The Collected Works of Milton H. Erickson: Volume 05 - Hardcover: Classical Hypnotic Phenomena, Part 1: Psychodynamics

The papers of this volume are illustrations of Erickson's early work on classical hypnotic phenomena such as amnesia, age regression, automatic writing, and literalness as well as the mental mechanisms involved in Freudian “psychopathology and dual personality.” In this clinical research Erickson frequently was responding to the Zeitgeist that surrounded him in his professional appointments in the 1930s and 1940s. While Erickson was able to use hypnosis to validate certain psychoanalytic conceptions of psychodynamics, he never identified himself as a partisan of any psychoanalytic school. Indeed, he often decried what he felt was a premature limitation and rigidification of our understanding of human nature in the belief system of most “true believers” of any “school.”

Table of Contents

1. Amnesia
   • The Investigation of a Specific Amnesia
   • Development of Apparent Unconsciousness During Hypnotic Reliving of a Traumatic Experience
   • Clinical and Experimental Observations on Hypnotic Amnesia: Introduction to an Unpublished Paper
   • The Problem of Amnesia in Waking and Hypnotic States
   • Varieties of Hypnotic Amnesia
2. Literalness
   • Literalness: An Experimental Study
   • Literalness and the Use of Trance in Neurosis
3. Age Regression Introduction
   • Age Regression: Two Unpublished Fragments of a Student’s Study
   • Past Weekday Determination in Hypnotic and Waking States
   • On the Possible Occurrence of a Dream in an Eight-Month-Old Infant
   • The Successful Treatment of a Case of Acute Hysterical Depression by a Return Under Hypnosis to a Critical Phase of Childhood
4. Automatic Writing and Drawing
   • The Experimental Demonstration of Unconscious Mentation by Automatic Writing
   • The Use of Automatic Drawing in the Interpretation and Relief of a State of Acute Obsessional Depression
   • The Translation of the Cryptic Automatic Writing of One Hypnotic Subject by Another in a Trancelike Dissociated State
5. Mental Mechanisms
   • Experimental Demonstrations of the Psychopathology of Everyday Life
   • Demonstration of Mental Mechanisms by Hypnosis
   • Unconscious Mental Activity in Hypnosis: Psychoanalytic Implications
   • Negation or Reversal of Legal Testimony
6. Dual Personality
   • The Permanent Relief of an Obsessional Phobia by Means of Communication with an Unsuspected Dual Personality
   • The Clinical Discovery of a Dual Personality
   • Findings on the Nature of the Personality Structures in Two Different Dual Personalities by Means of Projective and Psychometric Tests
7. The Implicit Processing Heuristic Scale
   • The Indirect Trance Assessment Scale (ITAS)
   • Exploratory Association Study between Catechol-O-Methyltransferase (COMT) High/Low Enzyme Activity Polymorphism and Hypnotizability: Pesach Lichtenberg, Rachel Bachner-Melman, Inga Gritsenko, and Richard P. Ebstein
   • Hypnotic Susceptibility: Multidimensional Relationships with Cloninger’s Tridimensional Personality Questionnaire, COMT Polymorphisms, Absorption, and Attentional Characteristics: Pesach Lichtenberg, Rachel Bachner-Melman, Richard P. Ebstein, and Helen J. Crawford