ABSTRACT
Phenomenology is the study of subjective experience. Hypnosis is a highly subjective experience, for it is highly personal and no two people experience it in exactly the same way. Much of the research in the field of hypnosis tends to focus on the behavior of the hypnotized person or the measurable brain changes of the hypnotized person. But watching someone’s arm rise in response to a suggestion for an arm levitation or seeing evidence of greater blood flow to a particular region of the brain in response to a suggestion for an imagined experience doesn’t tell you much, if anything at all, about what the person’s internal experience is at such times. Simply put, what you see from the outside as you observe hypnotized individuals may or may not have much to do with what’s going on inside of them. Someone can appear to be relaxed and calm, for example, yet subjectively feel distressed by the hypnotic experience (Sheehan & McConkey, 1982). Or the subjective experience can be pretty far removed from the objective circumstances: someone can feel as though transported to a past life (as in so-called past-life regressions), to a space ship (as in so-called alien abduction memories), or to some distant location (as in so-called remote viewing or out-of-the-body experiences). People can have subjective experiences they experience as “real” or believe to be “true” that may have little or nothing to do with more objective realities.
