Hypnotherapeutic Techniques

Second Edition

Arreed Barabasz, John G. Watkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136760594
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Medical Theory, Practice & Reference

Two premier hypnotherapists collaborate on a new edition of this award-winning text, a collection of techniques and information about hypnosis that no serious student or practitioner should be without. A thorough and practical handbook of various hypnotherapeutic measures, it contains illustrative examples and logically argued selection methods to help practitioners choose the ideal method for a needed purpose. Section by section, it breaks out the various methods and phenomena of hypnosis into easily digested chunks, so the reader can pick and choose at leisure. An excellent practical guide and reference that is sure to be used regularly. The authors have a wide and longstanding experience on the subject and thus can stay on clinically approvable methods.

Chapter 1

The History of Hypnosis sand Its Relevance to Present-Day Psychotherapy

Perhaps the earliest recorded description of hypnoanesthesia comes from Genesis 2:21–22: “And the Lord caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept; and He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof. And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made He a woman.”

Now, just imagine that you, as a doctor who has devoted your life to the study of human illness, have discovered a totally awesome new healing principle. You have happened, by good luck, on a new approach that seems to have miraculous results in relieving pain and curing many conditions that have defied the best efforts of your country’s most distinguished practitioners. You have watched hundreds of sufferers lose their pains, throw away their crutches, and resume normal living after being invalids for years. As to the effects of your new technique, there can be no doubt.

Furthermore, to account for this therapeutic power, you have developed a theory that is related to what is known scientifically about the operations of natural law. Your waiting room is besieged by patients from near and far. Your reputation as a great healer is established throughout the land. Only one cloud shadows your satisfaction: Your colleagues refuse to listen to you, learn your procedures, and verify them on their own patients. How would you feel? What would you do?

Perhaps in your eagerness to share this great discovery with the rest of the world and to be scientifically recognized for your contribution, you would welcome an official hearing. Let some highly respected members of the medical and scientific societies investigate your practice and see your therapeutic achievements firsthand. Their skepticism will be erased. They can announce to your colleagues and to the rest of the world the truth about your great discovery. Suppose that finally the government appoints such a commission, consisting of several of the most respected names in science. This group visits your treatment office. They study your charts, observe your therapeutic procedures, and interview your patients. Now you surely will be vindicated. Their long-awaited report is finally published. You are devastated. They ignored the concrete examples of your healing. They paid little attention to the reports of your many patients who attest to their cures. They only criticized the theory by which you attempted to explain your therapeutic achievements, and then said that any reported results must be due to “imagination.” How would you feel now? Could you carry on being scorned by colleagues and patients alike? Or would you, like Franz Anton Mesmer, leave the country in disgrace, filled with shame and bitterness?

The Discoveries of Mesmer

Mesmer, born in 1734, secured a degree in medicine in 1766. In tune with the times, his doctoral thesis, De Planetarum Influsu, attempted to relate changes in human functioning to gravitational and other forces in the surrounding universe. After all, if the position of the moon could so move the oceans of the world, would not such powerful forces also have significant impact on the operations of living organisms, especially humans?

Mesmer was a brilliant man of great imagination. His interests were indeed broad. A musician himself, he was a friend of Mozart, Gluck, and Haydn. Vienna of that day was a city in which the arts blossomed as much as the sciences. But Mesmer was equally a scientist and physician, and as such had been made a member of the Bavarian Academy of Science.

The mid-eighteenth century was a time of great ferment. The impetus for new advances, which two centuries before in the Renaissance had broken the frozen grip of medievalism and stimulated a new flowering in all the arts, especially in Italy, that now swept on into the realms of natural science. Newton, Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, and others had made significant breakthroughs in understanding the universe and its laws. Gravity, chemical reactions, electricity, and magnetism were being discovered as great natural forces, energies that were soon to be harnessed and enormously increase man’s standard of living. The Western world was on the verge of an industrial revolution. And speaking of revolutions, explosive social forces were at work that would soon sweep through the United States and Europe. Monarchies tottered before the increasing clamor of the many common people demanding their rights for liberty, equality, and fraternity.

It was in such a world that Mesmer learned from the Royal Astronomer in Vienna, a priest named Maxmilian Hell, the principle of the magnet. If one would hold a bit of magnetized metal before the eyes of an individual, he or she would become transfixed. Moving and acting as if in another realm, the subject was especially susceptible to healing suggestions that could be administered at that time. His or her pains could be made to leave. Many other complaints could also be banished under the spell of the magnet.

However, Mesmer soon made a most puzzling discovery. A priest named Gassner had been practicing a form of healing much like magnetism, which involved passes of the hands without the use of metal magnets. Mesmer observed Father Gassner’s work and found that he himself could also accomplish the same results merely by placing his hand near his patients even without holding a piece of magnetized metal. How could this be? It had been established that a magnet has about it a field that influences other pieces of metal, and when held close to patients it obviously influenced them too, because pain and other symptoms were relinquished. There must be something of the same energy in the hand of the doctor. Therefore, this great healing power apparently was not limited to metals; it could also be found in bodily tissues. So Mesmer coined the term “animal magnetism” to represent a universal force that might account for the healing achieved by “the laying on of hands.”

How normal, how natural it was that a brilliant thinker with the searching mind of Mesmer could arrive at such an explanation. Yet here we see an example of what has often occurred in science where, through faulty reasoning, an invalid theory is formulated even though based on apparently sound observational data. Accordingly, Mesmer established his clinical practice on a concept that several years later was invalidated by scientists who were more careful and rigorous in their experimental controls.

Mesmer was not the last to advocate the theory of a fluid, magnetic energy to account for healing effects. A century and a half later, a brilliant, creative psychoanalyst, Wilhelm Reich (1945), formulated theories about the concept of the “orgone,” a life energy that could be concentrated in a box and focused back on the human body with healing results. He also treated patients according to his theory and was jailed for refusing to obey a desist ruling of the Federal Food and Drug Administration in the United States. He died in jail, but perhaps his idea, even now, has not been put finally to rest. Recent “Kirlian” photographs (Krippner & Rubin, 1973) have shown that there is an “aura” of radiation about plant and animal tissue and alterations in it are correlated with healing effects. Maybe, just maybe, Mesmer and Reich were not entirely wrong.

Mesmer’s Controversial Case of “Restored” Sight

Maria Theresa Paradis, a young singer and pianist, had been blind since the age of 3 years. The best physicians had not been able to restore her sight. She was brought to Mesmer, who developed a strong interest in her case. With her parents’ consent, he took her into his home and treated her. Although a number of prominent physicians had diagnosed her condition as due to destruction of the optic nerve, there was considerable evidence that the blindness might be hysterical.

Maria had performed before Empress Maria Theresa who, being favorably impressed with the girl, had provided for her education and granted her parents a pension. At first, the treatment seemed to be successful, and the girl apparently was able to see again. However, the case created consternation within the conservative medical profession of Vienna. If Mesmer really had such powers, the other doctors might lose their patients to him.

Several influential physicians were able to convince Marie’s parents that her cure was not genuine, and they suggested that if she was no longer thought to be blind, the parents might lose the pension. As a result, she was removed by her parents from Mesmer’s care and returned to her home, after which her blindness returned.

Here we see an experience from history that is so frequently repeated today, one that society prefers to ignore but that complicates enormously the task of the healing arts practitioner; namely, attempting to treat a patient who has more to gain by remaining ill. Huge malpractice suits are won; workman’s compensation, disability payments, and the pensions of neurotically ill veterans are awarded to those who can successfully establish and retain symptoms in the face of treatment, psychological or physiological. To his great chagrin, Mesmer learned about secondary gains and reinforcements in the maintenance of illness long before the investigations of such factors by scientist-practitioner psychologists. This case example also serves to warn us that the first therapeutic question is not how we should treat the patient but whether the patient should be treated at all.

Mesmer’s Fascinating Theory of Disease

Mesmer held that because the human body was composed of the same elements as those that made up the universe, it should be subject to the same laws that govern other bits of matter, including the planets. The body, too, should be influenced by light, heat, electricity, and changes in gravitation and even by influences from celestial space. He believed that the two halves of the human body acted in relation to each other like two poles of a magnet and that physiological processes were disrupted when there was a lack of harmony because of the improper distribution of magnetism.

Animal magnetism was viewed as a kind of fluid that could penetrate all matter, that could be concentrated and reflected, and that could be invested by the human will into various parts of the body. Mesmer believed that he could direct this magnetic fluid through his presence, the passes of his hands, the waving of a metallic rod, and contact with the baquet.

The baquet was a large wooden tub about a foot high, which he had constructed within his clinic. It was filled with bits of metal, bottles systematically arranged in concentric rings, broken pieces of glass, and water. It was large enough to allow a number of patients to sit around it. From its upper lid there projected several iron rods. This baquet was supposed to concentrate the magnetism (like a kind of eighteenth-century cyclotron) that could then be transferred by patients to their afflicted members through rubbing against the rods. Being a musician (and undoubtedly somewhat of a showman) Mesmer felt that the experience would be enhanced if the clinic room was darkened and music was playing while he, in a long flowing purple robe, passed among his patients, rubbing their bodies from time to time with his metal rod.

Because patients were expected to go into crises (hysterical seizures) when the concentration of “magnetism” became sufficiently great, it is not surprising that every so often one would writhe and fall into a “fit,” thus further impressing the others as to the potency of the treatment. When the number of patients seeking Mesmer’s help exceeded the capacity of his clinic, he would magnetize a tree in a nearby park by stroking it. People could then stand around it, basking in its “magnetism” and occasionally going into crises.

Despite all of this apparent foolishness, Gravitz (2004), as a remarkable historian of hypnosis, brought to our attention that Mesmer also recognized that his own belief in animal magnetism was a crucial element and that it “must in the first place be transmitted through feeling” (Mesmer, 1781, p. 25). At some level then, Mesmer understood the criticality of what we speak of when we emphasize the importance of resonance as a key element in helping to bring about the state of hypnosis as an instrument of therapeutic change. Indeed, it would seem that Mesmer had an awareness of key aspects of transference. Although he had no concept of issues of libidinal regression, he was a century ahead of Freud’s recognition that the hypnotic state was created from transferential phenomena: “the key to an understanding of hypnotic suggestion” (S. Freud, 1910, p. 51). A complete discussion is cogently presented by Gravitz (2004).

Mesmer’s Reception by Colleagues

The same suspicion and criticism by medical colleagues that plagued him in Vienna continued in Paris, and the greater his successes, the greater became the hostility of the other doctors. In 1784, because of the conflicting claims, King Louis XVI appointed a distinguished commission, whose members were suggested by the French Academy of Science, to investigate Mesmer’s practice. It is most interesting to note who was included among its members. There was doughty old Benjamin Franklin, who had discovered the relation of lightning to electricity with his kite. At that time, he was the American ambassador to France. There was Lavoisier, the first to isolate the element of oxygen. There was Jussieu, an eminent botanist, and finally (not without symbolic significance for the future of Mesmer’s practice) there was the inventor of that device for amputating the head — Dr. Antoine Guillotine (we might also blame him for starting the whole mind-body separation notion that persisted until just a decade ago).

Mesmer’s therapeutic zeal was exceeded only by his tendency for exaggeration, his lack of caution in theoretical generalization, and his arrogance, a trait not uncommon in many good therapists today. The commission was soon able, through simple but well controlled experiments, to conclude that the changes in the symptoms of Mesmer’s patients could not have occurred through the action of a hypothesized magnetic field. Their report stated flatly that there was no such thing as animal magnetism and that, because it did not exist, reported cures could be only the result of fraud or imagination. Rejected by colleagues and patients alike, Mesmer left Paris, and, after some wandering, settled in Switzerland near Lake Constance, on whose shores he had been born 50 years before. There he spent the rest of his days, unnoticed and unheralded.

How often do individuals who are beaten by the forces of life return to the scenes of their childhood? How often do they simplify their existence, relinquish challenges to competitors, and cease efforts to make further advances? We see it every day in many of our patients. We call it regression. Mesmer’s star burst forth like a brilliant nova in the development of psychological treatment, but within a few short years it had returned almost to oblivion. Although personally discredited, broken, and embittered, he left a legacy of findings and questions that have ever since fruitfully stimulated humans’ quest for more knowledge about themselves. Mesmer reached to become God; he ended up very much human. Such strivings for power have often been the nemesis of practitioners of hypnosis, who, dazzled by the apparently unbelievable effects they achieve through the hypnotic modality, reactivate their own infantile yearnings for omnipotence. They sometimes lose their raison d’être as practitioners of the healing arts, as servants to men, and seek to use their newfound skills to become masters of humankind. The history of hypnosis has many lessons to teach the would-be hypnotist, and history tends to repeat itself.

The development of modern hypnosis is considered to have started with Mesmer. However, the use of hypnosis in treating human ills is probably as old as the history of medicine. There is evidence that most hypnotic phenomena were known to ancient man. Eighteen hundred years before Christ, hypnosis was apparently practiced in China. The Old Testament Hebrews employed the trance state in the making of prophecies. And the Druids would put suspects into a “sleep” to induce them to tell the truth. In the fourth-century B.C., temple cults developed in Greece (during which an induced sleep was combined with other forms of suggestion for the treatment of illness). Through the dances of whirling dervishes, the ancient Egyptians induced states of trance and ecstasy, during which hypnotic analgesia could be achieved. It would appear that many of these early inductions were successful in establishing true hypnotic trance effects, well beyond what is labeled “hypnosis” by some today. As we reveal in the theories and techniques foci of this text, a number of practitioners and even researchers today seem content to settle for nothing more...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• 1. The History of Hypnosis and Its Relevance to Present-Day Psychotherapy
• 2. Hypnotic Phenomena
• 3. Theorizing About Hypnosis: Recent Breakthroughs Shed New Light
• 4. Hypnotizability
• 5. Introductory Techniques of Hypnotic Induction
• 6. Advanced Techniques of Hypnotic Induction
• 7. Deepening Hypnotic Trance
• 8. Placebo, Hypnotic Suggestion, and the Hypnotherapist
• 9. Relieving Pain With Hypnosis
• 10. Hypnosis in Anesthesia and Surgery
• 11. Hypnosis for Childbirth Pain and Trauma
• 12. Mind-Body Interaction I: Hypnosis in Internal Medicine
• 13. Mind-Body Interaction II: Hypnosis in the Treatment of Dermatological Disorders
• 14. Meditation and Hypnosis for Health
• 15. Dental Hypnosis (Hypnodontia)
• 16. Hypnosis for Specialized Problems
• 17. Hypnosis With Children
• 18. Hypnosis and Sports Performance*
• Appendix: Societies and Journals
• References
• Index