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Bowers claims that much in Hilgard's neodissociation model seems to turn on reversible amnesia for post-hypnotically suggested behavior, and also that the model does not need reversible amnesia as a critical factor. "… I do not find the emphasis on reversible amnesia as the dissociative basis for hypnotically suggested responses very convincing—in part because amnesia that is not specifically suggested is even rarer than some of the hypnotically suggested perceptual/cognitive distortions that need explaining." Bowers notes that—unlike hysteria, in which the ideational basis is unconscious (repressed)—the actual hypnotic suggestions themselves are well represented consciously in the subject's experience.
Nonetheless, in hypnosis mental events are indeed made nonconscious but through hypnotic alterations in "cognitive controls." This notion of dissociated control, Bowers claims, is far more in keeping with contemporary views of mental functioning. Thus the hypnotized subject is aware both of the idea suggested (e.g., arm will be paralyzed), and its effect (a paralyzed arm); but what is lost is the subject's willful connection.
Bowers gives a brief illustration of an experiment designed to test whether hypnotic analgesia operates because of amnesia or because of dissociated controls. Given that hypnotic suggestions do diminish the experience of pain, Bowers hypothesizes two alternative mechanisms: 1) the subject effortfully initiates fantasies which mediate pain reduction, but the subject is amnesic for the cognitive effort in producing the fantasies (though not for the fantasies themselves), and 2) pain reduction is activated directly through the suggestion, and the fantasies are concomitants. Bowers asserts that one can test between these alternatives. The first mechanism would require the use of more cognitive resources, both in fantasy production and in effortful forgetting. Thus if this mechanism is operative, subjects with hypnotic analgesia should show le