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perspective taking, empathic concern, and empathic aspects of TOM to experience alter- ations in affect, behavior, sensation, thoughts, and his/her mind/body relationship that are suggested by a hypnotist or through his/her own creative and imaginative processes. The EIT attempts to unify many different theoretical and research traditions of hypno- sis by demonstrating their common underpinnings in the psychological processes and neuroscience of empathy. The EIT proposes that the experience of hypnosis is embodied in a system of neural networks in the brain that utilize empathy to (a) empathically enact the affect, cognition, body language, response expectancies, social roles, sensations, etc. that are presented to them during hypnosis in accordance with socio-cognitive theories of hypnosis; (b) engage in a convergent psychophysiological relationship with another per- son in accordance with psychoanalytic, Ericksonian, and polyvagal/social engagement system theories; (c) alter the empathic self/other (TOM) coding of their phenomenolog- ical experiences during hypnosis in accordance with aspects of the neo-dissociative and socio-cognitive traditions; and, (d) develop an experiential understanding of the illusion of self, which may lead in some people to its transcendence in accordance with Bon- Buddhist, Dzogchen, and transpersonal scholars. The EIT also proposes that the self is a believed-in imagining that is created in a neuromatrix that utilizes empathic processes to give it a sense of definition and solidity.
There are many implications for future research involving the EIT. First, it would be good to revisit some of the initial research that examined the relationship between hyp- notic ability and empathy while controlling for context effects (Council et al., 1986). It would also be good for these studies to employ the Stanford Form C (Weitzenhoffer & Hilgard, 1962) as a measure of hypnotic ability due to its superior psychometric properties and perhaps also a performance-based measure of empathy so that empathic accuracy could be assessed as well as empathic disposition. Many questions have been left open regarding the psychophysiology of the DMN, AC, and other brain regions as to whether they are truly the areas involved with the embodiment of empathy, TOM, and the trance states experienced with hypnosis and other strong empathic phenomena, such as falling in love, psychotherapy, and sexual intimacy. More precise studies of the specific neurophenomenology (Lutz & Thompson, 2003) of hypnosis and strong expe- riences of empathy are needed, and these studies will certainly need to employ a more thorough focus on the precise phenomenology of the participants though employing such measures as the Phenomenology of Consciousness Inventory (Pekala & Kumar, 2000), heuristic analysis (Moustakas, 1990), and the Experiential Analysis Technique (Sheehan, 1992). These same research techniques could also be utilized to examine my predic- tion that strong empathic experiences are all that is necessary to induce hypnotic-like phenomenology.
Finally, there are many implications for clinical practice involving the EIT, such as a general directive for clinicians to become more acutely aware of the underly- ing grounding of hypnosis in a strongly empathic experience. Any strong empathic experience can become trance-inducing, and knowledge of these phenomena may be
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