The question
Milton Erickson pointed at the shiny metal side of the filing cabinet in his office, turned to a young man named David, and asked whether he could see that fishpond there.
David said no. There was no fishpond there.
Erickson asked the same question of David’s companion, Anna Lee. She gave the same answer.
Sitting across from them was a young woman named Jane, who didn’t believe in hypnosis at all. She looked at her friends in disbelief. Couldn’t they really see the fishpond?
That moment, described by Erickson himself years later, is one of the strangest in the history of hypnosis. By the end of it, the sceptic was seeing a pond that didn’t exist, students walking past it, and the friend who couldn’t see it.
The disbeliever
The story survives because Erickson told it in a series of recorded conversations with Jay Haley and John Weakland, two members of the anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s research team, who visited him to discuss the nature of hypnosis and psychotherapy. The Erickson Foundation’s director, Jeffrey Zeig, published those conversations in 2022, in a book called Advancing Psychotherapy, and the Foundation’s newsletter printed this excerpt under a fitting title: “Hypnosis with a Resistant Disbeliever.”
As Erickson told it, David and Anna Lee were doing a lot of research on hypnosis, and came across Jane. David thought she’d make a good hypnotic subject. She was very intelligent and alert.
She also had every possible misconception about hypnosis. It was nonsense, she said; there was no such thing. She had studied enough psychology to be convinced it was just a stage trick, and that people only pretended. David tried to hypnotise her anyway. She didn’t respond at all.
So David persuaded her to come and meet someone who really could hypnotise her: Milton Erickson.
It didn’t go well. Erickson said that talking to her with hypnotic suggestions was like reading Chinese poetry to someone who didn’t know a word of it, and didn’t even know it was Chinese poetry. She listened, and nothing happened.
So Erickson stopped trying to hypnotise her, and tried something else.
The trap
Instead of arguing with Jane about hypnosis, Erickson talked to her about her friends, who were sitting there in the office with them.
He reminded her that she liked David and Anna Lee, and respected them. She knew they did well in college, and that they were sincere and honest people. She enjoyed their company. And she knew they believed in hypnosis. Jane agreed with all of it. She just didn’t know why they believed in it.
He reminded her that both of them had been hypnotised, and that she knew the definitions of positive hallucinations (seeing things that aren’t there) and negative hallucinations (failing to see things that are). Then he suggested something new. Perhaps, as they sat there across the room from her, David and Anna Lee had already slipped into that condition they called a trance.
He had a feeling they were in a trance, he said, and he thought he could prove it to her. They were going to show her a negative hallucination, and he thought seeing it would jar her ideas. She would become curious about how they could possibly do it, and then she would recognise that what they said about hypnosis was true.
Then he pointed at the shiny metal side of the filing cabinet in his office, and asked David whether he could see that fishpond there.
When both friends said there was no fishpond there, Erickson put the question to Jane. What did she think? Were they hallucinating? Lying? Faking? Or was it genuine?
The fishpond appears
Jane looked at Erickson, and then she looked at the fishpond.
She asked David whether he really couldn’t see it. She asked Anna Lee. Both said no. Then she pointed out a student walking past it. In Jane’s eyes, they were no longer in an office at all. She was looking at a fishpond on the college campus. Couldn’t they see the student? No. Now several students were walking past. David asked: what fishpond? Good heavens, Jane told him, they walked past it every day on the campus.
Erickson’s explanation was simple. Jane had refused to accept anything he suggested. So he had shown her something her friends would not accept. She trusted them too much to believe they were lying, so she had to accept their refusal, and in accepting it, she had to see the fishpond. According to Erickson, she hallucinated it both visually and by sound.
Then came the twist. David tried to tell her that what she was looking at was a wall, and a filing cabinet. Erickson laughed as he recalled her reply: there was no wall there, she said, and why would anyone put a filing cabinet out on the campus?
And then the woman who didn’t believe in hypnosis delivered her verdict on her friend: “You know he is really hallucinating positively.”
Seeing what others see
It’s tempting to dismiss Jane’s experience as a one-off: an unusually suggestible young woman, a famous hypnotist, a strange afternoon. But psychology has spent decades showing that other people’s words can change what we perceive.
In the early 1950s, the psychologist Solomon Asch asked volunteers to do a simple vision test: say which of three lines matched the length of another. The catch was that the other people in the room were actors, who had been told to give the same wrong answer on certain trials. The answer was obvious, but on those trials the real participants went along with the group about a third of the time. Around 75 percent conformed at least once.
For decades, a question hung over Asch’s work. Were people simply saying they agreed, to avoid standing out? Or were they actually seeing differently?
In 2005, the psychiatrist and neuroscientist Gregory Berns and his colleagues at Emory University tried to find out, using brain scans. Volunteers had to decide whether two rotated 3D shapes were the same, while being shown the supposed answers of other people. They went along with the group’s wrong answers 41 percent of the time.
The striking finding was where the brain activity happened. When people conformed, the changes showed up in areas involved in perception, in the visual and spatial regions doing the task itself, rather than in the frontal areas associated with deliberate decisions. When people stood their ground against the group, there was more activity in the amygdala, a region involved in emotion. Standing alone, it seems, carries an emotional cost.
As Berns put it, what other people tell us may colour our perception at a very deep level.
Jane’s case pushes that idea to an extreme. She wasn’t just nudged to see a line as a little longer. She saw a whole fishpond, with people walking past it. But the principle is the same: when people we trust insist on something, our minds can quietly reshape what we see.
A peaceful coexistence
Then there’s that wonderful final moment: Jane, happily seeing a fishpond in the middle of an office, wondering why anyone would put a filing cabinet out on a college campus.
Psychologists have a name for this. The hypnosis researcher Martin Orne called it trance logic, describing it as a “peaceful coexistence between illusion and reality”. In one of his best-known tests, a deeply hypnotised person was told that a researcher was sitting in a nearby chair, and they “saw” him there, though the chair was empty. Meanwhile, the real researcher had quietly moved to stand behind them. When they turned around, they saw him standing there too: the same man, twice. Rather than being alarmed, many simply accepted it, saying there seemed to be two of him. Some even said they could see the chair through the imaginary figure. Fully alert, they would have found it absurd. In trance, it didn’t seem to bother them.
Trance logic has been hotly debated. Some researchers have argued that it isn’t unique to hypnosis, and that it reflects how people respond to the expectations of an experiment. But as a description of what Jane did, it’s hard to beat. She held two incompatible realities at once, the pond and the filing cabinet, and simply arranged them so they made sense to her.
The double bind
There’s one more reason the story is intriguing, and it has to do with the two researchers Erickson told it to.
Years after the session, Erickson recounted Jane’s case to Jay Haley and John Weakland, who were recording a series of conversations with him. Both were members of the anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s research team, which was developing a famous theory about the “double bind”: a situation in which a person receives two conflicting messages, and can’t escape the contradiction or even point it out. Haley and Weakland had come to Erickson partly to explore whether trance and the double bind had something in common. Erickson never fully agreed with them, but he understood double binds well, and used them in his work.
Jane’s case certainly looks like one. Either her honest, trusted friends were lying, which she couldn’t believe, or something she was sure didn’t exist was really happening. Neither option was acceptable. Erickson offered her a third way out, and her mind took it: she saw the fishpond.
The sceptic’s lesson
Jane began the afternoon convinced that hypnosis was a stage trick, and that people who claimed to be hypnotised were only pretending. She ended it by gently informing her friend that he was the one hallucinating.
Erickson didn’t win her over by arguing, and he didn’t overpower her resistance. He found the one thing she trusted more than her own scepticism, her friends, and let that do the work.
The research suggests none of us is as immune as we’d like to think. What we see depends not only on what’s in front of our eyes, but on what the people we trust tell us is there. Sometimes, if the right people say so, a filing cabinet can become a fishpond, complete with students strolling past.
Further reading
The original account
- Zeig JK (ed.). Advancing Psychotherapy: Transforming Conversations — In Dialogue with Milton Erickson, Jay Haley, and John Weakland. Milton H. Erickson Foundation Press, 2022.
- “Hypnosis with a Resistant Disbeliever.” Book excerpt. The Milton H. Erickson Foundation Newsletter. Vol. 42, No. 2 (August 2022), p. 14. https://www.erickson-foundation.org/s/EricksonNews-42-2-WebFinal.pdf
Conformity and perception
- Asch SE. “Effects of group pressure upon the modification and distortion of judgments.” In Guetzkow H (ed.), Groups, Leadership and Men. Carnegie Press, 1951.
- Asch SE. “Studies of independence and conformity: a minority of one against a unanimous majority.” Psychological Monographs. 1956;70(9):1–70.
- McLeod S. “Asch Conformity Line Experiment.” Simply Psychology. https://www.simplypsychology.org/asch-conformity.html
- Berns GS, Chappelow J, Zink CF, Pagnoni G, Martin-Skurski ME, Richards J. “Neurobiological correlates of social conformity and independence during mental rotation.” Biological Psychiatry. 2005;58(3):245–253. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2005.04.012
- Blakeslee S. “What other people say may change what you see.” The New York Times, 28 June 2005. https://mail.sandrablakeslee.com/articles/social_conformity_jun05.php
- Stallen M, Sanfey AG. “The neuroscience of social conformity: implications for fundamental and applied research.” Frontiers in Neuroscience. 2015;9:337. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4585332
Trance logic
- Orne MT. “The nature of hypnosis: artifact and essence.” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology. 1959;58:277–299. https://www.psych.upenn.edu/history/orne/orne1959jasp277299.html
- International Society of Hypnosis. “Martin T. Orne (1927–2000).” https://www.ishhypnosis.org/encyclopedia/martin-t-orne-1927-2000/
- Kihlstrom JF, Frankel FH. “In memoriam: Martin T. Orne, 1927–2000.” International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis. 2000;48:355–360.
The double bind
- Bateson G, Jackson DD, Haley J, Weakland J. “Toward a theory of schizophrenia.” Behavioral Science. 1956;1(4):251–264.
- Lentz JD. Book review: Advancing Psychotherapy. The Milton H. Erickson Foundation Newsletter. Vol. 42, No. 2 (August 2022), p. 15.
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