Hypnosis Symptoms as an Integral Part of Hypnotherapy

In dealing with any type of hypnosis subject clinically there is a most important consideration that should be kept constantly in mind. This is that the patient’s needs as a human personality should be an ever-present question for the hypnotist to ensure recognition at each manifestation. Merely to make a correct diagnosis of the illness and to know the correct method of treatment is not enough. Fully as important is that the patient be receptive of the therapy and cooperative in regard to it. Without the patient’s full cooperativeness therapeutic results are delayed, distorted, limited, or even prevented.

Too often the therapist regards patients as necessarily logical, understanding, in full possession of their faculties—in brief, as reasonable and informed human beings. Yet it is a matter of common knowledge often overlooked, disregarded, or rejected that hypnotic subjects can be silly, forgetful, absurd, unreasonable, illogical, incapable of acting with common sense, and very often governed and directed in their behavior by emotions and by unknown, unrecognizable, and perhaps undiscoverable unconscious needs and forces which are far from reasonable, logical, or sensible. To attempt therapy upon a patient only apparently sensible, reasonable, and intelligent when that patient may actually be governed by unconscious forces and emotions neither overtly shown nor even known, to overlook the unconscious mind for possible significant information, can lead easily to failure or to unsatisfactory results. Nor should seemingly intelligent, rational, and cooperative behavior ever be allowed to mislead the therapist into an oversight of the fact that the patient is still human and hence easily the victim of fears and foibles, of all those unknown experiential learnings that have been relegated to his unconscious mind and that he may never become aware of or ever show just what the self may be like under the outward placid surface. Nor should therapists have so little regard for their patients that they fail to make allowance for human weaknesses and irrationality.

Too often it is not the strengths of the person that are vital in the therapeutic situation. Rather, the dominant forces that control the entire situation may derive from weaknesses, illogical behavior, unreasonableness, and obviously false and misleading attitudes of various sorts. Therapists wishing to help their patients should never scorn, condemn, or reject any part of a patient’s conduct simply because it is obstructive, unreasonable, or even irrational. The patient’s behavior is a part of the problem brought into the office; it constitutes the personal environment within which the therapy must take effect; it may constitute the dominant force in the total patient-doctor relationship. Since whatever patients bring into the office is in some way both a part of them and a part of their problem, the patient should be viewed with a sympathetic eye appraising the totality which confronts the therapist. In so doing therapists should not limit themselves to an appraisal of what is good and reasonable as offering possible foundations for therapeutic procedures. Sometimes, in fact, many more times than is realized—hypnosis therapy can be firmly established on a sound basis only by the utilization of silly, absurd, irrational, and contradictory manifestations. One’s professional dignity is not involved, but one’s professional competence is.