UC Santa Cruz

Erotic hypnosis fetishism is a practice involving gaining erotic or intimate pleasure from engaging in and/or roleplaying hypnosis, mind control, brainwashing, and/or hypnotic suggestion. Despite its surprising popularity as a sexual fetish interest, little is known about erotic hypnosis within the peer-reviewed academic literature. To fill this gap, this dissertation details a study which sought to better understand the social, developmental, ethical, and motivational characteristics surrounding erotic hypnosis fetishism. A set of 83 in-depth semi-structured interviews with a diverse set of erotic hypnosis fetishists was conducted between 2019-2021 (with both researcher- and community-derived questions), recruited at four erotic hypnosis conferences as well as via online advertisements and snowball sampling. The interviews were analyzed via an initial 2-round conventional content analysis, followed by a further 2-round (and occasionally 3-round) inductive thematic analysis on the content-coded data. The results of this study indicated that erotic hypnosis fetishists are motivated by a wide variety of different factors, including the opportunity to explore and play with aspects of their own psychology, to enhance and achieve other kink interests and to acquire practical benefits. Participants also reported that while consent was central to ethical erotic hypnosis, and that engaging in healthy consent practices required a team collaboration, substantial disagreements persisted in perceptions of the relative risk and management of consent and safety in erotic hypnosis communities. Furthermore, participants also noted that erotic hypnosis presented both challenges and opportunities for people with disabilities, especially for those who are neurodivergent, in part because of the overlap between erotic hypnosis and hypnotherapy. In the context of religion, faith, and spirituality, participants narrated both stories of conflict and stories of harmony between their erotic hypnosis practices and their faith. Lastly, most participants agreed that the erotic hypnosis community faced substantial challenges related to racial and linguistic diversity, often rooted in colorblindness and the role of language in erotic hypnosis as a practice, but that erotic hypnosis also provided unique opportunities for People of Color. Overall, this study sheds light on this poorly understood fetish community.