TITLE:
The Unconscious Experimentally Demonstrated by Means of Hypnosis
AUTHORS:
Edoardo Casiglia, Valérie Tikhonoff, Enrico Facco
KEYWORDS:
Haemodynamics, Regressive, Analgesia, Unconscious, Stroop, Hallucination, Neglect
JOURNAL NAME:
Psychology,
Vol.7 No.4,
April
13,
2016
ABSTRACT: Although taken for granted today by people and by some experts, the
unconscious has never been experimentally demonstrated. Even for the
psychoanalysts, the unconscious is nothing more than a model. The unconscious,
if anything, is normally obscured by conscious activities and can only express
itself in response to conditions leading to non-ordinary mental expressions,
for instance during hypnosis. For many years, we have been using hypnosis in
variegating experimental setting, and we think one of the evidences coming from
our tests is the experimental demonstration that the unconscious exists and can
be forced to respond to solicitations the participant is not aware of. We
administered hypnotic suggestions to highly-hypnotizable normal participants
with the aim of inducing hallucination of body heating, alexia, amusia, spatial
neglect, focused analgesia, general anaesthesia, and age regression. Following
such suggestions, participants actually experienced a sensation of heat,
incapability to read, lack of interest in a side of the world, indifference to
painful stimuli, and revivification of infantile age, respectively. But this is
not all. Through the above-mentioned suggestions we also obtained some physical
reactions that could only be defined as unconscious, i.e. increase of the
stroke volume and of the mesenteric artery flow following hallucinated body
heating, reduction of reaction times to incongruent color words in a Stroop
task following alexia, prolongation of ipsilateral reaction times following
spatial neglect, reduction of mismatch negativity to deviant stimuli following
hypnotic amusia, coherent modifications of the sympathetic/parasympathetic
balance to trigeminal and non-trigeminal pain during analgesia and anaesthesia,
reduction of Raven score and Raven-induced stress during age regression. These
responses evoked during hypnosis in response to mental images are clearly
non-voluntary and non-conscious, and demonstrate in experimental setting with
the tools that are typical of human physiology—the existence of unconscious to
perceive and react.