Hypnosis
History
Hypnosis has been used for thousands of years to treat various human conditions. Rituals induce the deep concentration of mind that we now recognize as a hallmark of hypnosis. In this state a suggestion is given and a condition improves.
Early practitioners realized they were doing something that worked but did not understand why. They developed theories based on their world view and limited information. Their understanding of hypnosis changed as belief systems and science changed. For better or worse, popular understandings of hypnosis lag because of the time it takes for information to flow from scientists to lay audiences.
The history of modern hypnosis has roots in Switzerland in 1770 with a Catholic priest named Father Gassner who began to practice faith healing. The prevailing understanding of mental illness during that time was based on a belief in witchcraft and demon possession.
Father Gassner had a great advantage in inducing hypnotic trance. His parishioners believed him to be God’s representative on earth. He enacted elaborate rituals in a dimmed cathedral, circling the supplicant with a diamond studded cross as he spoke quietly in Latin – the language of faith. Most of his subjects would enter a trance in as little as 7 seconds. Those who were more difficult to hypnotize would go instantly into hypnosis when he touched their heads with the cross. Grassner was the first to use a quiet, sleep like state for hypnosis.
Franz Anton Mesmer became curious about the stories of Father Gassner. Mesmer was a German who had studied philosophy and law. He was eventually granted a medical degree although it appears he didn’t actively practice medicine. After seeing Gassner perform cures, Mesmer began to form his own understanding of what was happening. Research was being done at the time on magnetic and electrical force. The popularity of these ideas may have influenced his theory. Mesmer decided that the body must have magnetic poles and that magnetic fluid must flow between them. He thought illness was caused by an interruption of this magnetic fluid and that it was restoring that flow that effected a cure. He also believed that only certain people that had “animal magnetism” were able to do that.
Mesmer became very popular. He used strange mechanisms, ethereal music and created a séance-like atmosphere all of which aided in inducing trance. He was able to perform many cures using the technique that became named after him, Mesmerism. However, the medical establishment at the time was the Viennese Medical Council and they could find no logical reason for the results he got. Perhaps out of jealousy, they exposed him as a fraud.
They were both right and wrong. His explanation was wrong and methods were unnecessary. In fact, his methods and those of Gassner are partly why hypnosis became surrounded by misunderstanding and myth. While there was a great deal of skepticism surrounding Mesmer, he was the first who was able to make a connection between treatment of the mind and improved physical health.
With the lack of scientific understanding and the pairing of hypnosis with strange performances like Mesmer’s, the technique was largely ignored by the medical field. In Europe it was relegated largely in popular culture to spiritualists and magicians who used it to entertain.
In the 1840’s an English doctor named James Braid began scientific studies of Mesmerism. He recognized the trance-like state and named the process hypnotism, from the Greek word for sleep. This has given rise to another myth about hypnosis which is the idea that it is a state of sleep or unconsciousness. It is neither.
In India in the 1800’s doctors began performing surgeries and amputations using hypnosis for anesthesia. The introduction of ether in 1849 brought a halt to the surgical use of hypnosis. In the Late 1800’s Jean-Martin Charcot, an eminent French neurologist, began to study hypnosis despite the prejudice against mesmerism. He got the idea that it may be a way to treat hysteria (an illness or symptom that appears to be physical but is entirely psychological. The modern term is somatization disorder).
In 1885 Sigmund Freud went to study with Charcot. Freud also used hypnosis as he worked with his mentor Josef Breuer. Breuer discovered that hypnotized patients were able say what they were thinking about on a deep, subconscious level. Freud and Breuer realized that when traumatic memories were brought to light, symptoms disappeared. Breuer used hypnosis to access these memories to great effect in a process called hypno-analysis. Freud used hypnosis but was apparently not very good at it. He abandoned the practice in favor of the development of psychoanalysis.
Transformation to talking therapy
Sigmund Freud recognized that many people could not be hypnotized, or were not suggestible enough to benefit from hypnosis, so he creating talking therapy in hopes that more people could be successfully treated. He designed his new talking therapy which we now call “psychotherapy” to be similar to hypnosis.
A patient sits with an authority figure who takes many steps to create an environment in which the patient feels safe and then facilitates the patient to become disinhibited enough to reveal their innermost thoughts and feelings. This will hopefully provide the therapist with a clue about how to facilitate the patient to an introspective understanding of themselves. This understanding will then empower the patient to change the way they are feeling and behaving.
In reality, a suggestible patient is being manipulated in a positive way by a trusted authority figure to do behavior that the patient really wanted to do in the first place but was inhibited for a psychological reason. Behaviors that humans typically want to do are those that are genetically programmed and species-specific. For humans, and in the context of behaviors that are causing problems, this usually means all kinds of social behaviors and especially behaviors dealing with intimacy.
The human brain responds with chemical messaging to sensory inputs that elicit pre-programmed activity. However, humans are able to stop themselves and not do this pre-programmed activity. Humans can feel a sense of wanting to do one thing but have a thought that they should do another thing. This creates enormous opportunities for conflict. Psychotherapy is an attempt to resolve this conflict.
Human social behavior evolved in small groups of hunter-gathers on the plains of Africa but recently has had to adapt to life in large agrarian societies. Our environment has changed to fast. Evolution has had a hard time keeping up. Thinking outside of it’s programming has resulted in the human brain being able to adapt more quickly but has also resulted in more frequent malfunction.
In order to think outside of it’s programming, the human brain developed a structure that is unique in the animal kingdom. It is called the prefrontal cortex. This structure has enabled communication with complex language and reasoned or critical thinking. We are happiest and healthiest when we are doing behavior that we are programmed to do so intentionally not doing that can make us feel bad. This bad feeling can lead to bad actions and impaired relationships and is what we call psychopathology. This is the kind of thing that psychotherapy tries to fix.
Hypnosis and psychotherapy are designed to weaken our defenses in the presence of a trusted ingroup authority figure and to then direct us to do the group strengthening behavior that our programming already predisposed us to want to do.
Neuroscience
The actual brain mechanisms of hypnosis and of psychotherapy are now being realized due to the advent of instruments for visualizing brain function. Functional magnetic resonance images (fMRI) and positron emission tomographic (PET) images are transforming our understanding of brain function.
You can now do psychotherapy with a patient or give medicine to a patient and see on a functional brain image changes that correlate with behavioral and emotional changes. For example, as a patient recovers from depression you can see the recovery of poorly functional prefrontal areas in the brain. In these images blue represents low sugar uptake which indicates low brain function and yellow represents high sugar uptake.
One area that has received the most research so far is pain. You can do hypnotic pain reduction, placebo pain reduction, acupuncture pain reduction, or opioid pain reduction and view what is happening in the brain in a real time functional image. It turns out that all these remedies do the same thing to the brain. They activate brain centers that produce endogenous opioids as well as several other pain related neural peptides.
If we follow the big picture main point of what the current neuroscience is telling us then we must conclude that there are conditions which respond to the manipulation of brain chemicals. These are conditions in which the brain is attempting to compensate for an insult such as pain, nausea, insomnia, depression, anxiety, OCD, Parkinson’s disease, and perhaps some immune related conditions.
Conditions that will not respond to manipulation of compensatory brain mechanisms are ones that are due to an infectious agent, malignant cells, structural injury, or developmental malformation. It is important when working with the placebo effect that we maintain a proper understanding of what can and cannot be accomplished.
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