What type of personality has hypnotic susceptibility?
Answers
The simple primary answer is fear or a similar emotion causing rejection. When this is removed or bypassed, often by simply educating the person, almost 100% of humanity can be hypnotized. I explained this in some detail on other parts of Quora.
Unfortunately, there are many misconceptions concerning hypnosis.
Hypnosis is NOT mind control - the subject can withdraw consent at any time.
Hypnosis does NOT correlate with intelligence. For 4+ years my hypnotic subjects were almost exclusively from the MIT community. For several years after that my contacts were with persons far below that in intelligence. Hypnotically - no difference.
Children ARE easier to hypnotize. But NOT because of adult authority or intelligence or any of the other reasons so far mentioned. Examine HOW the Critical Factor (some references call it the Critical Faculty) develops and note that this item is DEVELOPING from near zero at birth to full adult sometime after puberty. Simple description of what the Critical F. is? Think of it as your brain's outermost censor mechanism.
A large factor in misunderstanding hypnosis is the extent to which closely related academic professions refuse to engage in exchanges with experienced hypnotists. "Why listen to him? He hasn't got a PhD." (But he might have hypnotized several thousand persons...)
This attitude led to a psychology full professor at a medical school teaching my daughter that anyone who claimed to obtain hypnosis with less than 20 minutes of intense concentration and total silence was clearly a fraud.
My father's 10,000 physician students who routinely obtained hypnosis in one to three minutes in noisy environments and got patients sufficiently deep for such things as open heart surgery with only hypnotic anesthesia would be quite amused to consider this professor's professional errors.
If you have not consulted my bio, I learned hypnosis at age 11, later graduated from MIT, had a career in R&D in both Industry and the Air Force, and now teach hypnosis world-wide.
And should you wish to learn more, consult my father's book:
"HYPNOTHERAPY" by Dave Elman.
BE SMART...........^_^