Text a

[ ED the intermixing of quotes and your texts is a bit confusing, the hypnotherapist project sounds really fascinating but maybe an intro to this could come at the beginning and then the quotes get built into the later chapters as a way of interpreting your experiences? ]

“It is important to stress that hypnosis has continuously been an ambivalent practice. Used within the context of therapy as well as music hall and theatre as an entertaining spectacle.  There was a claim in early 20th century that hypnosis, like hysteria, was a sort of simulation.” Descleux.

The worlds of the magic show, the theatre, the hypnotic theatre collide under the scope of performance. Here we find the spectacle of performance, the audience suspends their disbelief to allow a sense of magic to appear.

As Vanessa Desclaux points out in What Relationships Some Thoughts On The Relationships At Work Between Artist And Hypnotherapist Artist And Audience Actors And Audience. “like spectators in magic, approach hypnosis with the expectation to find magical dimension, an paradoxically, fear to be manipulated, tricked or suggested. Hypnosis and magic both make use of communication persuasion and suggestion.”( Desclaux, 2011, p1)

“In both situations, hypnotherapist and magician rely on a dimension of mystery and enigma, but are also confronted with expectations and therefore, at times, disappointment. “(Desclaux, 2011, p1) 

The Body and Hypnosis “Hypnosis is interested in the body as it occupies a physical position in the world” (Desclaux, 2011, p3) [<<<<This interests me but I don’t understand it, it would be great if you explained it (unpacked it) more.]

“It is thus really interesting to read though Chertok and Roustang how much hypnosis deals with embodied subjects as bodies immersed in a set of physical relations in the world as a whole, real and imagined.” (Desclaux, 2011, p3)

For the first chapter of my thesis I plan to make several visits to a hypnotherapist. I will record my conversations under hypnosis to bring about personal descriptions I need to explore. Based on these descriptions from each visit I will write texts that pick up on the themes, issues and symbolisms discussed. These texts will form the basis of the thesis, the texts will not be ‘about’ personal issues or traumas but they will contain inherent qualities existing in the language of them. [ Ed this sounds great but it sounds like a project description - in the thesis maybe you can just say - having visited a hypnotherapist and then just start telling the story, I dont think you need to tell me what you are going to do?? Maybe this is from the thesis description instead and Ive just misunderstood? ]

I may explore other similar structures and states, which will also allow a body of text to be written under certain constraints.

This process I hope will be able to explore the ideas of intuition. It will enable me to improvise with the materials at hand. It will make me be able to form a relationship with the personal as material that can exist outside of the personal experience. It will give me access or starting point from real to fantasy, mundane to magical . The relationship between therapy and art (not as art therapy).

Chertok says the objective is to “ bring the person to retrieve himself from the exterior world through concentration on a monotonous impression, or through the closing of the eyes and then to make him intensely observe his own physiological functions.”

HYPNOSIS TEXTS HERE