Hypnosis

by Leon Singer, CH

"Individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being and this is not a confused state but the clearest, the surest of the surest utterly beyond words" - Tennyson's memoirs describing his impressions during self-hypnosis.

Freud wrote that in 1889, while watching Bernheim use hypnosis in treating patients he received "the profoundest impression of the possibility that there could be powerful mental processes which nevertheless remain hidden from the consciousness of men."

Today it seems most of the evidence indicates that the state of mind we call hypnosis is as normal as the state of mind we call being awake or sleep.

The so-called "hypnotist" is merely a teacher showing us how to hypnotize ourselves. All hypnosis is self-hypnosis. Nothing passes between the hypnotist and the "student" except words. The result (hypnosis) or lack of it is a complex function of the student's interpretation of those words, his own abilities and his reactions to the teacher (hypnotist).

We may be more or less hypnotized as we may be more or less awake or asleep. During any 24 hour period we normally cycle into and out of hypnosis in varying degree depending on myriad interacting factors.

Consider the impact and acceptance of words spoken by a parent, priest, rabbi, doctor, teacher, or friend. Words and ideas originating from sources endowed with our faith and trust have potent force. Also of interest is the uncritical way we accept ideas and our behavior when we are a part of the group, a demonstration or a mob.

Words and ideas originate also within ourselves. Athletes know if they believe they can win they stand a much better chance of so doing - all other factors being equal.

Since current estimates are that only 30% of the people who visit the general practitioner's office have physical illness of know organic etiology, a part of the other 70% most probably are suffering from psychosomatic ailments. These people during their normal cycle have effectively created very real symptoms as a response to their current or past emotional problems. Victims of psychosomatic ailments were and are made well by the idol, medicine man, witch doctor, rabbi, priest, king's touch, Mesmer's baquet, faith healing, acupuncture and others.

A psychosomatic illness is just as real as an organic illness to the person so afflicted and no amount of surgery or  chemical therapy, no matter how skillful will separate the person from the problem. Unless, possibly, the surgeon with his best bedside manner pronounces a complete cure after running his sheathed scalpel over the afflicted area. or the patient be given a placebo, ostensibly the precise drug that never fails in this case.

With hypnosis it is relatively easy to remove most of these symptoms. They frequently reappear or appear in some other form elsewhere in the body unless some more elaborate psychotherapy is also used. A surgeon can remove a pathology but unless etiological factors have been corrected we will soon see a new pathogen elsewhere in the body.

Perhaps the greatest benefit we will achieve by continuing research in this field is the awareness that we must look at the whole person and not merely his cells through the microscope.

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