title: Why scientific hypnosis needs psychoanalysis (or something like it).
abstract: The author contends that some contemporary hypnosis theories are restricted and narrow in scope, rendering them unnecessarily isolated from mainstream models of human development, psychopathology, and personality functioning. They seem to explain hypnosis and little else. The author contrasts this with psychoanalysis, which, although sometimes overly expansive, does nonetheless lend itself to the generation of specific hypothesis via careful deduction from a general theory of human behavior and experience. For illustrative purposes, the author criticizes the sociocognitive perspective of hypnosis contending that at present it is too narrowly inductive in focus, overvalues social influence, and has its own problems with reification. The author suggests remedies for these difficulties.
authors.affiliation: Psychology Department, University of Tennessee, Knoxville 37996-0900, USA.
authors.forename: M R
authors.initials: MR
authors.lastname: Nash
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D006990:Hypnosis / Q000379:methods*; D010551:Personality; D011574:Psychoanalytic Theory; D013404:Suggestion