Simulating the Unconscious

Abstract

This paper is concerned with hypnosis and the methodological "anxiety" (Devereux) which inevitably affects the hypnotist, whether experimental psychologist or therapist: what if the phenomena observed during hypnosis were only an effect of compliance with his own expectations, demands and suggestions? What if the hypnotized simulated hypnosis solely to please him? From Charcot and Richet to Martin Orne, by way of Bernheim or Freud, the response of researchers to this disquieting question has always been the same: the subject cannot be simulating, because he is hypnotized, asleep, unconscious. The hypothesis of a psychic unconscious (or of unconsciousness), which determined the very concept of hypnosis from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards is nothing more than a postulate required to guarantee the objectivity of hypnotic and, more broadly, psychological phenomena, by preventing the latter from being seen as simple artifacts of the experimental or clinical situation. The present paper examines several historical avatars of this postulate, including psychoanalysis, and proposes that it be abandoned in favor of a conception of psychology and psychotherapy which is constructivist and no longer objectivist, recognizing the artifactual character of psychic productions instead of denying it.

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