Chapter
Thirteen
Altered states of consciousness
ASCs have always had negative connotations (being associated with the differ-
ent, the strange, the abnormal, the irrational, the pathological) in tension with
their positive ones (the wonderful, the insightful, the life-altering). Some ASCs
clearly should be called pathological: if they seriously impair quality of life for
the person experiencing them or for those around them, for example. But the lit-
erature on drug use, sprinkled with phrases like ‘relapse to cannabis use’ (Crean,
Crane and Mason, 2011), makes clear that normative judgements are in play
far more widely, imposing pathology where there may be none. Some unusual
experiences of other kinds may also be inappropriately pathologised as mental
illness instead of being understood as instances of personal transformation or
post-traumatic growth or simply human variation (out-of-body experiences, cov-
ered in Chapter 15, are just one example of this). On the other hand, destigmatis-
ing mental illness is a process still very much ongoing, and that process requires
a willingness to draw boundaries between health and illness even when there is
no clear organic cause.
STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS
We have explored at length the question of whether talking about altered states
of consciousness makes sense. To conclude, it is worth asking whether state is the
most helpful word to use. It seems obvious what is meant by a state of conscious-
ness, but we should bear in mind that to speak of a state is to assume there must
be something which is in that state (or condition). And what is that something? If
instead of a thing called consciousness (e.g. a container with contents) we imag-
ine a process of attribution after the fact (as in the multiple drafts model), then
there is nothing to be in a state or not in a state.
In the long debate about whether hypnosis does or does not induce an ASC, one
attempt at a resolution was simply to reduce the term state to a mere label, ‘a
kind of shorthand, with no causal properties or defining features associated with
it’ (Kihlstrom, 1985, p. 405). Making the central concept so meaningless would
effectively end the whole debate. Psychologist Irving Kirsch (1997, p. 98) noted
that in response, various euphemisms for state, like ‘special process’, arose to dis-
guise the fact that the state debate was still happening, even though multiple,
often closely related positions had emerged, and the whole thing was no longer
getting anyone very far.
You could say all this is just semantics. Kirsch argues not:
if hypnosis is a state, like sleep or intoxication, then establishing its
essential characteristics is an important task for hypnosis researchers.
Conversely, if the state hypothesis is false, these questions are
meaningless and research should be directed elsewhere.
(1997, p. 97)But we can argue against states of consciousness without abandoning the study
of consciousness. In the case of hypnosis, we can still study the beliefs, expecta-
tions, imaginative strategies, and everything else that makes hypnotised experi-
ences unusual.