HISTORY OF “HYPNOSIS” - AN ALTERED STATE OF …
HISTORY OF “HYPNOSIS” - AN ALTERED STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS - A TRANCE-STATE by Jean Rogerson
A narrow view of hypnosis takes its history only from Mesmer in the eighteenth century. But it is important not to be medically parochial here, because behind hypnosis is the ancient use of trance and witchcraft, medicine and religion.
Hypnosis taps into a side of human nature which has not been adequately recognised by scientific Western thought, and for which contemporary pop culture has identified a need. Atheism has not worked well in the Soviet block, and people in our secular society have turned to Yoga, mysticism, fortune-telling, and the occult; looking for something beyond a materialistic, mechanistic view of life.
Modern Western medicine has been based on the nineteenth century concept of scientific method, as described by Karl Marx. Medical practice is based on a clinical diagnosis, made on the principles of scientific methodology. Generally this is a diagnosis of a physical condition, described in physical terms. Once in the realms of the mind, science becomes less precise, even for describing a problem. The traditional division of human life into body and mind is inadequate when investigating psychosomatic phenomena and the further division into body, mind and spirit has not been generally recognised in modern society.
The study of hypnosis may necessitate a fundamental rethink of these divisions.
The tripartite division of human nature behind Western culture stems from the Greeks, and comes down through the Judeo-Christian civilisations. Plato described the role of EROS in determining behaviour, the concept which we now associate with Freud. HIPPOCRATES and his followers first tried to classify mental illness in a scientific way. They were the first to describe hysteria, but they ascribed it only to women, caused by migration of the womb through the body. Mental illness was thus described first in terms of physical abnormality.
In the same Graeco-Roman tradition, the next notable attempt at classifying illness was by GALEN in the second century A.D. He said that the site of the emotions was the brain and not the heart. The rational soul was divided into external and internal parts, with the five senses being external, and the internal containing the qualities of imagination, judgement, perception and movement.
The scientific approach to mental illness was then lost until the eighteenth century.
By contrast, outside the Western world, Indian philosophy, Hinduism, Yoga and Buddhism, did not have the Greek subdivision of the person into body, mind and spirit. For Buddha, in 4th century BC, the chief end of man was not to glorify God, as in the Christian catechism, nor morality; but was to achieve KNOWLEDGE. The eight-fold pathway culminated in concentration, or mystical meditation, approximately equivalent to the Hindu Yoga. In this, the mind was fixated on a point or subject, and passed through stages of absorption, self-hypnotism or trance. This use of trance probably preceded Buddhism, but organised its use for the good of the disciple in ways which are reminiscent of our therapies.
The SAKHYA described the self as having a conscious - the spectator, and an unconscious - the active one.
YOGA emanating from this, concentrated on the need for discipline, and a return to theism. But this god was not a moral one who judged or punished; he was on the same level as the disciple. The object of Yoga was not to achieve oneness with the god, he did not create or reward or punish. The method was the suppression of mental activity, both conscious and unconscious, and the end was to become one with nature, where nature is the ultimate reality of the universe. The true light of the spirit will shine if the obscuring mental activities are suppressed. The eight-fold path of Yoga goes through abstention to observance, posture, controlling involuntary movement by breathing exercises, withdrawal inwards of the senses, with fixed attention and concentration. Through concentration, the disciple gets in touch with the inward reality.
All this is clearly using trance in a sophisticated system, bound up with religious observance, but in a way foreign to our own culture, until recent generations.
By contrast, our own Christian civilisation had its roots more in Eastern thought than in the Graeco-Roman philosophy. Hebrew religion was monotheistic, and the Hebrew god was primarily moral. But the chief end of their observance was not only moral perfection, but the word translated peace = SHALOM. The path to shalom was through meditation on the revealed character and law of God, and the history of his actions. A reading of the poetry-books of the Bible suggests that the Hebrews used trance just as much as did their Indian and Near-Eastern neighbours. Their concept of shalom then became borrowed widely throughout the world. For instance, it became SALAAM in Arabic. It was the concept of inner-health of the un-divided personality, body soul and spirit intertwined. (Compare the old-fashioned text “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace (shalom) whose mind is stayed on thee” Is. 26.)
Primitive animistic societies have been using trance since ancient days, and still do as the basis of rituals in worshipping the spirits of the inanimate objects around them. Witch-doctors in Africa, use trance in conjunction with alcohol, betel-nuts and so on.
MODERN HISTORY OF HYPNOSIS
MESMER 1734 - 1815 - an Austrian physician, widely educated and a member of the Viennese society (he played the glass harmonica at soirees held by the Mozart family). He developed the use of trance to treat emotional illness. He used all the trappings of a magical presentation, with a wand and long flowing robes. He explained his treatment as harnessing a magnetic fluid in the body which was the cause of illness. His treatment was so successful that it fell foul of the authorities. Louis XVI set up a commission of enquiry and members included Lavoisier, Benjamin Franklin and Dr. Guillotine. He was discredited, and the treatment fell into disuse.
MARQUIS DE PUSEGUR - one of Mesmer’s followers - had described a state of “artificial somnambulism” in which the operator could influence the ideas of the person who had been “magnetised”.
ABBE JOSE Dl FARIA put this into clinical practice, and told the subject to go to sleep.
JOHN ELLIOTSON 1791-1868 - Prof. Medicine at UCH - (introduced stethoscope into UK) used mesmerism until official opposition stopped him. He maintained that it was useful in functional illness, and also said that hysteria was not confined to women.
JAMES ESDALE - in 1830 s - a Scottish surgeon - reported on using trance for anaesthesia; 300 major operations had been performed and over 1000 minor ones. His ideas were not accepted in UK, and he died a disillusioned man.
JAMES BRAID - a Scottish surgeon in Manchester. In the 1840s, a French magnetiser, Lafontaine, gave a stage show. Braid strode onto the stage to expose the show as a fake, and discovered the subject was in a trance state. He set up experiments to investigate it, and coined the term HYPNOSIS. He developed induction through eye fixation, showed that the state was subjective, not due to any circulating magnetism and that the phenomena were due to suggestion.
FRANCE
A.A.LIEBAULT 1823-1904- August Liebault was a country doctor in France. He had treated thousands of people using trance. He was so successful that he drew the attention of the local HYPPOLITE BERNHEIM Prof. Medicine at Nancy. Between them they laid the foundations of the Nancy school of hypnosis. Sigmund Freud visited Liebault’s clinic and saw the phenomena of hypnosis for the first time.
CHARCOT 1825 - 1893 -anatomist and neurologist - Salpetriere School. His patients were hysterics. He devised tests of hypnosis, said that hypnosis is a pathological condition like hysteria, that only hysterics were susceptible to suggestion. There was bitter rivalry between him and the Nancy school and it was the Nancy view which prevailed. But one of his pupils had been Sigmund Freud.
MAUDESLEY in 1867 said that the preconscious and the unconscious had been established beyond any doubt.
BINET in 1890 described the unconscious in others than just hysterics.
WILLIAM JAMES in I870s popularised the concept of subconscious.
CHARLES RICHET in 1884 distinguished three divergent streams in the “intellectual existence of man” - personality, perception of outside events, and EGO - the notion of a being who both thinks and acts.
In 1887, the concept of DISSOCIATION had entered the writings of CHARCOT and MYERS. This term dissociation now becomes the important focus of attention. Following the description by Herbart about the “incomparatively small mass which occupies our conscious”.
PIERRE JANET in 1886 published his doctoral thesis on the subject. The concept of DISSOCIATION is an important alternative to Freud’s concept of REPRESSION, see below. He postulated the mind as comprising a series of lights, some on, some off. Those on comprise the conscious. An hysteric was someone in whom the range of the conscious has become narrowed, with material pushed down into the unconscious, the lights turned off. This part of the mind then becomes split off from the primary consciousness, a sort of separate personality, leaving the field of primary consciousness narrowed. Later, in 1909, he said it was necessary to see to what depth this dissociation goes, and was then able to differentiate DEMENTIAS in which there was dissociation of thought and motor functions, from HYSTERIA “in which the functions do not dissolve entirely”. Hysteria was then seen as “a malady of the personal synthesis”.
Others presumed from this that a person’s everyday persona was the normal one, but Janet described patients in whom their everyday state was the pathological one, and who under hypnosis reverted to a former happier state.
Janet quoted Breuer and Freud of 1893 “the disposition of this dissociation ...and the states of consciousness which we propose to collect under the name of hypnoid states, constitute the fundamental phenomena of hysterical neurosis.” Freud and Breuer in turn quoted Janet and his work on dissociation during their report of the case of Anna-O.
SIGMUND FREUD
During the case of Anna-O, Breuer had asked Freud to help. He had been using hypnosis for diagnosis. Freud then published in 1900 “THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS”. This publication appears as a watershed in the development of the subject. In this work, Freud set up a system of ideas which were opposite to his previous writings to the evidence of his past cases, and to the work on dissociation. He found he was unable to hypnotize subjects as well as Breuer and others could, and set up his alternative approach using what he termed
“PSYCHOANALYSIS”
The fundamental differences which Freud suggested were
1. The unconscious does not only comprise dissociated material (later he stated - does not comprise dissociated material at all)
2. The unconscious exists in everyone, not just the hysteric.
In the following few years, Freud described the basic life-force as a gratification-seeking one; sexuality, and with it the psychodynamic view of development, including the Oedipus and Electra concepts, and the central position of REPRESSION, and the mental-defence-mechanisms. The conscious mind cannot by definition know what has been repressed into the subconscious, and so treatment is by the free association of ideas, and the interpretation of ideas by the therapist who interprets from this material what has been repressed. There is by definition no way of corroborating this as the answers are interpretative ones.
Note - as a sixth-former in Vienna, Freud had learned in Herbartian doctrine about the unconscious, at the same time as it had been made part of the intellectual pop-culture by William James in America. Even the concept of the EGO was part of that culture.
Many have since described Freud’s publication in 1900 and the strict set of ideas which he then imposed forcibly on his followers, as a major spanner thrown in the works of the development of the subject of the unconscious, which has dominated the subject world-wide until recent years. In the process, he abandoned hypnosis, which has been in comparative disuse ever since, or at least until the need for treating shell-shocked troops after the Second World War. (see Pederson 1994, p.91, Van der Hart and Horst 1979, Spiegel’s 1978 p.16)
Does this matter?
1. Re- the study of DISSOCIATION - we as hypnotherapists are well acquainted with this, because we observe it constantly during our work. But in the U.K, and outside the hypnosis circles, it may not be recognized. Subjects being treated with other models of therapy may be in a trance state, or dissociated state, without it being recognized by the therapist.
2. Hilgard in 1977 re-examined Janet’s ideas on dissociated states, was able to confirm them, and advocated a return to them.
3. Van der Hart and Horst in 1989 reported work on post traumatic state, and advocated a return to Janet’s ideas. They said - “Premature acceptance of Freud’s idiosyncratic position vis-â-vis dissociation and consciousness probably delayed an appreciation of the alternative Janetian view.”
They found that therapists, who have become limited to a strictly Freudian psychodynamic approach, see the motivation of the unconscious only in terms of repressed infantile sexuality. They have found themselves stuck when what the patients display are dissociated ideas which have become fixated. They feel it is necessary to return to Janet’s ideas, in order to rethink the approach to therapy. Un-learning Freud, and all he stood for, and stopping the fragmentation of the field between people of opposing views and all the animosity which has accompanied it, is necessary. In other words, for them and others, Freud introduced something other than scientific objectivity - he demanded personal allegiance to his own ideas, and gave a gold ring to each of his close circle. Jung parted from him over the Oedipal conflict, which he then described as “the shibboleth which divides the adherents of psychoanalysis from its opponents”.
It is true that while Freud’s ideas have become part of our culture, and his concepts are part of common parlance, there is now an anti-Freud fashion, and questions over whether his treatment through analysis really works. In America, it is part of the culture to have a personal analyst, and to see them over many years. In this country, a brief form of analysis comprises psychotherapy and psychodynamic counselling. Yet few consultant psychiatrists do this. And the clinical psychologists have largely abandoned it in favour of behaviour-therapy, or therapies based on learning theory - mainly because the analytical approach is not cost-effective within the NHS.
EYSENCK in 1952 made his famous critique of Freudian method showing that for the neuroses there is a 70% spontaneous recovery rate, which falls to 44% with psychoanalytic therapy, and 64% with other methods of therapy. Moreover, the longer the psychoanalytic therapy, the lower the success rate.
Recent publication and media programmes have re-examined the early work of Freud, and are fundamentally discrediting him. This has become the current “politically correct” approach, and no doubt the pendulum will swing back in his favour at a later date.
There is current debate over false-memory syndrome which flowed directly from Freud’s methods of telling the subject that they had a guilty secret in the subconscious of which they were unaware.
1993 Esterton -“Seductive Mirage”
1994 Wilcock -“Maelzel’s Chess Player - Sigmund Freud and the rhetoric of Deceit”
1995 Richard Webster” Why Freud was Wrong”, Articles 1995 in the Journal of Experimental Hypnosis, Counselling Psychologist, Counselling 5.96, etc.
PAVLOV - said that hypnosis is a form of classical conditioning - a conditioned response to suggestions given by the therapist. He used the words “damp- down the higher centres”, thus allowing the more primitive ones to take over. These are more susceptible to suggestion.
J.B.WATSON used this approach through conditioning to develop LEARNING THEORY. From this came BEHAVIORAL THERAPY.
JOSEPH WOLPE in 1958 amalgamated all this into treatment by DESENSITISATION in which the patient can be de-conditioned and re-conditioned.
1955: The Psychological Group of the BMA recommended that hypnosis training should be given to all medical students, to trainee psychiatrists, obstetricians and anaesthetists (BMJ 23.04.55). Recommendation not yet carried out.
1958: Parallel recommendation in USA.
1968: BSMDH formed - British Society of Medical and Dental Hypnosis - for medical and dental clinicians.
1970: incorporated into USA undergraduate medical school courses (D Ewin)
1978: British Society’ of Experimental and Clinical Hypnosis (BSECH) formed: a parallel society for clinical psychologists.
2000: BSMDH National Council approved training of all health professionals working as part of a medical team.
2007 BSMDH and BSECH amalgamated to become British Society of Clinical and Academic Hypnosis BSCAH.
HISTORY OF HYPNOSIS
GENERAL HISTORY Use of trance
FRANZ MESMER 1734 Lavoisier, Benjamin Franklin,
Dr. Guillotine, Mozart
ABBE JOSE DI FARIA 1800
JOHN ELLIOTSON 1817 Prof. medicine U.C.H stethoscope
JAMES ESDALE 1830s Anaesthetics in India
JAMES BRAID 1841 Manchester surgeon, coined the term “hypnosis”
A.A. LIEBAULT 1823 - 1904 Doctor in Nancy
PROF. BERNHEIM 1900 Nancy school of medicine
J.M.CHARCOT 1825-1893 Salpetriere school -only hysterics are susceptible to hypnosis.
HERBERT 1824 Described the unconscious
MAUDESLEY 1867 Concept of Unconscious established
BINET 1890 Unconscious not only in hysterics
WILLIAM JAMES 1870s Popularised concept of unconscious
CHARLES RICHET 1884 Personality, perception and ego.
JANET 1886 Dissociation - doctoral thesis
MYERS AND CHARCOT 1887 Dissociation - hysteria a malady of
Personal synthesis
SIGMUND FREUD 1856-1939 Unconscious in everyone, repressed
Infantile sexuality, abandoned hypnosis
PAVLOV 1849-1936 Hypnosis is a form of classical conditioning
J.B.WATSON 1878-1958 Learning theory, behavioural therapy
JOSEPH WOLPE 1958 Desensitisation therapy
BMA PSYCH GROUP 1955 Training should be given to students
BSMDH 1968
BSECH 1978
BSCAH 2007
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