The Haruspex and the Hypnotherapist, 2026
This paper proposes a unified theoretical framework tracing the architecture of consciousness man... more This paper proposes a unified theoretical framework tracing the architecture of consciousness management from its origins in the first codified priestly knowledge monopolies, through its transmission and institutional elaboration across millennia, to its contemporary manifestations in agnotological governance and social hypnosis. Drawing on ancient history, social psychology, clinical hypnotherapy, ethology, and semiotics, it argues that the mechanisms by which human moral agency is suppressed are structurally continuous across historical periods, and that clinical hypnotherapy—understood through the psychobiology of trance and memory reconsolidation—represents not merely a therapeutic tool but a counter-architecture capable of restoring access to the suppressed natural moral compass.
This "unified theoretical framework" has its value in the underlying structure, rather than the specifics of examples, it should be read in this regard. This provides more of a 'model' for furthering, or perhaps creating, a new faculty of psychological engineering, than it does present any indepth discussion of the examples provided to illustrate this structure.
This is also an excercise in the use of AI to summarise complex, seemingly unrelated text into an authentic piece that reflects the intention of the researcher.
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Papers by Mena Baines
This "unified theoretical framework" has its value in the underlying structure, rather than the specifics of examples, it should be read in this regard. This provides more of a 'model' for furthering, or perhaps creating, a new faculty of psychological engineering, than it does present any indepth discussion of the examples provided to illustrate this structure.
This is also an excercise in the use of AI to summarise complex, seemingly unrelated text into an authentic piece that reflects the intention of the researcher.
Drawing on structural anthropology, post-structuralist theory, interpersonal neurobiology, depth psychology, embodied cognition, trauma theory, hypnotherapy, and Gestalt field theory, the paper argues that left hemisphere dominance in Western modernity is culturally produced and structurally maintained, with measurable consequences for individual and collective wellbeing. Trauma is understood not only as discrete event but as systemic condition, which is manufactured through scarcity, learned helplessness, and the destruction of the relational field.
Addressed to practitioners, educators, and general readers, the paper offers both scholarly grounding and practical orientation for an era of intensifying collective dysregulation.