among others, have devoted some portion of their careers to an understanding of hypnosis and hypnotic suggestibility. Still, as Hilgard points out, consciousness and conscious control of behavior were largely written out of the behavioristic era that dominated academic psychology from the late thirties through the midsixties, and with it, any interest in hypnotic alterations in consciousness and behavior.
I was "raised" in the waning days of behaviorism and still recall my amused reaction to a short article deploring the fact that the verbal conditioning paradigm-originally forwarded as demonstrating the automatic effect of reinforcement on behavior-was declining in popularity. This decline was attributed to the fact that some investigators (e.g., had demonstrated that awareness of response-reinforcement contingencies seemed necessary for learning. In other words, consciousness reentered the academic scene during the mid-sixties at least in part as an artifact that obscured the automatic impact that the environment allegedly had over behavior.
At about the same time, unconscious influences on behavior-especially unconscious perception and motivation-were emphatically rejected by an increasingly vocal group of investigators, led by , who argued with considerable success that the alleged evidence for unconscious influences was due to various methodological artifacts. So, conscious influences were regarded as artifactual by those committed to the automatic environmental control over behavior, and apparent unconscious influences on thought and behavior were regarded as artifactual by investigators committed to the conscious control of behavior. Neither school addressed how the very concept of conscious control over behavior made much sense unless by contrast to unconscious control-and vice versa.
With the wisdom of hindsight, it appears that two simultaneous issues were being played out in psychological journals during this transition period: (a) To what extent was behavior consciously/unconsciously controlled? and (b) To what extent was behavior controlled by internal/external influences? I think it is fair