experience at any moment. We will use this
capacity if for any reason an intense stimulus
distracts us from the film, or even if the film is
just not to our liking. When the film finishes, we
often need a few seconds to adapt ourselves
again to the external world.
Although we can experience a film with
intensity, in no case can we get stuck in it to the
point at which we confuse film and reality. An
honest presentation of hypnosis must inform us
that what occurs while we are in hypnosis is
similar to what occurs when we go to the
cinema.
Hypnosis vs. Seduction and Coercion: A
Comparison
To help us better to understand the differences
of hypnosis with regard to psychological
manipulation, it is useful to compare what
occurs while one is under hypnosis with what
occurs while one is in the manipulative contexts
of seduction and coercion. This is the focus of
the following subsections.
Seduction
Seduction can be sexual, nonsexual, or both
simultaneously. We are seduced when someone
has something we do not have but wish to have.
Let us consider amorousness as a means of
seduction. When we are in love, we are seduced
by the other person. This means that we are
dissociated from all that is negative about them.
Although we can perceive things that we do not
like in the other, it is as if we do not actually see
them. This state is what dissociation involves:
seeing without seeing. This dissociated way of
perceiving is truly a hurdle for critical thinking,
so much so that critical thinking will disappear
under such circumstances. That absence of
critical thinking will be a stimulus for the
continuation of dissociated perception. Thus,
dissociation will enhance low critical thinking,
and vice versa, as in the following example of
what might occur when a person is feeling the
initial stages of strong attraction, or
amorousness, toward another person.
Amorousness results in the following:
↑ Dissociation: I see only the good.
Any bad that I see, I do not truly
perceive (We see through the eyes of
the mind)
↓ Critical Thinking: Everything is
good.
Coercion
We understand coercion as a relationship based
upon fear, guilt, or both. Thus, the following two
sentences stated by the leader of a cult group are
oriented to provoke fear and guilt, respectively,
in the recipient:
If you go away, you will be miserable.
After all we have done for you, you
cannot be so selfish as to abandon us.
Because fear and guilt are two powerful
emotions that strongly interfere with freedom of
thought, these sentences are coercive because
they are intended to elicit in the recipient a
certain behavior and way of thinking by means
of fear and guilt respectively. When these
situations are repeated over time, they will
clearly contribute to establishing a manipulative
context that will stimulate the victim’s high
dissociation and decrease in critical thinking.
This combination will provoke a state of
heightened suggestibility that will favor the
aggressor. In that state of high suggestibility, the
recipient loses perspective of the portion of
reality he is being dissociated from he begins to
lose even the very notion of being in a coercive
environment, up to the point at which he feels
himself to be totally free and able to make any
decision required. A person in such a state will
not even see the aggressor as such. That is why
we say that the victim’s heightened state of
suggestibility will favor the aggressor in this
coercive context. Let us examine two examples.
Example 1: Stockholm syndrome. In this
context, a person in a hostage situation
dissociates from the whole situation and
perceives merely a part of it. So at each instance
of care exhibited by her captor, for instance, the
victim may lack the ability of seeing the whole
context, even beginning to feel, as a
consequence, an affective closeness toward that
captor. If the victim saw beyond the immediate
concern, she would perceive the global situation
in which she was being held and deprived of her
56 International Journal of Cultic Studies ■ Vol. 6, 2015

liberty by the very same person from whom she
is receiving care. But the victim does not see this
because she has become dissociated. Such
dissociation from the global situation will
greatly facilitate a situation in which any sign of
affection from the captor will cause the victim to
consider her captor as considerate, which clearly
shows a lack of critical thinking in that situation.
This lack of critical thinking will stimulate, in
turn, the perceptual dissociation from the global
situation, and so on, in a vicious circle. To
summarize:
↑ Dissociation: I don’t see the harm
they have done me, depriving me of
freedom being the main one.
↓ Critical thinking: They take care of
me, so they are good.
Example 2: Battered women. The dissociated
thinking that we are referring to here, “seeing
without seeing,” is stressed in the following
example. A woman receiving systematic
maltreatment from her partner is aware of it.
However, a mental mechanism we call
dissociation allows her not to pay attention to
that reality, despite having it right in front of her.
Dissociation is a mental mechanism that we all
use within our daily lives, and it has adaptive
functions. In our daily lives, dissociation allows
us to turn our back on painful situations so we
can fully focus on survival tasks, or the
achievement of our goals. Thus, the worried
father in the morning leaves his son at home
with a fever and goes to work, where he has a
very important meeting and is able to totally
forget about his son (dissociate) while in the
meeting because that meeting is also very
important to him.
When we are concentrated on something
significant to us, we are able to completely
forget anything else, no matter how dear to us
this “anything else” may be. This capacity to
dissociate is adaptive. It allows us to perform
better in each concrete situation we face without
being distracted from the relevant stimuli to that
situation, or rather, thanks precisely to our
attention not being distracted from the relevant
stimuli to that situation.
However, this mental resource that allows us to
dissociate, while adaptive in everyday life, in
extreme contexts of maltreatment or
psychological manipulation can end up
contributing to a dysfunction. In such situations,
we may dissociate from the relevant stimuli that
would help us recognize the maltreatment or
psychological abuse we are the victim of. This
disassociation can lead us to fixate our attention
on other stimuli that absorb us totally, and that
are irrelevant, or contradictory, with regard the
global situation we are in.
In the case of the battered woman, despite living
in a reality in which her partner treats her badly
99% of the time, she focuses her attention on
that portion of time when her partner treats her
well and that represents 1% only of her reality.
Having dissociated from 99% of her experience,
the woman takes the 1% of her reality as a
representation of the whole 100%. This is
possible because, while concentrating on the 1%
in which her partner treats her well, she totally
forgets anything else, just as the father who
leaves his son with a fever at home does during
that important meeting at work. Both are able to
do this because of their capacity to dissociate.
The fundamental difference between these
examples lies in each individual’s ability to get
out of the dissociation. Thus, when the meeting
is finished, if he is not very absentminded, the
father will probably remember his son’s fever
he will connect once again with the perception
of the whole of his day. Meanwhile, the woman,
as long as no drastic change occurs in her life,
will remain stuck in her dissociation,
interpreting that 1% for 100% of her reality. The
father whose focus of attention can fluctuate
from his work to his son achieves a better
perception of the whole of his life in other
words, he has a perception in which there is a
sound integration of those two parts of his life.
It is precisely the coercion exerted upon the
battered woman, in the other example, that is
responsible for her permanent dissociation. Such
dissociated perception will have drastic
consequences on her critical thinking, which
now is based merely on 1% of her reality, that
percentage in which her partner behaves well
toward her. Her vision of reality will then be
partial or nonintegrated:
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