4.
Can anyone be hypnotized, or only certain people?
4.2. The "Fantasy
Prone Personality"
T.X. Barber and his colleague
Sheryl Wilson did some interesting research where they apparently identified
some loose correlates to hypnotizability, and which appear to enhance an
individual's capacity to respond to hypnotic suggestion.
Called the 'fantasy prone personality,'
(FPP) these correlates do not seem to form a unitary personality type,
but represent a diverse group of naturally imaginative and visionary individuals.
Josephine Hilgard and other
researchers have also found similar results, that some people have particularly
rich inner fantasy lives and cultivate a lifetime of vivid imagery experience
corresponding to an openness to unusual experience, extraordinary memory
in many cases, capacity for intense concentration, sharp sensory acuity,
and unusually strong somatic responses to mental imagery (such as response
to placebos).
FPP may also describe the people
who most frequently report various psychic phenomena, and 75% of FPP subjects
in one study reported having experienced orgasms from fantasy alone. 65%
reported fantasies of hallucinatory intensity.
This helps support Barber's
earlier contentions about hypnotizable subjects also experiencing similar
kinds of phenomena without specific hypnotic induction.
See Wilson and Barber, "The
Fantasy Prone Personality: Implications for understanding imagery, hypnosis,
and parapsychological phenomena," in Imagery, Current Theory, Research,
and Application, from Wiley Press.
|
