Hypnosis is older than recorded history. Thousands of years ago, primitive people in Africa and Australia used chanting, drums, and the fixation of their eyes to achieve the state we now know as hypnosis. They were able to effortlessly perform amazing physical feats and easily endure situations that would ordinarily cause excruciating physical pain.
For 200 years scientists, physicians, surgeons, theorists and researchers have been using and studying what we now call hypnosis.
The father of modern hypnotism is Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815), an Austrian physician. Mesmer believed hypnosis to be a mystical force flowing from the hypnotist into the subject (he called it "animal magnetism"). Mesmer's assumption that the power behind hypnosis came from the hypnotist, and was in some way inflicted upon the subject, took hold for some time. Critics quickly dismissed the magical element of this theory, but none other than Benjamin Franklin was on the committee that investigated him, and Franklin thought Mesmer’s claims and abilities were worthy of further consideration. Hypnosis was originally known as mesmerism, after Mesmer, and we still use its derivative, "mesmerize," today.
In Britain, efforts to harmonize Mesmerism were made by divorcing the induced trance from Mesmer's theories of Animal Magnetism. The Scottish physician, James Braid (1795–1860) coined the word "hypnosis" after discovering that all of the effects of mesmeric trances — including hallucination — could be achieved without the presence of magnets. By 1893, a committee of the British Medical Association concluded that the mesmeric state was different than the hypnotic state and that the latter was beneficial in relieving certain pain and disorders (Ibid., p. 599). Experimentation with hypnosis played an important part in the early development of Psychiatry and Psychology.
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) used hypnotic suggestion as an integral part of his therapy until it was gradually replaced by his "free association" psychoanalytic technique. Freud never rejected hypnosis. Indeed, he claimed that it was the future of analysis, seeing his "free association" as a natural outgrowth of hypnosis ("Freud, Sigmund," "Hypnosis," Baker Encyclopedia of Psychology, pp. 430, 543).
Hypnosis was eventually incorporated into Psychology and seen as an adjunct therapy. The term "Hypnotherapy" was later adapted to describe "the use of hypnosis as a technique to be employed in conjunction with other skills by a trained psychotherapist, physician, or dentist." One popular technique is Indirect Hypnotherapy, developed by Milton Erickson, in which elements of hypnosis are subtly introduced or "embedded" into counseling sessions without the client's knowledge. This form of hypnosis was influential in the development of Neurolinguistic Programming by Richard Bandler and Dr. John Grinder.
The brain is a tangible thing. You know where it is, roughly what it looks like, and what it is made of. It has properties that dictate how it functions, and we know what those properties are. One of them, the one that is most important for hypnosis, is the brainwave.
The level that our brain is operating in dictates how we feel, how we behave, and how we perform. The hypnotic state is attained by taking your brain from Beta, which it is probably in right now, to either the Alpha state or the Theta state, depending on how deeply you need to go for what you'd like to achieve. There has been a lot of research into the four levels of electrical activity that our brains emanate in the form of brainwaves. Here’s a brief review of (or introduction to) the brainwaves and what occurs at each of the four states of consciousness.
Beta
Alpha
Theta
Delta
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Certified Clinical Hypnotherapist
Certified, Complementary Medical Hypnotism
Nahant, MA
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Juliette@CenterOfThought.com