The-Almond-at-the-Center-of-Guilt

In lieu of an abstract, this paragraph is reproduced from the article: "We can imagine metaphor being a linguistic or conceptual mandorla, where two things that are not the same are likened unto each other, shown to share something, to be mutually informative, to translate some insight that otherwise could not be reached with them isolated in distinction. John Schumacher, in his 1995 book The Corruption of Reality: A Unified Theory of Religion, Hypnosis, and Psychopathology, points to the intelligible use of metaphor as representative of ‘trance logic.’ Ernest Hilgard (1904-2001) coined that term to point to the experience of hypnosis as a variety of dissociation: the ability to hold two contradictory or paradoxical data sets as true at the same time. Hilgard theorized that hypnotic phenomena such as negative or positive hallucination, hypnotic anesthesia, or muscle catalepsy required a ‘splitting’ of consciousness, allowing for two conflicting premises to both be true in one mind. Schumaker says metaphor is essentially the same thing: two things that are not the same are assumed, to some meaningful degree, ‘the same’ enough that what we know about one is something we can know about the other. Whether one agrees with Hilgard or Schumaker in the particulars, there is insight in seeing hypnosis as, at least in part, the ability to see more than mere ‘sense experience’ or sterile logic could provide.