At the second appointment the patient readily developed a deep trance and at once was instructed to recall completely and in chronological order the events of the previous session. She was asked to review them in her mind silently, then to recount them aloud slowly and thoughtfully but without any elaboration.
Such silent review of a hypnotically repressed experience is a necessary preparation. It ensures completeness of the final recall. It avoids uneven emphasis on separate elements in the recollection and distorted emphasis which the subject subsequently would feel the need of defending. It permits an initial recall in silence without any feeling that in remembering facts the subject is also betraying them to someone else. This facilitates the reassembling of painful elements in the subject's memories. Finally, when the subject is asked to tell aloud that which has just been thought through in silence, it becomes a recounting of mere thoughts and memories, rather than the more painful recounting of actual events. This also helps to lessen the emotional barriers against communicating with the hypnotist.
As the patient completed this task, her attention again was drawn to the fact that her mother had lectured her repeatedly. Then she was asked,
"How old were you when your mother died?" She replied, "When I was thirteen." Immediately the comment was made with quiet emphasis,
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"Had your mother lived longer, she would have talked to you many more times to give you advice; but since she died when you were only thirteen she could not complete that task, and so it became your task to complete it without her help."
Without giving the patient any opportunity either to accept this comment or to reject it, or indeed to react to it in any way, she quickly Was switched to something else by asking her to give an account of the events which had occurred immediately after she had awakened from her first trance. As she completed the account, her attention was drawn to the repetitive character of her mother's lectures, and the same careful comment was made on the unfinished character of her mother's work.
It will be recalled that on the first day of hypnotic work the patient was brought back to an early period in her childhood, and in this pseudoregression, she was asked to give an account of the sexual instructions her mother had given her. Then through a series of intermedi-ate transitional stintermedi-ates she was wakened, and in her waking stintermedi-ate she was asked to give an account of the same instructions, but with an amnesia for the fact that she had already told any of this to the hypnotist. In the second hypnotic treatment up to this point the patient was promptly hypnotized, and the posthypnotic amnesia for the first hypnotic experi-ence was lifted so that she could recall all of the events of her first trance.
Then she was asked to review the material which she had discussed immediately after awakening from the first trance—in short, her conscious memories of her mothers puritanical instructions. By reviewing in a trance both the events of her previous trance and the events that had occurred immediately on her waking from this trance, a direct link was established between the childhood ides and affects and those of the previous week's adult experience. Thus the two could be contrasted and compared from her adult point of view.
The patient then was reoriented to the same period of early childhood.
She was reminded of the account she had given before and was asked to repeat it. When she had done so, in terms essentially identical with those she had used in her original account, similar approving remarks were made, but this time so worded as to emphasize sharply the fact that these lectures had all been given to her in her childhood. When this seemed to be impressed upon her adequately, the suggestion was made quietly that as she grew older, her mother would have to give her additional advice, since things change as one grows older. This idea was repeated over and over, always in conjunction with the additional suggestion that she might well wonder whal other things her mother would tell her as she grew older.
Immediately after this last suggestion the patient was brought back from her pseudochildhood to an ordinary trance state. She was asked to
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repeat her account of the remarks she had made in the waking state. She was urged to take special care not to confuse the words she had used when fully awake with the words of the account she had given in the first pseudochildhood trance state, even though the ideas expressed were essentially the same and even though she had both accounts fresh in her niind. This request constituted a permission to remember now in an ordinary trance the events of the second pseudochildhood trance, since this had been merely a repetition of the first, but the fact that there had been a second trance of this kind would not be recalled. Instead the two trances would be blended into a single experience.
As before, the purpose of these devices was to bring gradually together the child's and the adult's points of view. Into her childhood perspective an element of expectation and of wondering had been introduced by the comment that as she grew older, her mother would have had more to teach her. This now was ready to be brought to bear upon the adult version of her mother's instructions, which she had also given.
The blending of the two experiences served an additional technical purpose. In the first place repetitions are necessary under hypnosis, just as they are in dream analysis or in the recounting of experiences by patients under analysis in general. Without repetitions one cannot be sure that all of the material is brought to expression; moreover, allowing the subject tinder hypnosis to recall both the original version and the various repetitions as though they were a single occasion actually gives the subject something to hold back—namely, the fact that there were two or more experiences. This seems to satisfy the subject's need to withhold some-thing, by giving her something unimportant to withhold in return for the important fact which is divulged. This the hypnotist can well afford to do.
just as one can allow a baby to refuse to give up a rattle when he has already given up the butcher's knife. The baby is satisfied and so is the parent.
As the patient concluded this task, her attention was drawn again to the period of her life in which her mother's lectures had been given, the repetitions of these lectures, their incompleteness, the unfinished task left to a little girl by her mother's death, and the necessity to speak to a child in simple and unqualified language before she is old enough for more complex adult understanding. Every effort was made to impress each of these specific points upon her, but always by the use of terms as general as possible.
Without giving the patient an opportunity to develop or elaborate these points, the suggestion was made that she might well begin the hitherto unrealized and unrecognized task of continuing for herself the course of sexual instruction which her mother had begun but had been unable to finish because of her death. She was urged that she might best begin this unfinished task by speculating earnestly and seriously upon what advice
136 ' . Hypnotic Investigation oi Psychodynamic Processes her mother would have given her during the years intervening between childhood and adolescence and between adolescence and adult woman-hood. As she accepted this suggestion, it was amplified by additional instructions to take into consideration all intellectual and emotional aspects, all such things as physical, psychological, and emotional changes, development and growth, and most important to give full consideration to the ultimate reasonable goals of an adult woman, and to do so completely, fully, freely, and without fail, and to elaborate each idea in full accord with the facts appropriate to herself.
Immediately after this instruction was given, the patient was told that upon awakening she should repeat all of the various accounts she had given in this hypnotic session, preferably in their chronological order, or else, if she chose, in any other comprehensive form which she preferred.
Thereupon she was awakened.
The patient's waking account was decidedly brief. She slowly combined everything which she had said into a single, concise story. Significantly, she spoke in the past tense: "My mother attempted to give me an understanding of sex. She tried to give it to me in a way that a child such as I was could understand. She impressed upon me the seriousness of sex;
also, the importance of having nothing to do with it. She made it very clear to me as a child."
This account was given with long pauses between each sentence, as though she was thinking profoundly. She interrupted herself several times to comment on her mother's death and on the incompleteness of her instruction, and to remark that had her mother lived, more things would have been said. Repeatedly she said, as if to herself, "I wonder how mother would have told me the things I should know now."
The examiner seized upon this last remark as a point for terminating the session, and the patient was dismissed hastily. No attempt was made to guide her thoughts beyond the urgent instruction to speculate freely upon the things her mother would have told her and which she now needed to know. She was told to return in one week.
During this week the patient showed marked improvement. Her roommate reported "some crying, but of a different kind," and none of the previous depressed behavior. The patient seemed rather to be profoundly self-absorbed, absent-minded, and puzzled; much of the time she wore a thoughtful and sometimes bewildered expression. No attempt was made to establish any contact with the patient during the week.
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