Consciousness in Hypnosis

In hypnosis, subjects respond to suggestions for imaginative experiences that can involve alterations in conscious perception, memory, and action. However, these phenomena occur most profoundly in those subjects who are highly hypnotizable. The chapter reviews a number of these phenomena, including posthypnotic amnesia; hypnotic analgesia; hypnotic deafness, blindness, and agnosia; and emotional numbing, with an eye toward uncovering dissociations between explicit and implicit memory, perception, and emotion. These dissociative phenomena of hypnosis bear a phenotypic similarity to the "hysterical" symptoms characteristic of the dissociative and conversion disorders. The experience of involuntariness in hypnotic response is considered in light of the concept of automatic processing. Hypnosis may be described as an altered state of consciousness based on the convergence of four variables: induction procedure, subjective experience, overt behavior, and psychophysiological indices including neural correlates of hypnotic suggestion revealed by