Therapeutic Trances

The Cooperation Principle in Ericksonian Hypnotherapy

Stephen Gilligan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429000744
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Therapeutic Trances is a manifesto of the fundamental principles and techniques of Ericksonian hypnotherapy. This innovative volume lays out the principles and practice of developing relationships with patients and creating a hypnotic environment in which true healing can take place. The book offers therapists specific questions to ask and practical ideas to pursue, thereby illustrating how therapists may cooperate with clients to translate problems into solutions. Stephen Gilligan synthesizes the approaches of Erickson, Bandler & Grinder, and Bateson to bring a new perspective to the field.

Chapter 1
The Ericksonian Approach to Hypnosis

Hypnosis suggests many things: power, magical cures, mystery, loss of control, and so forth. Unfortunately, many of these pervasive notions are misleading. This chapter distinguishes the Ericksonian approach from some of these popular misunderstandings. The first section overviews different conceptualizations of the hypnotic relationship: the authoritarian approach emphasizing the hypnotist; the standardized approach emphasizing the subject; and the cooperation approach emphasizing the relationship between hypnotist and subject. The second section outlines eight further ideas underlying the Ericksonian approach: (1) Each person is unique; (2) hypnosis is a process of communicating ideas; (3) each person has generative resources; (4) trance potentiates resources; (5) trance is naturalistic; (6) transformational change is course-corrective rather than error-corrective; (7) a person’s uniqueness can be appreciated on many levels; and (8) the unconscious can operate autonomously and generatively.

The Hypnotic Relationship

Traditionally, hypnosis is seen as a social interaction between two people enacting roles of hypnotist and subject. This interaction is intended to produce in the subject a special “trance” state. In this state, the subject’s behavior and experience are presumably different from that characterizing his or her regular waking state.

Although most hypnotic practitioners would concur with this general description, they disagree sharply about the specific nature of the hypnotic relationship. To clarify some of these differences, three approaches can be distinguished: the authoritarian approach, the standardized approach, and the cooperation approach.

The Authoritarian Approach

The extreme version of this approach involves some “powerful” individual (the hypnotist) with “special” mental abilities (e.g., the “hypnotic eye,” a “strong will”) who causes another individual (the subject) to enter a relatively passive state wherein he or she is “susceptible” to the hypnotist’s “suggestions.” These suggestions can “force” subjects to perform various behaviors (from barking like a dog to stopping a smoking habit) that they ordinarily would not be willing or able to do. Notions of “mind over matter,” “loss of control,” “implanting suggestions,” and “susceptibility” abound within this viewpoint, themselves in part “implanted” by books, movies, and folklore. These conceptions are often held openly by lay persons, but many therapists who use hypnosis also believe them implicitly.

The authoritarian approach is especially exploited in the stage hypnosis situation. Here subjects are usually individuals who attend a night club act with a group of friends. They typically volunteer to climb up on the stage where the hypnotist first administers a brief (5–10 minutes) flurry of inductional communications, then issues authoritative commands directing the subjects to enact unusual and often amusing behaviors, such as losing a shoe, acting like an animal, or beginning a striptease act. Upon returning to their tables following the hypnosis, subjects are showered with the good-natured adulations of jubilant and intrigued friends. In this sense, stage hypnosis serves the same function as a bottle of alcohol: normally inhibited persons can act in a “wild and crazy” fashion, then attribute responsibility for such behavior to someone (the hypnotist) or something (the trance state) other than themselves.

This direct and authoritarian approach is also used by many clinical hypnotists, albeit in a less spectacular fashion. Although clinicians operate in a different situational context and have different intents (e.g., to help people change), they often implicitly conceive of the hypnotic process as one in which they assume control over (i.e., hypnotize) clients’ mental processes, then order them to change undesirable behavioral patterns (e.g., smoking, overeating).

Although adherents to the authoritarian approach are often well-intentioned, they promote misleading ideas about hypnosis. For example, the unconscious is generally construed to be something that is not the individual; it is considered as some “blank state” or “fertile ground” in which suggestions may be “written in” or “planted.” These suggestions allegedly exert a powerful control over subjects’ behavior, sometimes forcing them to act in ways inconsistent with their conscious volition or normal behavioral habits. Perhaps the most unfortunate implication is that the hypnotist holds power over the subject. As we will see in later chapters, this highly erroneous belief regarding loss of control strongly discourages many individuals from fully participating in the hypnotic process.

The authoritarian conceptions derive partly from the writings of historical figures such as Mesmer, Bernheim, Charcot, and Freud. Although these men claimed different theoretical positions (see Ellenberger, 1970, for detailed comparisons), they all emphasized hypnosis in terms of an asymmetrical relationship in which the hypnotist (usually a charismatic male) held sway over a generally passive subject (usually a woman). For example, consider Ellenberger’s (1970) description of Charcot, one of the most eminent scientists of the late 19th century:

In the eyes of the public, Charcot was the man who had explored the abysses of the human mind, hence his nickname, “Napoleon of Neuroses.” He had come to be identified with the discovery of hysteria, hypnotism, dual personality, catalepsy, and somnambulism. Strange things were said about his hold on the Salpetriere’s hysterical young women and about happenings there. Jules Clareties relates that during a patient’s ball at the Salpetriere, a gong was inadvertently sounded, whereupon many hysterical women instantaneously fell into catalepsy and kept the plastic poses in which they found themselves when the gong was sounded. (p. 95)

By focusing on the power of the hypnotist, the authoritarian approach does not take into account the uniqueness of each subject in terms of his or her learnings, beliefs, capabilities, and so forth, nor does it recognize the client’s ability to choose how (or whether) to participate in the hypnotic events. Thus, as we will see, this approach has limited value for developing lasting therapeutic changes.

The limiting conceptions of the authoritarian approach have lingered so long partly because Freud’s categorical rejection of hypnosis around the turn of the century all but eliminated serious scientific examination of the topic for many years. As Cheek and LeCron (1968) have commented:

In the 1890’s when Freud first began to practice, he worked with a general practitioner named Breuer, one of the best medical hypnotists of that time. Freud knew little about hypnosis, was a poor operator, and had the mistaken idea that a deep trance was necessary for good results. Only about one in ten of his patients would enter a deep trance and Freud found this frustrating. Breuer was having far better results. There was much rivalry between them and Freud could not tolerate the situation. He therefore sought other methods, gave up hypnosis, and developed free association and dream interpretation.

Although Freud’s contributions to our knowledge of the mind and of psychotherapy are great, his abandoning hypnosis was harmful, for he blocked hypnotherapy for nearly fifty years. Today many psychiatrists and most analysts have minimal interest in hypnosis. They know nothing about it and believe it worthless because Freud first used it and then gave it up. Many of them firmly believe that hypno-therapy is only a matter of suggesting away symptoms, as Bernheim used it. Hence it is often claimed that hypnotherapy has only temporary results, although Bernheim and other physicians of that day certainly proved this idea false. (p. 18)

Fortunately, this model of hypnosis in terms of authoritarian and direct suggestions is slowly being rejected. This is largely due to what might be called the standardized approach.

The Standardized Approach

This approach is especially dominant among experimental psychologists. Instead of focusing on the power of the hypnotist, this view emphasizes the subject as the major unit of study, generally assuming hypnotic responsiveness to be some durable trait within the subject. As such, the hypnotist can employ a standardized set of communications that remain unchanged across different subjects. In other words, the subject is either hypnotizable or he or she is not; the hypnotist’s behavior really does not matter too much.

The most influential advocates of the standardized approach have been academicians seeking to legitimize hypnosis by subjecting it to the rigorous tests of experimental psychology (e.g., Hilgard, 1965; Hull, 1933). Their efforts are certainly to be commended, as they rescued hypnosis from its “Mesmer metaphor” role (i.e., the authoritarian conceptions), thereby reestablishing its respectability in the scientific community. However, in strictly adhering to the tacit assumption in experimental psychology that the fundamental unit of study is the individual, the approach minimized the relative importance of contextual variables (e.g., the hypnotist-subject relationship). Since the phenomenon of interest was the subject’s behavior, efforts were taken to experimentally control all other factors. For example, much work was devoted to developing standardized induction procedures that could be played on records or tapes, thereby completely eliminating the need for an operator (who might bias the experimental tests). Of course, this in itself is not objectionable; in fact, if by such a procedure the majority of subjects could experience a trance state, it would be quite laudable.

However, it soon became apparent that only a portion of subjects are hypnotically responsive to standardized inductions. Specifically, about 15% are highly susceptible, 65% are moderately susceptible, and 20% are not susceptible at all (see Hilgard, 1965). These individual differences, coupled with the finding that a given subject’s responsiveness to the standardized test remains generally stable over time (see, e.g., Hilgard, 1965), led many experimentalists (Hilgard, 1965; Shor, Orne, & O’Connell, 1966) to consider hypnotizability a stable trait. Some people have it; some do not. As Hilgard (1965) remarked:

Whenever a human ability is subjected to measurement the question arises as to how stable that ability is, how enduring it is through time. The historical studies of the constancy of the IQ are addressed to this problem, and we face the same kind of problem concerning the stability of the ability to enter hypnosis …. The evidence … shows that under standard conditions [italics added] hypnotic susceptibility is a quite dependable trait …. (p. 69)

In this sense, the standardized approach attributes both success and failure in the hypnotic encounter to the subject. The hypnotist is not that important.

There are some major problems with this approach. First, it assumes that a standar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction to the Classic Edition
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 The Ericksonian Approach to Hypnosis
• 2 The Experience of Trance
• 3 The General Approach of the Ericksonian Hypnotherapist
• 4 Cooperation Strategies
• 5 Creating a Context for Therapeutic Trance
• 6 Associational Strategies for Developing Therapeutic Trance
• 7 Depotentiating Conscious Processes: Confusion
• 8 Balancing Associational and Dissociational Strategies: Practical Issues Regarding Therapeutic Inductions
• Epilogue
• References
• Index