Back to the past....riffing on THE PRESERVED

[Page]

Thanks to Mark for his quote below about the subconscious taking orders.

Most hypnotherapists, including me and the ones I know well, would tread 
carefully on claims like "the subconscious mind takes a statement as an 
order." That is a primitive and misleading claim at best. For instance, you 
cannot make someone in a deep hypnotic state act like a chicken simply by 
telling them to. This one of the functions of the unconscious mind. Even in 
a deep hypnotic state, the unconscious mind protects the integrity of the 
whole person.

Having said *that*, hypnosis is a powerful way to help people change 
behaviours and thoughts. One can change dangerous, or even just unwanted, 
behaviours easily and comfortably using hypnosis. This kind of work is based 
on some idea of an unconscious mind. Indeed, a good fractioned can help 
people facilitate important, even life-changing, work without knowing what 
"problem" the client wanted to change. The means of change often remain in 
the client's unconscious mind. One of the common definitions of the 
unconscious is, "an internal focus of awareness."

However one construes the unconscious mind, it is at the least useful 
fiction. (It doesn't need to be reified, though that does not much matter.) 
There are simple examples to support, but not prove, the notion of an 
unconscious mind. Speaking loosely, where are your memories "stored"? Not in 
the conscious mind. (See the wikipedia entry on George Miller's work, 7 plus 
or minus 2.) When you drive a car with a standard transmission, how do you 
know what to do with the clutch and the brakes? Surely, you don't always 
think about specific muscle movements? You may in certain situations, but 
ordinarily you don't. If you did, you wouldn't be able to drive and 
converse.

Then there is language. We can generate syntactically well-formed sentences 
without thinking about syntax at all, and the "fight or flight" response is 
not generated by (in) the conscious mind. You don't have to think about it 
to generate it.

Hypnotherapists take a pragmatic view of the unconscious mind. Fiction or 
not, positing it helps the hypnotherapist do his or her job. You cannot see 
it, hear it, taste it, or touch it, but some version of what we call the 
unconscious mind is in there (or out there in the collective unconscious).

Perhaps I ought to confess that I am a certified hypnotherapist, but not a 
medical doctor. For a more accurate look at hypnosis, and profound 
hypnotherapy, read most anything by Milton H. Erickson, M. D., of Phoenix, 
Arizona. He was a psychiatrist and a hypnotherapist, though not a licensed 
one. There wasn't anyone to license him. No one had the temerity or the 
ability.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mark Kohut" <markekohut at yahoo.com>
To: "Keith" <keithsz at mac.com>; "David Morris" <fqmorris at gmail.com>
Cc: "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Tuesday, January 26, 2010 11:26 AM
Subject: Re: Back to the past....riffing on THE PRESERVED


> David M. wrote:
>> One cannot see the entirety of "the unconscious," only
>> small bits at a
>> time, as it reveals itself to the extent one is able to see
>> it, in the
>> course of an entire life's journey.
>
> From a book called Directive Hypnotherapy, on hypnosis, by a licensed 
> doctor-practitioner: "The subconscious mind moves by steps..."
>
>
> And, also interesting: "the subconscious mind takes a statement as an 
> order"...
>
>
>
>


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