Kafiri, I can't recall what Jung had to say about hypnosis beyond (paraphrasing) "You can't make somebody under hypnosis do something against their moral disposition." But I suspect this was something discovered by previous psychologists . . . especially since the generation of psychologists before/teaching Jung were very interested in hypnosis.
I have no personal experience with hypnosis (and am probably one of those majority of people who can't be hypnotized), so unlike with many of the things I take a stab at here on the site, Hypnosis is fairly mysterious to me and beyond my scope. From what I've read (in skeptic literature), there are certain people who, for whatever reason, are hypnotizable. In stage magic shows that feature hypnotism, these "marks" are searched for by the hypnotist (who has learned to recognize various signs of suggestibility in potential volunteers). In hypnosis studies, highly hypnotizable people are also sought out/screen for.
The only other thing I can contribute is that (also, from the little I've read), consciousness is not really "out of the picture" during hypnosis, but perhaps merely suspended or altered as in trance or meditation.
From
Wikipedia:
Anna Gosline says in a NewScientist.com article:
"Gruzelier and his colleagues studied brain activity using an fMRI while subjects completed a standard cognitive exercise, called the Stroop task.
The team screened subjects before the study and chose 12 that were highly susceptible to hypnosis and 12 with low susceptibility. They all completed the task in the fMRI under normal conditions and then again under hypnosis.
Throughout the study, both groups were consistent in their task results, achieving similar scores regardless of their mental state. During their first task session, before hypnosis, there were no significant differences in brain activity between the groups.
But under hypnosis, Gruzelier found that the highly susceptible subjects showed significantly more brain activity in the anterior cingulate gyrus than the weakly susceptible subjects. This area of the brain has been shown to respond to errors and evaluate emotional outcomes.
The highly susceptible group also showed much greater brain activity on the left side of the prefrontal cortex than the weakly susceptible group. This is an area involved with higher level cognitive processing and behaviour."
The Skeptic's Dictionary says:
Hypnotherapists. While it is true that some hypnotherapists can help some people lose weight, quit smoking, or overcome their fear of flying, it is also true that cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) can do the same without any mumbo-jumbo about trance states or brain waves. There have been many scientific studies on the effectiveness of CBT. For example, one systematic study found that CBT improves weight loss in people who are overweight or obese. Another systematic study found that CBT appears to be an effective and acceptable treatment for adult out-patients with chronic fatigue syndrome. Finding high quality scientific evidence for hypnotherapy, however, poses a major problem. As R. Barker Bausell says: hypnosis and the placebo effect are "so heavily reliant upon the effects of suggestion and belief that it would be hard to imagine how a credible placebo control could ever be devised for a hypnotism study" (2007: 268). Even if you could devise a hypnosis study that isolated the role of suggestion and belief, how would you do "fake" hypnosis?
Hypnotherapy is said to effective for such things as helping people lose weight, quit smoking, or overcome a phobia. Most of the evidence for the effectiveness of hypnotherapy is anecdotal, despite the claims of such groups as the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis (ASCH). Not surprisingly, all the anecdotes are positive! Nobody collects examples of failures or tells the world about their "incomplete successes." If one compares the characteristics of the placebo effect and those of hypnotherapy it is hard to distinguish the difference between these two ducks. Both work because participants believe they work and they occur in a clinical setting where the client is highly motivated for the therapy to work and the provider has all the accoutrements of the healing arts. Suggestion is the heart and soul of both. Hypnosis adds such things as asking the client to relax (important for suggestion to work) or to concentrate on something (which may be completely superfluous).
Also from the same article:
Scientific studies have found out a few things about hypnosis. We know that there is a significant correlation between being able to be absorbed in imaginative activity and being responsive to hypnosis.* We know that those who are fantasy-prone are also likely to make excellent hypnotic subjects. We know that vivid imagery enhances suggestibility. We know that those who think hypnosis is rubbish can’t be hypnotized. We know that hypnotic subjects are not turned into zombies and are not controlled by their hypnotists. We know that hypnosis does not enhance the accuracy of memory in any special way. We know that a person under hypnosis is very suggestible and that memory is easily “filled-in” by the imagination and by suggestions made under hypnosis. We know that confabulation is quite common while under hypnosis and that many states do not allow testimony that has been induced by hypnosis because it is intrinsically unreliable. We know the greatest predictor of hypnotic responsiveness is what a person believes about hypnosis.
I've seen some other opinions which suggest that hypnosis is not so much a trance-like/meditative state as it is a state of extreme focus . . . which makes it perhaps compatible with transference phenomenon, a sharing among two or more people in a mythic or narrative "vessel" or theater of world-/self-construction. This sounds plausible to me, and from what I've seen many people mistake the "mysteries" of transference for transcendent and supernatural phenomena. But again, although I am quite familiar with transference, I can't directly compare it to hypnosis, which is utterly foreign to me.
Similarity between hypnotic states and active imagination also seems likely. As a creative writer, I would describe my standard writing modus operandi as much like active imagination (and my dream-like poetry is pretty clear evidence of this). During such writing, my conscious mind is open to the "suggestion" of my unconscious in a manner similar to dreaming (without full submergence into the unconsciousness of the dream state). Many things "pop into my head" that at first make no sense to my consciousness or are the product of extreme associative complexity that I would have to consciously puzzle out ("back-think") in order to understand their components (memory quanta) and the pattern of their combination. I've always found these things to yield logical structures under analysis and deeper reflection. It is, in my opinion, the conscious state that is prone to illogic and irrationality, because so much that composes it is gleaned, condensed, constructed, filtered, estimated, and unreflected upon.
My experience of the unconscious is that its thoughts are profoundly logical and have a notably physical or material/spatial quality to them. E.g., memory quantum A connects to memory quanta B, C, D, E, and F in a spatially consistent manner, much like putting a puzzle together in three dimensional space or molecules in a compound. But memory quanta are or the unconscious is vast, complex, highly iterated, intricately interrelated in a way that every association has quantitative valuation or potentiation. I.e., some associations between quanta are stronger than others, and there is a scale of association strength. What fascinates me about this phenomenological observation is that it exactly parallels neuronal structure and behavior.
To be fair, this sense of a logical, physical/material/spatial psyche really only became very apparent to me in recent years (although increasingly apparent to me before then). In the past, much of this structure seemed illogical or irrational to me, more mysterious . . . and the accompanying numinousness made it seem somewhat supernatural or divine/spiritual. That is, my more biological approach to psyche today is not the product of a lack of imagination and a tendency toward skepticism, but rather a continuation of the more symbolic spiritual journey I had long pursued before "biologizing" and becoming a full-blown atheist and materialist. Currently, I see no contradiction between the spiritual/numinous feelings I've always had (and still have) for these introspective journeys into psyche and the more scientific, materialistic theories of psyche I've formulated more recently.
That is, I don't feel any different. My sense of value for what I am perceiving has not been altered even as my clarity of perception has improved. Call it God, the Self, complexity, matter, Nature . . . I understand the
feeling of the thing, and it is differentiable from the thing itself, from what it actually is. I believe that materialism does not have to mean devaluation of this feeling or numen or spirit. I.e., materialism is not, as it is so often portrayed, the enemy of spirituality. These two things are entirely compatible on some level . . . and the only way to comprehend that compatibility is to undertake the spiritual journey, even into its despiritualization or materialization. Which is what the Second Opus of alchemy is also all about, in my opinion.
Sorry for the digression
. Back to work for me now!
-Matt