HYPNOSIS
Background
Hypnosis is absolutely unique to the person experiencing it. Just as pain is unique to the person experiencing it, one person will feel a mild annoyance as a pin is scratched across the back of their hand, while another will feel severe pain, so the state of hypnosis is unique to the person hypnotised.
It is therefore almost impossible to define this subject with any degree of accuracy. Many have tried, and all have come up with differing definitions. There are some indications that would seem to point to the fact that someone is experiencing this state, but again they are not hard and fast rules nor are they absolutely essential. We will, during this workshop, be encouraging you to define hypnosis for yourself, using your personal experience of the state and of inducing the state within yourself. Therefore hypnosis is entirely experiential and personal.
Hypnosis is a natural enjoyable state of consciousness that we all experience many times during the day. From sitting idly at a desk and daydreaming, to the mental focussing required to study in a noisy environment, all of these are variations of the state that is known as Hypnosis. In particular that twilight time, when you are either just drifting into or awakening from sleep, when you can process vivid or even contemplate re-entering a dream to continue it, these are all states of hypnosis.
It is, therefore, disappointing that the myths and misconceptions about
the subject have continued for so long. Modern hypnosis has been used beneficially for a round the last two hundred years, and is rapidly growing in acceptance as a significant tool in effecting positive change. While hypnosis has been, and is still being used extensively by many cultures through their medical practitioners, healers and priests, its modern roots are usually attributed to Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815)
Mesmer, who gave his name to mesmerism, was a Viennese physician
who believed that the human body has a magnetic polarity. A theory that is now becoming accepted again, and is used in polarity therapy. He termed his force, animal magnetism, and proposed that it was evident in everyone to differing degrees, with himself having an abundance of it that he could transfer to others.
Mesmer believed that by channelling this force through to others he could relieve
his patients of many long-standing conditions including paralysis and nervous conditions.
He was a show man with an enormous ego and would seat his patients around a huge tub of iron filings, directing his magnetic fluid to a long wand which he would wave at his subjects, sometimes laying his staff aside and directing the fluid with his eyes. He had some success in relieving symptoms, but it is almost certain that he stumbled across hypnotism and was accessing the belief systems of his patients, building a trust and a rapport that may have been one of the earliest forms of psychotherapy.
Mesmer enjoyed considerable popularity and success, before an investigation by the French government led him to being pronounced as a fraud. He retired to Switzerland where he died in 1815.
Hypnosis history has seen periods of intense interest and advancement,
followed by lulls and occasionally the persecution of its proponents. Following Mesmers death the next significant interest was displayed by British surgeon John Elliotson, the inventor of the stethoscope . Elliotson developed techniques for using mesmerism to induce anaesthesia and performed many operations with no other form of pain control. However, he too was persecuted by the conventional medical establishment and forced to resign his post as head of staff at the University of London Hospital.
Yet another British surgeon, James Esdaile, drew upon techniques while
working in India in the 1840s. Having witnessed mesmeric anaesthesia in England he decided to use it upon his return to India and is reported to have performed over 3000 surgical procedures, including the removal of an eye, using hypnosis as the sole pain-killing agent. Esdaile took hours sometimes to induce the state of trance in his subjects, and frequently enabled his patients to achieve incredible deep states that were often mistaken for signs of unconsciousness. His name is given to The Esdaile State which indicates this deep phenomena.
Esdaile too was persecuted by the medical authorities, with charges of sacrilege laid against him for preventing people feeling pain that God had intended them to feel. However, the interest in this fascinating subject was not to be denied, and another British physician, James Braid continued investigating. Braid is credited with the invention of the word Hypnosis, derived from the Greek verb Hypnos to sleep.
Braid rejected the waving limbs and showmanship of Mesmerism,
preferring instead to use eye fixation and verbal suggestion. As his knowledge and interest in the subject grew and his understanding of hypnosis being different
from sleep developed he tried to change his name for hypnosis but it was, by this time, too late, and hypnosis has stuck to this day.
There was another apparent lull in the interest of hypnosis until 1880 when
a French physician named Bernheim teamed with Liebault and set up a practice in Nancy, devoting themselves to hypnosis. Bernheim developed Braids verbal suggestion methods of inducing hypnosis, and their work was so successful that people travelled the world to learn from them, including Sigmund Freud , the developer of psychoanalysis.
At the turn of the 19th- 20th century, interest in hypnosis hit another lull,
principally due to the rejection of it by Freud. There are many reasons for this rejection, and most can be traced to his inadequacy as a hypnotist. He believed that a deep trance was necessary for effective work, and he could only manage to induce this with a few subjects. Concurrently a medical colleague, Bruer, was achieving remarkable success with hypnosis while Freud was not and he built a growing resentment, and finally one of his lady clients threw her arms around him just as a colleague entered the room and caused him deep embarrassment. Now we would attribute that phenomena to transference, but Freud rejected hypnosis, and signalled the start of another period of low interest and development.
It was not until shortly after World War II that hypnosis started to
become popular again in the clinical field, when it began to be used to treat neuroses and battle related disorders and trauma. Since that time, it has gained a growing recognition and acceptance by much of the medical fraternity, some of whom have tried to second it for themselves. Notably the British Medical and Dental Association, who maintain that only medical practitioners should be allowed to use this powerful enhancing tool.
The use of hypnosis and our knowledge about it and related issues has
grown incredibly over the last 20 years, notably research into the power of language and belief systems and the pioneering work of John Grinder and Richard Bandler who formulated Neuro-Linguistic Programming from the work of the great Milton H. Erickson the father of modern day hypnosis (5th December 1901 25th March 1980)
