Inducing the mental creation of experiential realities

Inducing the mental creation of experiential realities

Prof. Victor F. Petrenko, PhD, PhD & Dr. Vladimir V. Kucherenko

Can people—even those ostensibly not hypnotizable—be coaxed into creating entire virtual realities that they then take for facts? Can the same techniques be used to alter our memories of the past? If so, is this significant for our understanding of what reality—the real reality—actually is? Psychologists Prof. Petrenko and Dr. Kucherenko share astonishing results produced by Russian clinical and experimental psychology, which answer these questions in the affirmative.

(Editors’ note: the authors use the word ‘unconscious’ in the Jungian sense: that of psychic realm that lacks higher-order mental functions, such as meta-cognition, but which may nonetheless still be experiential in essence.)

V.V. Kucherenko, one of the authors of the present paper, works with patients suffering from a variety of diseases. He works in cooperation with physicians to create a favorable emotional state of the patient, so that the organism’s resistance to the disease increases.

Nowadays, the development of psychological techniques is transforming psychology from a descriptive and explanatory science to one that is actively modifying its own objects; a science at the cutting edge of human evolution; a science that can secure the humanization of humankind or undermine our very existence. In addition to Kucherenko’s sensorimotor psychosynthesis method, the human personality can be substantially modified by Eriksonian hypnosis, various techniques of working with autobiographic memory and the collective unconscious, transpersonal psychology approaches that involve immersion into ASCs (S. Grof, A. Mindell, R. Frager, C. Wilbur, and others), and coaching sessions similar to those proposed by C. Rogers [34] and A.F. Alekseichik [35]. The minimization of risks is essential, and we assume that it can be ensured by the implementation of the techno-humanitarian balance principle proposed by A.P. Nazaretyan [36]: the development of technologies should be necessarily controlled or restricted (in the absence of a more suitable term) by newly emerging ethical and moral norms. In this case, one can hope that the sensorimotor psychosynthesis method will remain another powerful tool for positive modification of the human psyche.