Describa las características de esta formación, en cuanto a quiénes recibieron esta formación, su

As every well-experienced psychotherapist knows, highly important and most extensive changes in a person's adjustments in life can be effected, even after failure of as much as seven years of rigid "orthodox" or "classical" psychoan- alytical therapy six hours a week. There is no way of proving that a short period of psychotherapy employing hypnosis following prolonged psychoanalytic ther- apy did cause therapeutic result. Instead one can prove only that the previous seven years of psychotherapy had not yet effected the desired result. The only thing possible of proof is the lime relationship. But long-continued psychiatric experience has disclosed many times that hypnotic psychotherapy has enabled psychotherapeutic results otherwise not achievable until hypnosis was employed. This author knows of major surgery, including cholecystectomy, performed on patients in the somnambulistic state without any medication preoperalively or during the operation; and these patients made excellent and "uneventful" recoveries. While the author knows that this does not prove that an anaesthesia of the body tissues existed during the operation, he also does not know of any such operations done by choice on a patient who was in the ordinary waking state, nor does he know of any surgeons willing to do such surgery on a patient who is in the ordinary waking state, even though there are many physicians and dentists who willingly and successfully substitute hypnosis for drugs, sometimes in part, sometimes entirely, and with complete success

In brief the vaiidity of hypnotic trance slates and hypnotic manifestation i not a matter of what the critics or questioners do not understand or want to understand in terms of their own choosing. The validity of hypnotic phenomena lies within the phenomena themselves, and is not to be measured by standards applicable to another category of phenomena. While both water and iron can be measured by a common standard of specific gravity, the floating of iron upon water depends upon the shape of the iron, and the shape cannot be given in terms of specific gravity, nor does it alter the specific gravity of either the water or the iron. Yet the shape relationships can keep iron from sinking in water, and the standards of measurement are of another type than those for measuring specific gravity. Science will ever be plagued by those who insist upon under- standing that which they do not understand in terms of which they think they do understand.

72 Nature of Hypnosis & Suggestion of waking state realities is not questioned by this author. He questions only what is the nature and character of that category of experimental behavior. He knows that dreams during sleep can be experienced as actualities which do not include the actuality of being sound asleep in bed but, instead, of socializing, of flying

d plane, or a myriad of other experiences that may be most pleasing or actually

evocative of states of extreme terror. The author also has full respect for the hallucinatory experiences of mentally ill patients despite the absence of any discoverable physical basis. The author recalls his startling experience of dealing with a patient, diagnosed as having developed a sudden, inexplicable, acute slate of catatonic schizophrenia, tell him with utter bitterness that she smelled 'foul, putrid, rotting fish smells" and that people more than 20 miles away were "cursing" her and calling her "vile, despicable names." He was even more startled when she asked him to sit on her left side and secured, in response to his detailed inquiries, the explanation that she could "smell good smells" only in her left nostril and "hear good voices" only in her left ear. The author tentatively postulated a tumor in the olfactory area of the temporal lobe of the brain. The patient's sudden death and the autopsy that followed confirming the existence of a carcinomatous growth in the left temporal lobe served only to confirm that there was a basis in actuality for the patient's disturbed mental state and sudden death. But there was no explanation of her complaints of olfactory and auditory hallucinations, nor of her ability to identify odors correctly with her left nostril—but not at all with her right nostril when an eye dropper con- taining an aromatic fluid was carefully inserted. Nor did the autopsy findings explain why the patient would scream imprecations at the author accusing him of vile language when he spoke to her from the right, but would converse agreeably if complain ing ly when he spoke to her from the left.

Dreams, too, have long been recognized as valid, subjective experiential phenomena for which many theoretical explanations have been offered and sometimes even forcibly thrust upon those attempting to achieve an understand- ing of them. The author carefully recorded a dream of his in the early 1930s. In that dream he found himself to be an adult, and he had the valid knowledge lhat he was a psychiatrist at the Worcester State Hospital in Worcester, Mas- achusetts and that he had a limp caused by anterior poliomyelitis. He was standing on the north side of a country road in Wisconsin, watching a small barefooted boy climbing up and down a freshly made cut through a hillside where a new road was being graded. He watched the boy with interest; he knew that he could see the boy but that the boy could not see him; he was pleased with the boy's interest in the tree roots that had been cut in the grading of the hillside as a part of the grading of the road; he was pleased that the boy was interested in trying to determine which of the roots belonged to the white oak tree and which belonged to the chokecherry tree. The boy doubted that any of the roots belonged to the hazelnut bush which was east of the oak tree. The author knew all the thoughts and feelings of that little barefoot boy and approved of all of them. He was amused by the thought that the little boy had no realization that he would grow up and be a psychiatrist at the Worcester State Hospital.

Further Experiments 73

Subsequently the author drove by automobile from Massachusetts lo Wiscon- tn and sought out through the country highway department the year, location, jnd employees involved in grading various country roads. By this means he discovered that a road running east and west had been graded when he was eight years old, that a hillside had been cut through by the grading, that several of the workmen employed recalled that the ""pesty Erickson kid always getting in the way and asking questions" had been present at the time of the grading, and that just behind a barbed wire fence, (not included in the dream), at the top of the cul in the hillside, were from east to west, a hazelnut bush, a white oak tree, and a chokecherry tree, the latter two at least 50 years old. Yet the author has only his dream memories, those obtained by his investigation in the 1930s, and the statements from the workmen. Comparable accounts from many other persons indicate that the author's experience is far from unique and that com- parable somnambulistic hypnotic trance-state experiences are of a similar order. For example, a national athletic champion recalls clearly having met the author in a t.a u U social situation in a hotel more than 1,500 mites from Phoenix and, with amusement, describes the "probable appearance" of the kind of an office the author was "likely to have." The athlete is certain he was never in that iffice, does not believe that he ever developed a somnambulistic trance in that office, nor that he ever sought hypnotic aid because of difficulties he was ex- periencing in his particular athietic area. Yet the author's schedule book and his record files disclose that the national champion had sought hypnotic aid in overcoming certain difficulties in his participation in athletic endeavors and that a somnambulistic trance had been employed to correct his problem. This fact is included in his income tax return of that year, but so far as his subsequent waking states of awareness are concerned, he had merely met the author cas- ually, far from Phoenix and only on a casual basis. This is not an uncommon experience so far as somnambulistic patients and subjects are concerned.