Hypnosis is the black sheep of the family of problems that constitute psychology. It wanders in and out of laboratories

Hypnosis is the black sheep of the family of problems that constitute psychology. It wanders in and out of laboratories and carnivals and clinics and village halls like an unwanted anomaly. It never seems to straighten up and resolve itself into the firmer proprieties of scientific theory. Indeed, its very possibility seems a denial of our immediate ideas about conscious self-control on the one hand, and our scientific idea about personality on the other. Yet it should be conspicuous that any theory of consciousness and its origin, if it is to be responsible, must face the difficulty of this deviant type of behavioural control

_Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind_