Hypnosis transference

This automatic response to suggestion affects your Sense of identity subsystem. Ordinarily it is your own "voice" inside you that tells you to do a thing that you then do. Now the hypnotist s voice takes over this role, and your sense of self begins to include the hypnotist. The special modulation from this subsystem that constitutes the ego sense (discussed later) is added to the stimuli that would ordinarily be perceived as the voice of an outsider. Psychoanalysts call this the transference element of hypnosis, especially when some of the transference involves parental transferences onto the hypnotist. The deliberate or implicit encouragement of identification with the hypnotist s voice is an application of patterning forces. 

Sometimes in ordinary hypnosis the subject unconsciously projects his childhood attitudes onto the hypnotist. This is the transference dimension of hypnosis, which we discussed in Chapter 9. It definitely increases the hypnotist s ability to alter the subject s reality and control his behavior. 

Hypnosis is not usually seen as a treatment burdened with adverse effects. However, an authoritative review has reminded us that it is by no means completely safe (140). Complications include amnesia, catharsis, paralysis, disorientation, literalness of response, accelerated transference, and memory contamination. A further unwanted effect of hypnosis is an inability to dehypno-tize the patient. A review of the literature has shown several such cases and has contributed two new such incidents (141). 

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