redmountainhypnosis.com

Quite a few interesting things have been written on this subject – and for the moment, I’m only picking a few items from the web:

Murphey, T. & Bolstad, R. Educational Hypnosis, in The Language Teacher. Japanese Association for Language Teaching (JALT). Retrieved May 17, 2012 from http://jalt-publications.org/old_tlt/files/97/feb/hypnosis.html

This article explains that our basic attitude to the student’s ability to learn is conveyed hypnotically. Beyond that, all language use is part of a hypnotic web that we weave around and within and beyond ourselves and our students. This can be rewoven for the purpose of improving the learning process. Beyond this, JALT seems to have a wealth of materials on the learning process, and not only that – the articles are readily available online and in English.

Laura Di Giorgio is selling CD’s for accelerated language learning from her Deep Trance Now website, Accelerated Learning of Foreign Languages. Retrieved May 17, 2012 from http://www.deeptrancenow.com/learninglanguages.htm

I have not tried them, but they seem reasonably priced. They seem to be dedicated to improving foreign language learning, though they are not teaching the individual languages per se. A cursory glance at the web shows that there is a great deal of interest in the subject of using hypnosis to accelerate language/foreign language learning. There is a general feeling that if the process of learning a language were more fun and less anxiety-provoking it would accomplish more. Also, there is increased interest in how the brain processes information and how brain entrainment can be used to accelerate learning. Steve G. Jones, Clinical Hypnotherapist in Britain, also has a CD to power your mind to learn a foreign language at http://www.stevegjones.com/08foreignlanguagehypnosiscdmp3.htm, though here too, he is not teaching the language as such.

A hypnotherapist named Mary Willix with an academic background in romance linguistics specializes in helping people to learn foreign languages. Mary has a private practice in Boulder, Colorado. Here is an interview with her on BlogTalkRadio. She says that learner beliefs, emotional components, learning styles have to be considered. Language anxiety is very common. It is a result of experience in childhood, though not natural. Who told you you couldn’t speak a foreign language? This is a common internalized belief, she says! They remember a language teacher saying “you’ll never be able to get this.” Language anxiety also develops when children are encouraged to be quiet and not to participate – where over a period of time children are not encouraged to express themselves. Hypnosis can take people back to an incident in the past and de-program it. This is quite similar, she says, to an ADD reaction. Early language memory can be triggered by place. It is fascinating when you can open the floodgates…Playing and having fun with rising and falling tones in Chinese…(would probably take about 70 weeks! without hypnosis, however.) Listen to this great interview here at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/dr-david-newman/2009/10/23/learning-languages-through-hypnosis The radio show is available through Dr. David Newman’s show, Learning languages through Hypnosis by Dr David Newman in Self Help, Friday, October 23, 2009.
Boundaries in the Mind: A New Psychology of Personality by Ernest Hartmann – She says this book shows how compartmentalizing inhibits learning. http://www.amazon.com/Boundaries-In-Mind-Ernest-Hartmann/dp/0465007392 He also wrote something (1973) called The Functions of Sleep.

Website for Mary Willix: http://www.hypnosis.edu/hypnotherapists/mary-willix/
Website for Mary’s publishing company: http://creativeforcespublishing.com/

More thoughts from Mary Willix:

You control the information that comes back at you by asking yes/no questions and never ask why.
Language academies hiring native speakers without pedagogy training, but she says hire a language teacher who can help you with both languages…
Use of hypnosis could cut the time in a half…
Work with a recorder, know what you sound like…
Ideal state for learning – mind, body, emotions are relaxed…
Pronunciation: watch the mouth…
Linguistic prejudice…evident in many language programs…
Dialects…
Acting who have to learn different dialects and languages…can hypnosis help?
Can a hypnotist help politicians to switch between languages?

A June, 1978 article in the journal Language Learning – Volume 28, Issue 1
Pages 1–219 – demonstrated that deeply hypnotized subjects performed better than non-hypnotized subjects in learning Thai pronunciation.

Here is the website of a physicist/hypnotherapist who works with learning and languages and hypnosis: http://www.languageandintelligencetraining.com/index.html

So much for today.

Tags: Boundaries of the Mind, Dr. David Newman, Ernest Hartmann, JALT, Laura Di Giorgio, Mary Willix, Richard Bolstad, Steve G. Jones, Tim Murphey

Idris Parry (1916-2008), Welsh scholar of German Literature, translated this essay very smoothly and effectively into English and introduced his translation with some wise and thoughtful explanation. In particular, I quote the two paragraphs below, in which Parry explains that it is our concept of time that makes us think of the Fall of Man as an event of the past. On the contrary, he says, it is happening to us all the time. This interpretation reminds me of Neville Goddard, who has a purely symbolic view of the events in the Bible. The stories within the story in “On the Marionette Theatre” are all about the weakness and inferiority of consciousness without the unconscious link with the Higher Mind to make our knowledge whole. The futility of the self-conscious young man trying to imitate a painting, the man who tried to fence with a bear – with absolutely no success, the dancers whose center of gravity was not in their center or their Soul, but in the elbow and the small of the back is about disconnection from the Higher Mind, from the Soul as center of gravity, from the unconscious strings to the higher consciousness that swing us all and explains why a marionette, free of attachment to the ground, has the freedom to swing from its center, or why a person with a prosthesis can dance. In the light of our understanding that consciousness and subconsciousness, with its connection to the Higher Mind, have to combine forces, this essay makes a lot of sense.

Idris Parry’s translation and notes reprinted in the Southern Cross Review, Nr. 82:
“Kleist’s essay pivots around a reference to the third chapter of the book of Genesis, the story of the Fall of Man, the discovery of that self-consciousness which establishes and perpetuates human isolation. But ‘discover’ implies a historical event. Kleist shares with Kafka (who once claimed he understood the Fall of Man better than anyone else) the insight that it is only our concept of time which makes us think of the Fall of Man as a historical event in the distant past. It is happening all the time. The biblical story is a mythical representation of constant human awareness of self and therefore of separation…

According to Kleist there is no way back. Humans are now thinking animals, and the material of thought is knowledge. But knowledge, although the source of uncertainty when fragmentary.. is also the vital substance of harmony when complete. So Kleist asserts that our only hope is to go forward to total knowledge.”

Tags: Heinrich von Kleist, Idris Parry, Kafka, Neville Goddard

The word addiction originally had a concrete meaning as an action a person might undertake, just like the word emotion which derives from the prefix e-, meaning out of, and the word motion, meaning movement. Prior to the early 19th century it signified a movement outward, whereas today we understand it as a private event. The word did not predominantly signify a mental state until the 19th century.

Similarly, the word addiction derives from the Latin ad-dicere, meaning to assign, to pronounce to, used in Roman Law to assign someone by law to another person, in particular, a slave to a master. In the 17th century, the term was not only negative and did not primarily refer to substance addiction, but was also used to refer to personal inclinations, talents, interests or, so to speak, the gifts divinely assigned. In 1604 Shakespeare in Othello writes “Each man to what sport and revels his addiction leads him,” and Henry Peacham, the Younger, in his guidebook The Compleat Gentleman from 1634 is quoted as saying “For every man to search into the addiction of his Genius, and not to wrest nature.” In other words, the word seemed to suggest that people have been assigned certain gifts or drives. On the other hand, Thomas Jefferson was using the word more negatively when he wrote that he was not addicted to any particular creed or party or single way of thinking:

“I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent.”

-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Francis Hopkinson, March 13, 1789

Gradually, the meaning of the word as a mental slavery came to predominate, and the OED has an example from the 18th century of “addiction to tobacco.” Today, the term suggests personal enslavement to something that causes pain upon withdrawal, as in the obvious cases of alcohol, tobacco and certain drugs, and the assumption is made (say by the Mayo Clinic staff online) that people need a great deal of help to deal with, let alone overcome, this kind of addiction. According to psychologists, one can also be addicted to food, money, gambling, sex, shopping and work. One can become dependent on another person. So-called co-dependency is a kind of addiction.

So it might seem that everybody or almost everybody – except oneself, of course – has some kind of compulsion or addiction. To say that we “have” a compulsion or addiction is a rather weak way to put it, when we actually are using the habit to control and manage and organize our lives. Medical and popular psychology has promoted the view that we are all in the grip of something over which we have no control, yet we are controlling ourselves this way. Meanwhile, this doesn’t even begin to address the distinction between a passion and an addiction. Where does one stop and the other begin?

When the mystic Almine talks about addiction she does not seem to assume that we are this far away from ourselves. She says that our job is to live in the moment, to avoid dragging the past with us “like an anchor.” (https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10151468706590290) “Life is newly expressing,” she says,”for nothing is ever familiar.” Even wanting to be left alone is a prison cell…so her understanding. Listen to this audio for more.

So addiction is not something we “have” or have had forced on us. It is the structure of our own decisions and responsibilities, our difficulties in giving up the past and moving on to the next moment. Almine and the Dalai Lama and the Buddha value, encourage, model and promote living in the moment. As soon as we drag the past with us “like an anchor” we are stuck in something, addicted to something. The solution to the problem would be to take each moment of life separately, remembering where we are, hopefully, but not making the decisions we make based on the decisions we and others have made in the past.

If this is a valid way to look at things, then the problem of addiction is not necessarily best handled by giving oneself over to some kind of managed care, but by resuscitating the individual nature of the moment and taking personal responsibility for it. Almine suggests we have a tendency to try to control expression, perhaps according to schedules or self-images or rigid goals, and this is the nature of addiction – it is control.
The so-called addictive personality is accustomed to controlling his or her life and making it safe and orderly, words we don’t usually use for addictive behavior, but this must be the inner justification for all such patterns of life: just like Prufrock says – “I measure out my life in coffee spoons.”

The problem with addiction is not always that there is something inherently wrong with an activity, as we assume that activities like shopping or eating or working are not inherently wrong. In these cases, the distribution of energy is distorted, or the return on energy investment is disappointing. People like to look at pie charts to see where their money is going, and it would be illuminating to look at a pie chart that demonstrated where your energy was going. Of course, charting this might be way more irritating than it was worth, but it might be as much of a learning experience. By re-arranging and redistributing the investment of energy in one’s life, one would be sure to distort and disrupt the intention and orderly arrangement of the addiction as control mechanism, forcing energy to flow into different channels.

Tags: Almine, Francis Hopkinson, Henry Peacham, Othello, Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, the Younger, Thomas Jefferson

Poe’s story, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar (available here) had such an authentic feel that many readers believed it to be true. In any case, the story itself and its reception give plenty of evidence of a compelling fascination with the potential power of mesmerism for readers of that era.

A few remarks on naming: the name Valdemar is said to be a Danish version of the Russian Vladimir and derives from Slavonic words meaning rule and famous; the name Waldemar is said to derive from Old High German, waltan, meaning power, and mari meaning famous. A 12th century Danish King was named Valdemar, and he was apparently quite a powerful one too, having raised Denmark to the level of a major power in the Baltic. Further internet researches uncover the history of the name Vladimir, however, to have been derived from Vlad, presumably meaning ruler, and mir, which once meant both peace and world in the Russian language. I say “once,” because the Russian spelling reforms carried out on the occasion of the Russian Revolution ended up making these two separate words. It looks like the folk tradition identified “great” with “peace” and “universe.” The Russian spelling reforms are supposed to have resulted in a more phonetic spelling, but there has been some criticism of them. Meanwhile, back to Valdemar, it seems that J. K. Rowling might have used the etymology of this term with respect to power to derive the name of Lord Voldemort, though I have not seen any mention of this. However, she did say the name should be pronounced as in French without articulating the final t.

Poe’s Valdemar story ought to be read in connection with his essay, Mesmeric Revelation, available here, which rings more true to me, mainly because I have heard about dialogues similar to this in which the hypnotized person is amazingly articulate about vast realms of being and the nature of being and of God.

Tags: Edgar Allen Poe, etymology of name Valdemar, Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling, King Valdemar, Lord Voldemort

The scene opens to a court of law, high and secret, said to be divinely appointed, representing the winged armies of the Lord, appointed to hunt up crime where it has holed up in the human heart like a lizard – so announces Graf Otto von der Flühe. Here this supreme authority has come together to execute justice in the case of Theobald Friedeborn, blacksmith of Heilbronn, who has charged the Count Wetter von Strahl with seducing his child.

Friedeborn has appeared at court to complain that the means the Count has used to attract his child seem to be so unfathomable – and would hint at hypnosis, if anyone was thinking that way. Graf Otto von der Flühe is head of the committee – Fluh, by the way, means mass of rock, stratum, layer, or concrete, and it does have a plural. The word appears in my 1958 Cassell’s, but not in all modern dictionaries. It derives from the Swiss and refers to rocky cliffs. It’s hard to get around the implication of the names, with the blacksmith’s name suggesting peace and coming from a town called Healing Springs and the Count’s name portending a ray or flash of light and the storms that come with it.

By the end of Act 1 Graf Wetter von Strahl, whom Kaethchen has been following – staying the night in his stables with the horses – is begging her to tell him and the representatives of the Law why she left her family and home to follow him, and she answers that if she had to stand before her own consciousness in front of a golden seat of judgment, with all the terrors of the conscience in flaming armor to either side, she would still answer: I do not know. Her falling and her fainting, of which there are three examples mentioned in Act 1 alone, as well as this idea she has of standing before her own consciousness in judgment – without knowing why she does what she does – makes her an emblem of the subconscious mind, linking her maybe with one of those crimes buried in the caverns of the human heart that the winged armies of the Law are here to root out. Her actions make no sense to anybody, but they have a driving power, like the sound of the iambic pentameter.

Der Graf vom Strahl. Was ists, mit einem Wort, mir rund gesagt, Das dich aus deines Vaters Hause trieb? Was fesselt dich an meine Schritte an?

Käthchen. Mein hoher Herr! Da fragst du mich zuviel. Und läg ich so, wie ich vor dir jetzt liege, Vor meinem eigenen Bewußtsein da: Auf einem goldnen Richtstuhl laß es thronen, Und alle Schrecken des Gewissens ihm, In Flammenrüstungen, zur Seite stehn; So spräche jeglicher Gedanke noch, Auf das, was du gefragt: ich weiß es nicht.

Tags: Das Kaethchen von Heilbronn, Heinrich von Kleist, subconscious mind, Wilhelm Nerenz

I have been reading The Collected Papers of Milton H. Erickson on Hypnosis, Volume IV in a volume entitled “Innovative Hypnotherapy,” edited by Ernest L. Rossi. According to the editor’s preface, the material in these volumes is derived from boxes of manuscripts entrusted to Rossi by Erickson, in which were contained journal articles from the great medical doctor and hypnotherapist’s many decades of experience with therapy. The articles are mostly successful case studies, stories, even thrillers. Some of the stories made me laugh, and aspects of the healing process involved were usually enough to make you gasp. Erickson used shock therapy, though it was nothing like “electroconvulsive” shock therapy. He took the client just as he or she wanted to be – that was the starting point.

He seems to have known instinctively that no one – and that means no one – wants to be talked out of their problems. On the contrary, if a problem becomes a problem, you can be quite sure that it serves many purposes for the problem-holder. You like and enjoy and want your problem. You are thoroughly comfortable with being small or inadequate or insufficient, and Erickson usually started his therapy by seeking common ground and appearing to accept the client’s self-perception, even bowing to it.

For example, in one case, the client was so sick of being pushed around that his eyes glazed over at any thought of therapy. He had actually been subject to 600 hours of psychoanalysis on top of his other rather intractable personal problems. Erickson had to promise not to do any therapy at all, at least at first, while weaving in and out of their discussion…a plan. I won’t spoil the fun and divulge the actual strategies, but I will say that they were a lot like theater – and in the more serious cases, there were other actors besides the doctor and the client – that brilliantly circumvented the client’s own self-invented plot, unfolding a dramatic subtext that carries the day and unfolds into an alternative ending.

Erickson used strategies that shock the personality, while at the same time pushing the suffering person out onto the road of freedom and personal responsibility. He realized that our problems are due to our beliefs and assumptions, our “biases” or “acceptance sets” or rigid assumptions, and one can’t simply talk people out of these rigidities.

Tags: drama therapy, Ernest L. Rossi, hypnosis, hypnotherapy, Milton Erickson

In Mozart’s Così fan tutte, the chambermaid, Despina, appears disguised as a crazy doctor who pulls out of her bag a huge magnet or mesmeric stone to bring the supposedly poisoned “Albanian” suitors back to life. It works. First, their arms and legs twitch wildly and then they awaken. At this point it is clear that they are in an advanced state of hypnosis. Watch the Glyndebourne Chorus (2006) playing this hysterical scene. They don’t know where they are: Who are they? Who’s that? Do I stand before the throne of Jove? Are you Pallas or Citherea?

Mozart’s family is known to have been friendly with Mesmer and his wife, so the question that arises is how this fact fits together with the rather harsh satire of mesmerism and magnetic therapy that appears in this drama. One answer to this question is provided by Pierpaolo Polzonetti in an extensive article in the Cambridge Opera Journal, 14, 3, 263–296 2002.
Mesmerizing adultery: Così fan tutte and the Kornman scandal.

Apparently, much scholarly attention has already been devoted to this question. Without going into too much detail, Polzonetti’s super-detailed account makes it clear that mesmerism and hypnosis do not only appear in this scene but to a significant degree throughout the opera expressed in the story as well as in the music. Mozart’s cruelest satire may have been directed not so much at Mesmer himself but at mesmerism’s radical French wing. Another book that looks like it might provide some good information on this is Robert Darnton’s “Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France” (1986). Benjamin Franklin is known to have spearheaded the pre-revolutionary investigation into mesmerism carried out by the French Royal Commission, one that seems to be regarded by many as a definitive debunking. However, hypnosis and mesmerism had a full life in France in the late 18th and the whole of the 19th century, with quite a number of important and widely admired figures and books representing its progress.

Tags: animal magnetism, Benjamin Franklin, Cosi fan tutte, Franz Anton Mesmer, glass harmonica, Gustave Kornmann, hypnosis, magnet therapy, Pierpaolo Polzonetti, Robert Darnton, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

And its Practical Application in Surgery and Medicine – was published in London in 1846. The whole subject of mesmerism, as hypnosis was then called, was in disrepute, and the general fear and distrust was surely given a stamp of approval by the verdict of the 1779 French Royal Commission under Benjamin Franklin. Here is one description of how the commission went about verifying Mesmer’s theory and practice of animal magnetism. A 1902 American edition of this book was printed by The Psychic Research Company in Chicago in 1902. That is the volume I have in front of me.

James Esdaile was a Scottish doctor employed in Bengal as a Civil Assistant Surgeon around 1846 who wrote this book to describe his experiences doing drastic surgery on patients using hypnosis and no other anesthetic. He wrote that mesmerism is hardly “a new and unnatural art,” but must be “the oldest and most natural mode of curing many of the severe, uncomplicated diseases of the human race.” He considered mesmerism to be the “simplest and most speedy restorative of the powers of life…” (27), a way of handling disease and pain as old and as innate as human instinct, and his book documents his actual experiences as a surgeon in Bengal. Mainly, the book is intended to document the use of hypnosis as an anesthetic in the most drastic types of surgery, but, not only is this anesthetic harmless, there seemed to be some restoration of good spirits and normal functioning after the surgeries, an improvement which could hardly be attributed only to the surgery – or so it seems to me. He concluded in his final comments that “Mesmerism is a natural power of the human body” (155).

Tags: Abbé Faria, anesthesia, Bengal, Benjamin Franklin, Franz Anton Mesmer, French Royal Commision, hypnosis, James Esdaile, mesmerism, Panjim, surgery

It is said that the motto of Paracelsus (1493-1541) was the following statement:

“alterius non sit qui suus esse potest” which means “let no man that can belong to himself be of another.”

Paracelsus is also thought of as having contributed to psychotherapy with the idea of the unconscious:

“Paracelsus is credited as providing the first clinical/scientific mention of the unconscious. In his work Von den Krankeiten he writes: “Thus, the cause of the disease chorea lasciva is a mere opinion and idea, assumed by imagination, affecting those who believe in such a thing. This opinion and idea are the origin of the disease both in children and adults. In children the case is also imagination, based not on thinking but on perceiving, because they have heard or seen something. The reason is this: their sight and hearing are so strong that unconsciously they have fantasies about what they have seen or heard.”

(Retrieved from Wikipedia, July 23, 2009 – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracelsus)

This would make Paracelsus an early believer in what we call hypnotism.

Implied in the thinking of Paracelsus is that a person who can belong to himself should belong to no one else, and that people can also heal themselves because the origin of disease is within them. No wonder this did not sit well with representatives of the Holy Roman Empire. It’s easy to see why he was associated with Faust, presumably by Goethe himself, among others who identified him with the Renaissance.

(Andrew Weeks, Paracelsus. Speculative Theory and the Crisis of the Early Reformation, Albany: SUNY, 1997).
Paracelsus
July 24, 2009

Tags: Paracelsus

Freud is generally assumed to have abandoned hypnosis, and many explanations of this have been offered. However, it is known that Freud’s idea of the subconscious was inspired by Charcot’s lectures on hypnosis at the Salpetriere and that he translated Bernheim’s book on suggestion.

Some comments by J. Ben Fisher, a hypnotherapist, support my occasional suspicion that Freud never really abandoned hypnosis at all, but that whatever his therapy involved, he just didn’t call it hypnosis. Fisher says Freud was “run out of France (practically on a rail) for his practices and his postulates based on the practice of hypnosis…” Fisher goes on to say that Freud simply called his “induction” “free association.” He says that Freud’s office itself constituted an instant induction:”Freud had well learned that all hypnosis is self-hypnosis and he simply facilitated the participants’ journey in this realm without the use of the incessant verbal influence less experienced hypnotists feel they need.”

Retrieved July 29 from “Hypnotic Briefs: Freud and Hypnosis” at www.hypnos.co.uk/hypnomag/fisher2.htm

July 30, 2009

Tags: Charcot, J. Ben Fisher