Trance: a contested word
Trance is everyday and clinical language for looking absorbed or less responsive to the room. Researchers disagree whether it names a unique state.
Last reviewed 27 August 2026
Trance is a folk and clinical word: the person looks absorbed, still, or less concerned with the room. It is not a scale score and it is not a diagnosis.
Key evidence
Laboratory programmes usually measure suggested responses (who passes which items), not a unique trance substance. See hypnotic susceptibility.
Kirsch’s response-set account (2000) rejects a uniquely hypnotic altered state of consciousness and also rejects a pure-compliance story. Response expectancies play a major, not exclusive, role. That is a theory paper, not a brain scan.
Bernheim had already denied that hypnotic sleep is a neurosis like hysteria (Suggestive Therapeutics; Nancy). Dissociation is Hilgard’s different laboratory vocabulary for split control.
Limitations
People use “trance” for meditation, stage shows, and clinic rooms. Those uses are not one phenomenon.
What we don't know yet
Whether any physiological signature is necessary for a hypnotic suggestion to work is not settled by the texts cited here.
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