Update

Volume 13, Number 4 (December 1997)

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Every human being, created in the image of God, is endowed with a power akin to that of the Creator -- individuality, power to think and to do.¹ -Ellen G. White

Whenever I think about hypnosis, I recall Hobergs, a rustic resort in Northern California's "lake district." It was to Hobergs that I traveled as an earliteen with my parents and siblings for annual meetings of Seventh-day Adventist physicians and ministers and their families in the early 1960s. It was at Hobergs that all five or six hundred of us enjoyed stimulating company, tasty vegetarian food, fresh snow, and bunking in cozy cabins nestled under dark but dignified trees. It was at Hobergs that we were awakened each morning by the singing and trumpet playing of "good old Ozzie," the resort's cheerfully intoxicated handyman, comedian, and crooner. It was at Hobergs that I first drove my parents' 1950 Cadillac Coupe DeVille on my own, even though I was still too young for a driver's license.

It was also at Hobergs that I attended my first religion and medicine conferences. I wasn't invited, of course, because such meetings were for the adults. But sometimes I slipped into the large meeting hall, chose a seat toward the back, and took it all in, or at least as much as I could fathom.

One of those convocations was devoted to a consideration of hypnosis, a practice that had been condemned by Ellen White and other nineteenth century Adventists as a "satanic science." In the mid 1950s, however, both the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association had endorsed hypnosis as an approved form of therapy, making the difference between the position of those professional bodies and that of the Adventist community of faith obvious to all.

Two of the speakers at that meeting particularly impressed me. One of these, a Seventh-day Adventist pastor from the San Francisco Bay Area, was dismissive of the entire conversation, and sharply so. There was a time, he declared, that some Christians condemned silk hose as of the devil, just like some now say the same thing of hypnosis. But, of course, they were wrong about silk hose then and, of course, they are wrong about hypnosis now, he insisted. Why, therefore, should we discuss this matter further?

Despite this pastor's attempt to nudge the conversation on to what he considered more fruitful topics, those assembled at Hobergs that snowy day continued to discuss the pros and cons of hypnosis. Adventists, like others, have continued to debate it right down to the present time. Perhaps because it is often linked in popular imagination with the "strange" or "weird," this subject still sparks interest and controversy.

The other speaker that winter day at Hobergs who greatly impressed me was a young professor at what we now call Loma Linda University. He was, and still is, both an ordained minister in the Seventh-day Adventist Church and a fully qualified physician, a combination of credentials that caused me to equate him with Albert Schweitzer. His name was Jack W. Provonsha.

As I now recall in my own words the line of reasoning Dr. Provonsha employed at Hobergs, it unfolded something like this:

Major premise: It is ethically wrong to use any therapeutic technique that diminishes the dignity or the free moral agency of patients.

Minor premise: Hypnosis diminishes the dignity and free moral agency of patients.

Conclusion: It is ethically wrong to practice hypnosis.

Much more so than the earlier reference to silk hose, this argument carried the day.

The most important question, however, is not whether this way of approaching the matter was convincing to the majority of those who had gathered at Hobergs. It was. The question that really matters is whether today we should also find it persuasive.

I believe we should, albeit in a nuanced way.

This argument's major premise strikes me as supported by all four of Christianity's primary sources of moral wisdom: Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. The first book of the Bible declares that humans deserve special protection against harm and danger because they are created in the image of God (Genesis 1:1-2:3 and 9:1-27), a theme that threads its way through both Testaments. This theme makes its way through Christian tradition as well. Although they have often failed to live up to the ideal, for almost 2,000 years Christians of every sort have claimed that each human person is to be regarded as intrinsically valuable and treated as such without respect to race, religion, gender, nationality, ethnic origin, economic class, or political persuasion. In its own way, secular moral reason demonstrates that ethical principles much like the "golden rule" (do unto others as you would have them do unto you), can be rationally justified so that we do not have to accept them merely on the basis of external authority, religious or otherwise.² Any attempt, "to will" to be "unwilling" but still "willing," encounters serious logical difficulties. With respect to experience, anyone who is either a victim of or a witness to the degradation of human life can testify on the basis of that personal knowledge that such exploitation is best avoided. Therefore, when we consider Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience together, we find four different but related lines of evidence converging at the same moral point: it is ethically wrong to diminish the dignity or the free moral agency of human beings.

Ellen White objected to hypnosis as she knew it because she believed it required the patient wholly to surrender his or her dignity and free moral agency to that of the therapist. She was unalterably opposed to "the theory of mind controlling mind," to the "work of having one mind completely control the mind of the other so that one acts out the will of another." She insisted that "it is dangerous for anyone, no matter how good a man he is, to influence another human mind to come under the control of his mind." She wrote that "no man or woman should exercise his or her will to control the senses or reason of another so that the mind of the person is rendered passively subject to the will of the one who is exercising control."³

To put her point in our parlance, Ellen White and other Adventists of her time held that the relationship between patients and health-care professionals should not be unilateral in either direction, but reciprocal and mutual to the highest possible degree. She repeatedly wrote the same thing about the relationships between parents and children, teachers and students, ministers and parishioners, and, most importantly, husbands and wives. Against all forms of "chain of command" thinking in her time and ours, she held that in none of these relationships should one party wholly yield his or her dignity or free moral agency to that of another. Speaking about the role of the wife, she declared that "entire submission is to be made only to the Lord Jesus Christ, who has purchased her as His own child by the infinite price of His life. God has given her a conscience which she cannot violate with impunity. Her individuality cannot be merged into that of her husband, for she is the purchase of Christ. It is a mistake to imagine that with blind devotion she is to do exactly as her husband says in all things."⁴

As a devoted spiritual granddaughter of the eighteenth century reformer John Wesley, Ellen White even denied that the relationship between God and humanity should be characterized chiefly by the sovereignty of the Creator and the submission of the creature. Discerning that depicting this primary relationship in unilateral rather than reciprocal terms tempts us to construe all our secondary relationships as alternating patterns of sovereignty and submission, she much preferred to speak of "co-operation" between the human and the divine. "The Lord does nothing without our co-operation," she declared. "The work of gaining salvation is one of co-partnership, a joint operation," she wrote. "There is to be co-operation between God and the repentant sinner. This is necessary for the formation of right principles in the character." Sounding almost like a contemporary biomedical ethicist, she also stated that "God wishes us to have the mastery over ourselves. But He cannot help us without our consent and co-operation."⁵

If even the relationship between God and humanity is not to be unilateral but reciprocal, should we not look with ethical suspicion upon any therapeutic relationship between finite and fallible human beings that reduces either individual's dignity and free moral agency? I think our answer to this question should be "yes."

But now for a word of caution. Since that winter day so many years ago at Hobergs when I first heard Dr. Provonsha, and even more so since Ellen White's death in 1915, the term "hypnosis" has undergone some changes in meaning. Often it is still used in reference to an induced trance the chief characteristic of which is greatly increased--almost complete--suggestibility. The ethical conclusion to which we have come applies with full force to such interventions, all the more so when they are employed for entertainment rather than therapy.

But this conclusion must be qualified when the term "hypnosis" is used in other ways, particularly when the distinguishing feature of the patient's experience is not primarily suggestibility but focused attention with decreased peripheral awareness. Suggestibility and dissociation are still experienced to some degree, but they are secondary to focused concentration.⁶

This difference, though subtle, is clinically and ethically decisive because it can mark the division between interventions that demonstrably weaken the patient's dignity and free moral agency and those that actually strengthen them. At the precise point where the two approaches first separate, the difference may be apparent only to the most discerning. But as they progress, they increasingly diverge, so much so that eventually all can see the difference between working with the patient's dignity and free moral agency, and working against them.

In view of these considerations, I am persuaded that the therapeutic professions would do well to relinquish the term "hypnosis" altogether in favor of one that: (a) does not wrongly denote "sleep;" (b) does not connote the occult; (c) does not confuse therapeutic interventions with those done for entertainment purposes; (d) does not obscure the wide range of mental states now covered by the one term; and (e) does not imply that such states are always induced by individuals other than those who experience them.

Perhaps following Dr. David Spiegel's analysis, we could speak of the "ASD State," with the respective letters standing for "Absorption," "Suggestibility," and "Dissociation." Perhaps, further, we could identify various "degrees" or "depths" of the "ASD State" with identifiable markers for each that are conceptually defensible and clinically ascertainable. We then would be in a position to state that a strong ethical presumption prevails against intentionally inducing the "ASD State;" that the reasons that would justifiably rebut this ethical presumption in any patient's case must increase in persuasiveness the greater the "degree" or "depth" of the anticipated "ASD State;" and that in every case in which the rebuttal is ethically justified, the therapeutic purpose and practice ought to be that of increasing the patient's dignity and free moral agency.

As Dr. Provonsha made so clear at Hobergs, this is what matters most of all.

1. Ellen G. White, Education (Mountain View, California: Pacific Press Publishing Association, 1903), 17.

2. See, for example, the logical analyses of Alan Gewirth, on the one hand, and Alan Donagan, on the other.

3. For collections of her statements, please see, Mind, Character and Personality: Guidelines to Mental and Spiritual Health (Nashville, Tennessee: Southern Publishing Association, 1977) and Selected Messages, vol. II (Washington, D.C.; Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1958).

4. Ellen G. White, The Adventist Home (Nashville, Tennessee: Southern Publishing Association, 1952), 116.

5. Ellen G. White, The Acts of the Apostles (Mountain View, California: Pacific Press Publishing Association, 1911), 482.

6. On this distinction, please see the writings of psychiatrist David Spiegel.*

David R. Larson, DMin, PhD,
Faculty of Religion
Loma Linda University

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