quote:
Originally posted by babayada:
Also, I do not know how true the belief about not doing anything you wouldn't normally do or have in your values is. A point brought up by the author of "Secret, Don't Tell" is that many experiments "proving" that hypnosis cannot be used to influence people against their will or values was executed by people for whom it was in their best interest to come to the aforementioned conclusion.
IMO many people teaching hypnotic skills for persuasion would LOVE it if this was true. They could advertize that their students can totally dominate anyone they wished to.
As I already said, there are things that can and cannot be done with hypnosis. There are also ways to seemingly get around those rules. Supposing you have the skill to "program" someone to do what you want them to do, if you do this the subject will not be a "zombie" like on movies. What you'd be doing is talking them into changing their frames, values, and beliefs so that it seems natural to do what you want. Using typical skills, however, like establishing rapport to build trust, eliciting and enhancing positive states, and using language patters to persuade them is a far cry from creating a "zombie."
For those that want to create "zombies" it is best to do so in a total control environment like a cult or prison camp. Hypnosis can help in this, but most the changes are related to environmental control and behavior. You separate a person from everyone they know, take away their sense of identity, make them dependent on you for basic needs, punish disobedience, change their diet radically to change their body chemistry, maybe involve drugs, associate pain (probably through torture) to things they valued in their normal life, and probably a host of other techniques. They may or may not use hypnosis when brainwashing the victim, but things like these are far more useful. No, I'm not suggesting that anyone should go out and do any of this, I'm just pointing out the reality of brainwashing vs. the fantasy that a hypnotist can walk up to someone and hypnotize them to rob a bank or kill someone.
It is possible to use hypnosis to mess someone up, but not in the way they show on movies. I've heard from credible sources of a few hypnotists doing things like installing depression, impotence, phobias, incompetence, etc. in people. Again, I don't advocate this I'm only using it as an example of what is possible in the real world rather than what is taught in fiction.
I've listened to Emery on the Art Bell show and it sounded like she was very paranoid and did not know much about hypnosis in the real world.
