance,
the more your perspective spontaneously expands…. Gilligan has noted the paradoxical
nature of trance (1987): “Trance involves a paradoxical, both/and logic. That is,
a person identifies with both sides of a complementary distinction of ‘this’ and
‘that,’ ‘inside’ and ‘outside,’ ‘subject’ and object’” (pp. 40-41)…. (Wolinsky 43-44)
As early as one-hundred-fifty years ago, James Braid recognized that relaxing and
focusing on a spot induced trance—only a more extreme version of watching a screen.
In both cases, the conscious contraction unlocks the depths for daydreams and fosters
the ability to make this access.
This requires only an invitation to trance, which blatantly in the old and more elaborately in the new hypnoses is built through iterations. As Dylan Morgan argues in his Principles of Hypnotherapy, hypnotic repetition runs feedback loops, which amplify the suggestion each time it occurs through the subject’s continuing expectation. As a simple example (and thus one that smacks of the old hypnosis), he writes: “the question, ‘I wonder if there is a small grain of sand in your shoe at this moment?’ establishes a mild expectation that there might be. This tends to amplify the response of any nerves in the sole of the foot. If we keep on asking the question there will generally come a time when one small group of nerves happen to fire more than average. This will reinforce the expectation that there might be something there.… Within a few minutes this feedback loop will increase to the point where there is a clearly "hallucinated" grain in the shoe” (lihttp://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~dylanwad/morganic/ph_chap13.htm). More in the frame of self-hypnosis, becoming aware of one’s body leads to greater control over it, which raises self-fulfilling expectations of continuing improvement.
Artistic use of foreshadowing, set patterns (such as the so-called rule of three), formulaic plots, myths, well-known history, and all the other devices that invite the audience to anticipate what will happen next, create assumptions that function like hypnotic iteration. Because of the audience’s identification with characters, these expectations amplify emotions (as with the mounting tension a series of mystery-film murders may generate in the viewers). Furthermore, iterations can achieve rapport with the repetitive patterns the unconscious manages, such as those in the sympathetic nervous system. Sometimes this is obvious as with John Williams’s theme in Jaws (1975), where the throbbing beneath the horn melody sounds like an accelerating heartbeat to cultivate precisely that in the audience. And it is soon so associated with the shark that it raises the prospect of mayhem at each iteration. For the crime-thriller Mona Lisa (1986), its director Neil Jordan commissioned variations on its title song sufficiently camouflaged so that the audience would barely notice shards of the same melody, surfacing like strands of an enigma.
If entertaining, movies must surprise, thus being confusing at least momentarily. Viewing a successful film, an audience rapt in curiosity sits in the dark becoming less and less conscious of the other spectators around them, while the movie triggers memories and fantasies. At first, this is enough: a lesson in interiority and the possibility of choosing emotions as easily as picking the genre of the film. Because people begin with the assumption that they cannot wish their complexes away (or else they would have done so already), Erickson would often convince them of their self-control by asking them to do something they had never thought to try—making their symptoms worse (cf., coping with fears through horror films). Once the patients succeeded, they found it easier to expect that they could reduce the pain, and consequently mastered it.
Erickson adopted this Jungian insight that the unconscious cooperates
in self-healing. He found that psychopathology consisted of some state frozen so
that it impedes development. All a hypnotherapist need do is suggest acceptance of
responsive change and allow the unconscious to adapt. To suggest this, he often told
a story from his childhood of a time he had returned a neighbor’s horse without knowing
to whom it belonged. He mounted it and gave the horse free reign; it took the “real
road” home (Erickson 1982, 46). More abstractly, he commented:
The activated… associations may remain at an unconscious level, where during trance
they are turned over to effect an apparently autonomous resolution of the patient’s
problem. It is possible that hypnotherapy can take place entirely at an unconscious
level without the patient (and sometimes even the therapist) knowing the “why” of
the cure. The patient only knows a problem has been resolved. (Erickson 1982, 165).
Admittedly, feeling guilty at the failure of his first marriage, Erickson himself
presumed that health meant belonging to a family (i.e., stage two); for the first
part of his career, he acted as a trickster (the archetypal complement of that stage)
manipulating his patients into family-oriented solutions to their difficulties. Gradually,
however, he gained the above realization that if he interrupted the looping state
or stage, the mind, prevented from continuing its habitual course, would be in a
position to update its programs. Both as a statement of this and a way to induce
it, he comments:
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Many subjects who tend to intellectualize, instead of going into a trance, will, some night, when they are thinking about other matters, dream that they are in a trance. And, in that trance state of the dream, they will do certain things. They will come and tell you the next day, “I dreamed a solution to that problem.” Therapy is primarily a motivation of the unconscious to make use of all its many and varied learnings. (Erickson 1982, 163). |
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