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The practice, phenomenology, and theory of hypnosis have evolved, of course, since the time of James Braid, and hypnosis can now be seen as a largely cultural phenomenon. All the same, some questions, contradictory and probably unanswerable, seem to remain after more than a century. Is the hypnotic state akin to sleep and dreaming, or to wakefulness and lucidity? Does it imply an unconscious dispossession, or is it a form of playacting? And is "hypnosis" a functional concept that can explain certain phenomenon, or a word that precipitates the very state it is supposed to account for?
==Jacques Lacan==
irst we need to see what Lacan is excluding in talking about knowledge: He is not talking about the state of mind in which knowledge is acquired, that is, the different possible states of consciousness (etats de la connaissance), such as states of enthusiasm (en-theos, having the god within, as in the case of Socrates and his daemon), the state of samadbi in Buddhism (a state of “deep contemplation” of an object in which the subject/object distinction is at first preserved and then, at a later stage, all distinctions are absorbed or abolished), or the Erlebnis (experience) of using hallucinogens. According to Lacan, Hegel says that while these states may be objects of experience, they are not epistemogenic (E 795). It is not because one is in a certain state of mind or receptivity that knowledge can be produced. Lacan characterizes the attempt to investigate the unconscious in such states or via hypnosis (or even in the hypnoid states characteristic of some forms of hysteria) as a form of “rape” (ravissement), or taking by force. He situates the subject not on the basis of some experience or state of consciousness but on the basis of a logic that “is already operative in the unconscious” (E 796).
==See Also==
JACQUELINE CARROY
