ABSTRACT
No person in the field of psychology has done more to challenge traditional assumptions about hypnosis and to question the nature of hypnotic phenomena than Theodore X. Barber. An enormously productive worker, Barber has queried the very relevance of the term "hypnosis" as a necessary construct for explaining the multiple forms of behavior that typically occur within the hypnotic setting. Barber claims that the term "hypnosis" as it is ordinarily employed in the literature is ambiguously and tautologically defined and that research has been hindered much more than helped by continued appeal to the connotations that have accrued to this term through the years. His thinking challenges our most fundamental assumptions about hypnosis (Dalal, 1966) and in their place he has substituted searching empirical analysis of a multitude of factors that appear to bear upon "hypnotic" behavior.
