Etzel Cardeņa, PhD
Poul Thorsen Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Lund, Sweden
Theodore Xenophon Barber's initial contributions to hypnosis greatly increased the methodological and conceptual sophistication of the field (Barber, 1969/1995) and questioned a facile acceptance of unquestioned concepts such as "trance" and even "hypnosis" itself. Many people in the field still think, incorrectly, that he was foremost a critic of the reality of alterations of consciousness and extraordinary human potentials, whereas he was a careful and probing researcher and theoretician (see, for instance, Barber, 1976). In this presentation I want to emphasize his recent typology of highly hypnotizable individuals (fantasy prone, dissociative, highly motivated), with an emphasis on his construct of fantasy proneness and ways to measure it. Barber's typology (1999) extends the previous work of Deirdre Barrett (1990) and Etzel Cardeņa (1996) and helps integrate separate strands in hypnosis research and theory. I will also discuss the implications that the consideration of different types of highly hypnotizables has for the empirical and conceptual study of parapsychological and other anomalous phenomena. For instance, the psychological dynamics of why a traumatized dissociator may be more psi-conducive (Ferenczi, 1993) may be different from those of someone who developed his/her inner life in a more benign way.