Hypnosis, in some form or another, has been used for more than two hundred years. It began gaining credibility as a medical tool in the early decades of the last century as psychiatry and psychoanalysis began to show how the subconscious mind often rules daily life. Its usefulness was cemented when combat physicians reported using it during World War II for the wounded. As more doctors were able to document their experiences in the war, the American Medical Association certified the technique in 1958 as a legitimate treatment tool. Although few doctors employed it on a regular basis, the National Institutes of Health ruled in 1996 that hypnosis was an effective intervention for alleviating pain from cancer and other chronic conditions. In the present time, as more people accept that stress can exacerbate illness, the potential curative power of hypnosis is becoming more acceptable.
Brief History of Hypnosis
Few therapies in the history of medicine have enjoyed simultaneously such widespread acclaim and such universal condemnation as has hypnosis. To some extent these opposing attitudes still prevail (Hammond, 1990). However, recent years have witnessed advances in experimental and therapeutic hypnosis which have tended to establish hypnotherapy firmly as a scientific treatment method (Kappas, 2001).
Although trance and trance-like states have been used for centuries in many cultures, in the belief that there are benefits from using the mind to control body processes, there has been little interest or belief in that theory in recent Western culture (Hammond, 1990). Practitioners using techniques to induce a trance-like state were relegated to the stage and treated as charlatans. Although people who watched performances of hypnotic trance behavior on stage were entertained, a fear arose among the general population that the hypnotist was somehow able to control the subjects on stage by exerting his will over theirs, thus making them say or do things that were beyond their control (Hammond, 1990 Kappas, 2001).
Franz Anton Mesmer (1765) was an early practitioner of hypnosis, calling it magnetism, and believing that all living beings contained magnetic energy, and that this energy could be controlled by using the mind (Monte & Sollod, 2003). He first called his technique magnetism, later changing it to Mesmerism. He would place his subjects into trance by staring deeply into their eyes, and then directing their magnetic energy to cause changes in behavior or to promote healing. Hence, we have adopted the terms “mesmerize” and “animal magnetism” into our vernacular (Kappas, 2001; Monte & Sollod, 2003).
James Braid (1840) was an ophthalmologist who did not agree with the magnetism theory, but who believed that subjects were able to enter a trance state through suggestion, and he observed that many physiological changes occurred during this state (Hammond, 1990; Kappas, 2001). These changes resembled sleep state changes, like rapid eye movement and deep breathing, but the subjects were suggestible to verbal cues during this state in a way that they were not suggestible during sleep nor during wakefulness. He called his technique hypnosis , after the Greek Hypnos, the god of sleep (Hammond, 1990; Kappas, 2001).
Sigmund Freud, influenced by his mentor Jean-Martin Charcot, employed hypnosis on his patients whom he believed suffered from hysteria, or hysterical conversion syndromes. It was clear that people whose physical symptoms had an underlayment of emotional distress responded in a seemingly miraculous way to the effects of hypnosis (Monte & Sollod, 2003). It was also clear that the term “hysteria”, which was coined to describe the emotional symptoms in women that were believed to have been the result of a “wandering womb”, was also applicable to symptoms present in men who had suffered extreme emotional distress and were afflicted with physical ailments that could be attributed to no other cause (Hilgard, 1968; Monte & Sollod, 2003).
Both Freud and Charcot abandoned hypnosis for lack of skill in using it beyond the treatment of “hysteria” (Monte & Sollod, 2003). Others persisted in investigation such that the American Medical Association recognized it as a viable medical practice in 1958, and the National Institutes of Health funded grants for further study beginning in 1996 (Kappas, 2001; Harris, 2005).
Current Study Direction
During the past decade, with the aid of neuroimaging technology, notably functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the study of the brain during the hypnotic state is revealing that when hypnotized people act on hypnotist's suggestions, their brains really do process information differently (Rainville & Hofbauer, 2002; Derbyshire & Whalley, 2004; Harris, 2005; Raz & Fan, 2005). People who are hypnotized show less activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, which is active when people are trying to resolve conflicting information from differing sources(Raz & Fan, 2005). Another study showed that there was activation in the right fusiform gyrus in hypnotized people who were told that they could see gray-scale prints in color. That area of the brain did not show increased activity in non-hypnotized subjects who were given the same suggestion to imagine that gray-scale prints were in color (Raz & Kirsch, 2006).
