December 2006, Volume 21, Number 4
by
Dennis K. Chong and Jennifer Smith Chong
©
Before you can do anything well, you will have to have some knowledge of what you do.
Ormand McGill: The New Encyclopedia of Stage Hypnotism Crown House Publishing Limited, page 9.
We believe that at some logical level, this ‘some knowledge’ that Ormand McGill refers to concerns the knowledge about the Linguistics of Hypnotism1.
At the very heart of Hypnotism, stage or clinical, is the use and the application of linguistics. Whilst it is true that you can analogically induce a trance, it also remains true that unless you can speak, you cannot truly do Hypnotism across its full scope. You have to be able to articulate language to really do Hypnotism well.
As a result, in our recent presentation at the 2006 Annual Conference of the National Guild of Hypnotists, we told the registrants that one of the premier goals of the Guild is to ensure that its accredited graduates are the best that are taught anywhere in the world. It is clear that for this to be true, all its graduates must have ‘some knowledge’ about the Linguistics of Hypnotism.
The Linguistics of Hypnotism is unquestionably linked to what Hypnotism is all about.
However, before we can examine the Linguistics of Hypnotism, we have to explore what Hypnotism is about? In doing so, we acknowledge that there are other understandings about what Hypnotism is. Respectfully, we present here one way of looking at it. To do so, we have to introduce the concept of well-formedness and ill-formedness2.
If a person has sight he will be able to see an object in space. However, if he is blind, he cannot do so. We say that the former condition is well-formed and the latter is ill-formed. Now, in Hypnotism it is possible to suggest to a person that he cannot see. In such a contingency, by the logic that is proffered here, then an ill-formed condition has been elicited. To flee in fear when a person comes at you with a knife is well-formed. To remain in situ and offer oneself to his/her knife is not well formed. And this happens in surgical hypnoanaesthesia. To feel pain when a knife cuts into a person is well-formed. To feel no pain when a knife cuts into a person is ill-formed. Hypnotism can get this for a person. To consent and allow the knife wielder to continue cutting is not well-formed. Yet this happens in Hypnotism. To sit with fine social poise before a group of people is well-formed. To quack like a duck in front of them, even as part of a Hypnotism stage show is not well-formed. To know that gas does not escape from your navel is well-formed. To believe that gas is blowing out from your belly button is ill-formed. This happens in a Hypnotism stage show. To be aware of an itch at some part of a person’s body, now and then, is well-formed. A person can feel an itch uncontrollably at one site or over all his body in certain medical conditions. This is well-formed. When it is induced in Hypnotism it would be considered ill-formed.
This then is the distinction:
The shift from a state of “normalcy” to a hypnotic state is a shift from the potential for well-formed behaviour to one for ill-formed behaviour. The Hypnotist evinces this transit.
Now logically, well-formed linguistics would
determine well-formed responses and actions. Ill-formed linguistics will
determine ill-formed responses and actions. The question now is, “How does the
ill-formed linguistics of Hypnotism work in Clinical
Hypnotism3?”
Now, let us consider this example of linguistics:
Go and kill Dennis
Chong!
Indeed, the linguistics of this utterance is extremely ill-formed; it would fall into the category of criminal incitement. In life, when such a sentence is said to another, he might carry it out. The evidence for this is reflected in the papers of various court trials. Ill-formed linguistics, in life, works; and it does so in Hypnotism. This being so, it raises the question about the part played by the subconscious or unconscious4 in people’s lives.
What is the role of the Linguistics of Hypnotism? It is to shift the response by a person, from the potential for:
well-formedness
! ill-formedness.
What is the structure of the Linguistics of Hypnotism that can bring this about? Whatever it is, the linguistics has to be concordantly ill-formed in its structure to evince a correspondingly ill-formed response and action.
From our research we now know that the Linguistics of Hypnotism consists of:
In 1933, in his seminal work Science and Sanity, Alfred Korzybski, the father of General Semantics indexed the Aristotelian linguistic system as “unsane”. In 1975, Richard Bandler and John Grinder in their foundational work to the field of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Structure of Magic, confirmed Korzybski’s finding by describing that the linguistic system of Cause and Effect is semantically ill-formed. To describe Cause and Effect in this way is to say that if a person uses this system then the system will determine for him/her meaning that will be warped, bent, twisted, gnarled and perverted. Alas, he and everyone will have no awareness of this because everyone is adapted, habituated and accommodated to it and its consequences. To put it in another way, when we are all mesa to a system we shall have no awareness of its derivatives. In 1991, in the work, Don’t Ask WHY?!, the authors, mapped out the entire linguistic sub-systems that comprised the Aristotelian Linguistic system of Cause and Effect
The Aristotelian Linguistics system of Cause and Effect is universal. Therefore, currently it is an integral part of our spoken word, known in Linguistics as Natural Language.
Therefore, with unconscious ease, fluency and
automaticity we have used the Aristotelian Linguistic system of Cause and Effect
in Hypnotism5 to secure trance and the incredible but ill-formed
phenomena of trance in stage work. Those of us who have attended the stage
performances by the Hypnotic artists at the Annual Conferences of the National
Guild of Hypnotists will bear witness to this.
It is necessary to invert the above formats because to use them as they are will entail well-formedness in response and action in a person. However when they are inverted they will compel an altered state of ill-formedness in response and action in a subject.
We now know that normally we do not use the formats of the Modified Meta Model. We use its inverted forms and as a result the verbs in our sentences are invariably incompletely specified; we freely use our modal linguistic operators and as a result we are invariably imposing our expectations on others; we are fuzzy in the way we quantify things and as a result we are inexact in what we say; we consistently simplify the complexity of things resulting in mismatches between our conclusions and actuality.
We now know that top stage hypnotist use this kind of linguistics.
The original Meta Model was delineated in
Structure of Magic. However, all its linguistic formats were constructed
within the Aristotelian Linguistic system. As a result, it became contaminated
with the intrinsic ill-formedness of the Aristotelian system. Therefore, it was
critical to extract it from the Aristotelian system and reconfigure it in the
linguistics of Non-Aristotelian system. It was also critical to supplement it
with subsets of linguistic formats that were missed in its original form. As a
result, it was renamed the Modified Meta Model.
Under normal conditions, the linguistics of the Non-Aristotelian system will evince well-formed responses and actions in a person.
Therefore, when a hypnotist inverts the linguistics of the Non-Aristotelian system on a person he will evince ill-formed responses and actions in a person provided he is already in trance.
In Science and Sanity, Korzybski, in a
frank and robust way admitted that he failed to uncover the linguistics of the
Aristotelian system. This was finally achieved and published in 1992 in the
work, Power and Elegance in Communication, PEOPLE, PARADIGMS AND PARADOXES.
Formal logicians had known for a very long time that the rigour and semantic well-formedness of Formal Logic simply had no utilitarian function in life with the single exception of syllogisms. They were finally forced to examine the form and manner of the logic used by the ordinary Joe - the representative in a State House, or in Congress or Senate or in the Upper and Lower Houses of Parliament, the plumber, the butcher, the fishmonger, the lawyer, the doctor, the nurse, the housewife, the bartender and so forth.
From their research unfolded the whole field of the linguistics of Informal Logic.
Since it is ill-formed (as in contradistinction to
the rigour and well-formedness of Formal Logic), and it is a part of Natural
Language, hypnotists have been using it with fluency and ease in an unconscious
way in their work regardless of whether it is in a clinical or stage
setting.
In summary, we can say that every student of Hypnotism has already in place these critical components of the Linguistics of Hypnotism derived from their Natural Language:
As it turn outs, the above three categories comprise seventy five per cent of Natural Language. This is enough to do Clinical and Stage Hypnotism. However, there is a missing twenty five per cent of the Linguistics of Hypnotism. It is this missing portion that is in part the mother for the forewarning that Ormand McGill cited:
Just keep this in mind that a good hypnotist might possibly try ten persons and not hypnotize one of them for a variety of reasons depending on the situation.
Ormand McGill: The New Encylcopedia of Stage Hypnotism Crown House Publishing Limited, page 9.
This failure can only be explicated in this manner. Those ten are unique like everyone else. And for them, trance can only be achieved by and through the missing Linguistics of Hypnotism that is indexed here.
Ormand McGill was a master of his art and in our view, he was an intuitive master of the Linguistics of Hypnotism. The problem is of course whether Ormand McGill was able to teach what he intuitively knew. Based on the quote we cite below, we conclude that there is a possibility that he probably was not able to:
To effect change is one thing; to communicate about this change is something else: above all, a problem of correct logical typing and of creating an adequate metalanguage. In psychotherapeutic research, it is very common to find that particularly gifted and intuitive therapists think they know why they are doing what they are doing, but their explanations simply do not hold water. Conversely, many gifted writers are astounded and even annoyed at the deeper meanings that others read into their works. Thus, while the former believe they know, but apparently do not, the latter seem to know more than they are willing to acknowledge - which brings us back to Laing: “If I don’t know I don’t know, I think I know; if I don’t know I know, I think I don’t know.”
Paul Watzlawick, John Weakland and Richard Fisch: CHANGE Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution W. W. Norton & Company Inc. 1974 p79.
To put this in another way, we are never aware of what we are mesa to. It is only when we are meta to a domain, can we ever talk about it and teach about it.
We therefore say, that to be a master of Hypnotism:
Before you can learn to do anything well, you will have to have some knowledge of what you do.
Ormand McGill: The New Encylcopedia of Stage Hypnotism Crown House Publishing Limited, page 9.
It is therefore, critical that the Linguistics of
Hypnotism is to be part of the curriculum of accrediting
students.