The nature of hypnosis is not adequately explained by conditioned responses or conditioned attitudes. The writer agrees with R. W. White that the hypnotized subject must be motivated, but not necessarily to behave like a hypnotized person. She postulates, rather, that suggestions are effective only if the subject actively strives to imagine himself in the situation described by the operator. This would explain automatisms in the absence of any experience of intention. Suggestibility is pertinent only as it relates to a tendency to arouse strong images. Hypnotic phenomena are as 'real' as the functional disorders of conversion hysteria and are similarly produced by concentrated imagining. Posthypnotic suggestion and age regression can be explained by assuming that the subject directs his own imagining, although at the suggestion of the operator. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved)