DRUG-ASSISTED HYPNOSIS
The Uses And Abuses Of Hypnosis – W A H Stevenson
“Read something fun,” she said. “It’ll be fun,” she said. “It won’t take you long and you haven’t reviewed a pamphlet yet.”
‘Okay,’ I thought, yeah, why not? It’ll be nice to read something that takes less than several weeks of hard-fought concentration; get it read in under an hour and smash out a review. And these pamphlets are Literally Hilarious with all their nonsense and seriousness, and their total lack of credibility.
So I picked up the first pamphlet I saw in our unread stash and it’s got a brilliant title, The Uses And Abuses Of Hypnosis, from 1959. That’s clearly going to be silly and fun to review.
Except, it wasn’t. It was dull to read and the claims were boring, even if they were outdated and nonsense. They just weren’t the fun kind of nonsense that is found in the pamphlets that Amy gets to review. There’s no hair full of bees here, or even a hint of carotid artery squeezing.
This pamphlet helpfully states that it is part of the Proceedings Of The Dental And Medical Society For The Study Of Hypnosis, and is essentially the script for a talk given by Stevenson at the Royal Society of Medicine in London.
Stevenson has an impressive set of letters after his name and is both a psychotherapist at St Bartholomew’s Hospital and Hon Research Consultant Psychiatrist at St Ebba’s Hospital in Epsom. I should have immediately realised that this was not going to be full of the fun hypnosis myths that we like to talk about, but, at seven-and-a-half pages, at least it wouldn’t take me long to read – and there’s only so much writing that will be possible as a result.
Stevenson is a statist and happily talks about light and deep trances; but this isn’t a theory piece, it’s all about therapeutic application. Apparently direct suggestions for symptom removal were very popular during the First World War, but Stevenson warns that such a practice can lead to suicides and “depressive psychosis”. He raises the issue that symptoms may have uses and haphazard removal could lead to tragedy. Wait, what?
I was surprised to find abreaction described as a therapeutic technique rather than an unfortunate side effect; clearly the therapy system that he wielded was one based on regression and emotional outpouring. Indeed, he compared hypnotic methods to drugs for achieving this, concluding that hypnosis was better because the patient doesn’t thrash around so much, but that a hybrid approach was easier to use than hypnosis alone.
He warns that this should only be undertaken by experienced psychiatrists as “in unskilled hands it is possible to precipitate an acute psychosis, for instance, by by-passing the ‘Censor’ and dragging up material which the personality is not yet mature enough to tolerate.” Phew, what dangers await those who learn hypnotherapy on a week-long course! According to Stevenson, there should be tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people suffering psychosis as a direct result of novice hypnotherapists. (Specifically hypnoanalysis-hypnotherapists, admittedly, but there are still many of those even if this technique has already had its heyday.)
He cautions against speed, both in treating symptoms as well as when it comes to the induction, making the case that This Stuff Is Dangerous And Is Not To Be Meddled With.
All in all, it wasn’t much fun to read and, aside from the historical insight into psychiatrists throwing drugs into patients to cause them a supposedly therapeutic crisis, there isn’t much here of particular interest.
On that note, however, the complete abandon shown when it comes to issuing licensed drugs makes me wonder why any government ever bothered to make street drugs illegal – I know, I know, there’s a complete difference between a mate with a few party aids and the implicit authority of a government-backed drug dealer. Still, I’d definitely like some of what Stevenson was on.
