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Originally Posted by paigetheoracle
Do we self-sabotage as a strategy?
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This sounds a bit like what Freud called “
undoing”, one of the neurotic ego defense mechanisms in his psychoanalytic theory of personality. This and related theories are pretty unscientific, anecdotal things, but according to various of them, undoing is very common, pretty easy to spot, and not too hard to cure.
Quote:
Originally Posted by paigetheoracle
Does anyone know if the following experiment has been tried? Hypnotise subjects, testing their IQ both before and after to see if it changes.
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I’ve not heard of such an experiment, nor searched for one.
A fundamental systematic problem you’d likely have with this experiment is due a well-known tendency for people to do better each time they take a particular intelligence test. You might counter this effect by using different tests, but this creates the problem of comparing the results of different tests. So, rather than use an IQ test, the experiment would, I think, be more doable using a very repeatable test that the subject had taken many times over a long period, such as a memory test using random strings.
Done by a competent therapists with whom the subject has good rapport, with the goal of improving test performance, my guess would be hypnosis would improve some peoples performance. As many people use their own private hypnosis-like techniques and rituals when taking tests, I suspect it might little help, or even hurt, some people’s performance. Decades ago, I had some experience with studies comparing “traditional hypnosis” with techniques such as progressive relaxation, which tended to show that the latter was as or more effective than the former.
Quote:
Originally Posted by paigetheoracle
The basis for this idea is my belief that we're all actors on a stage and that hypnosis can cut through this to reach the basic, honest, more scientific and logically consistent 'being' beneath.
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This may be. On the other hand, I’ve witnessed hypnotic subjects lieing shamelessly and playing outrageously dishonest roles. On of my college instructors regularly demonstrated this by instructing subjects to jump out a third story window, lightly float to the sidewalk below, then float back up, back into the room, and report what they had seen below. The subject would leave the room via its main door, walk down 6 flight of stairs, out a side door, to the sidewalk under the main door, then return and give an accurate report of they had seen, omitting any mention of the halls or stairs.
Although I’ve personally witnessed two of the demonstration sessions I describe above, One must be cautions in interpreting them. Many hypnotic subject report that their behavior is not due to an actual difference between their actual and perceived experience, but from a desire to comply with – “play along” - with the hypnotist. Though some claim this is due to differences in the skill of hypnotists and hypnotic aptitude (susceptibility) of the subject, controversy exists as to what really happens during “traditional” hypnosis like I describe.
Thus, I’d caution against expecting profound effects from hypnosis. Though a potentially useful therapeutic technique, there’s not, to the best of my knowledge, clear and credible evidence that the effect of hypnosis differs qualitatively from that of ordinary conversation and/or simple meditation and relaxation techniques.
In particular, the idea that hypnosis can reach “reach the basic, honest, more scientific and logically consistent 'being' beneath” ones ordinary personality, is not, I think, much supported by either anecdotal or scientific evidence. The majority of well-researched and documented studies of hypnosis in the past couple of decades have focused on its role in nearly opposite effects such as
False memory syndrome, where rather than making a person more honest and realistic, hypnosis and similar techniques cause a person to unwittingly believe demonstrably untrue things. False memories can also be produced using more ordinary techniques, such as introducing rumors into a social conversation.
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The freudian concept of “undoing”, limitations and perils of hypnosis
