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A summary of the case description in "The February Man: Facilitating New Identity in Hypnotherapy" by Erickson and Rossi, Chapter 59 in Innovative Hypnotherapy, Volume Four of The Collected Papers of Milton H. Erickson on Hypnosis, edited by Ernest L. Rossi, Irvington Publishers, 1980. A footnote reads, "This case material is reproduced from Erickson and Rossi, Hypnotherapy: An Exploratory Casebook (Irvington, chapter 10, 1979)."
"There is much in this work that is beyond our own understanding. The use of indirect suggestions to integrate hypnotic and real-life memories to create a self-consistent internal reality is an art that does not entirely lend itself to rational analysis. We do try, however, fully realizing that we have fallen short and are in need of the reader's creativity to fill some of the gaps and to carry the work further."
At midterm of her first pregnancy the wife of a doctor who works at the same hospital as Erickson approaches him for psychiatric help, worried her troubled childhood will render her an unfit mother, wondering if hypnosis can reduce her anxiety or help her discover how to correct her deficiencies. At the end of the first appointment Erickson tells her "before this could be done, it would be necessary for her to relate at length all her anxieties, fears, and forebodings. In so doing she was to give as comprehensive a picture of their nature, variety, and development as possible. It was explained that the primary purpose of this report was to make certain [Erickson] appreciated as fully as possible her feelings and thoughts before any attempt was made to ascertain causes and remedies."
In the second interview the woman tearfully reports a variety of symptoms worsening: obsessive thinking and catastrophizing about how horrible a mother she'll be, depression, anorexia, insomnia, and vivid flashbacks of her own childhood memories. She asks Erickson if he thinks he can help her. He simply reassures her a plan will be worked out before the next session.
In the third interview Erickson spends five hours training her in hypnotic responsiveness. He regresses her to various ages and neutral memories, including their first interview, into which he "interpolates" a brief hypnotic episode that did not occur in the actual interview ("It just occurred to me that you could easily be a very good hypnotic subject, and I wonder if you would mind closing your eyes and sleeping hypnotically for a few moments, and then arousing and continuing from where I interrupted?"). He introduces the gentle squeezing of her wrist as a hypnotic cue for rapport: "It's an attention-attracting but otherwise meaningless cue". He explains to Rossi why: once he lost rapport with a regressed subject and spent a "wretched four and a half hours" trying to re-establish rapport.
When Erickson has established various regressions as a "general background for new, interpolated behavioral experiences" he rouses her "somnambulistically in this regressed state." Erickson defines somnambulistic trance as "a form of hypnotic behavior always significant of a deep trance state. In this condition subjects behave and respond as if they were wide awake and may even deceive observers with their seeming wakefulness." In her wide-awake four-year-old state, he begins to talk to her and identifies himself as a friend of her daddy's. After each episode of meeting Erickson while regressed, she is instructed to sleep hypnotically, then roused with the wrist cue for another meeting with him at a different age. Finally, she receives "extensive posthypnotic instructions to ensure a comprehensive amnesia for all trance experiences" and the session ends.
In subsequent sessions, "usually of several hours' duration," Erickson carefully interpolates himself into her regressed memories, offering perspective and "friendship, sympathy, interest, and objectivity, thereby giving him the opportunity to raise questions concerning how she might later evaluate a given experience." "The consistent and continual rejection she experienced from her mother presented many opportunities to reorganize her emotions and understanding." He offers therapeutic reframes of traumatic events (she will be able to remember her childhood grief over a broken china doll when she herself is a mother, and will be able to understand when her own daughter is sad), perspective (a teenage humiliation will one day be looked on as amusing), and weaves real happy memories in with the February Man episodes to insure integration.
Near the end of the work she receives a letter from her mother activating all her old fears and anxieties. Erickson asks her to describe her reactions after inducing a "blanket amnesia" for all their hypnotic work, and she sounds like she did before their work began. Then he regresses her to a week before she got the letter from her mother, removes the amnesia for the hypnotic work, and asks her to "recall fully all the many visits, talks, and discussions over the years she had had with [Erickson] as daddy's friend. As she recalled his many visits and their conversations on so many subjects, the suggestion was offered that she ought to consider the present minor worries against the total background." She is led to the period just after receiving the letter, expresses "some sensible views" and then Erickson asks her to speculate on how she might react "if she did not include in her thinking 'all she knew about her past.'" He encourages her to "really enlarge her reactions into exaggerated fears and anxieties by just 'not being comprehensive in her thinking,'" and to speculate as to what type of reactions she could develop if she were "not intelligent in her thinking." Her "speculative" statements resemble her pre-therapy anxieties, and her "actual" responses, calling on her insights from her many visits with the February Man are full of "corrective insights."
In the final session she receives training in analgesia (relief from pain) for the birth of her child. Asked if she wouldn't prefer anesthesia (numbing), she explains she wants to enjoy the experience of the baby passing through the birth canal as she experienced the pleasurable sensation of swallowing a whole cherry or ice cube as a child and felt it move down the esophagus. "Pain shouldn't have any part in having a baby. It's a wonderful thing, but everybody is taught to believe in pain." And seven months after giving birth, she, her husband, and baby visit Erickson, reporting a painless birth without anesthesia. She chatted with her husband and obstetrician during the delivery, mistook the expulsion of the placenta for a twin, laughed at her mistake, and accused the obstetrician of "cheating" by giving her a local anaesthetic when the suturing of the episiotomy felt a little numb.
When, two years later, she returned to Erickson for a tune-up for her upcoming second childbirth with hypnotic analgesia, he found during the three-hour trance work that "her adjustments were excellent in all regards."
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© 2002 Chuck Holton All rights reserved.