HYPNOTERAPl - Dansk Selskab for Klinisk Hypnose

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therapist, through resonance, internally understands his fear and his need for more strength.
She enters into his experiential world and adds her ego strength to his as follows:)
Th: Now I want you to pay close attention. I'm not going to let her hit you anymore, and I'm
going to hold her back, and you can get mad at her. I'm gonna hold on to her, and she has a
belt in her hand, and I´m not gonna let her hit you.
Ed: Can I take the belt and hit her with it,?
Th: Yes! Don't be afraid to. I'm not gonna let her hit you.
(Ed hysterically beats on the couch repeatedly, shrieking and laughing, then emerges
spontaneously from hypnosis.)
Ed: God damn. You're right, my headache's gone.
In this case two abreactions represented the heart of the treatment. In the first, the 3-year old
child state was induced to re-experience and master the "monsters" in the dark closet. In the
latter one, the patient (as above) expressed his anger at the cruel mother and mastered his fear
of her. Closure of these within two hours resulted in freeing of the patient from much of his
past trauma and a return to normal functio-ning. But the crucial factor was the therapist's
willingness to co-enter the experiential world of these child states and provide the added ego
strength necessary for a successful confrontation with the abusing mother. Lacking this "withness",
the patient might well have suffered a retraumatization.
In listening to tapes of treatment sessions we have noted that so often the therapist does not
appear to be emotionally involved, even though listening and cognitively understanding.
Therapist reactions, suggestions and interpretations, are commonly calm, objective and in
contrast to the emotional involvement of the patient. We do not often hear therapists shouting,
"Tell her off!" , "Let's give him hell" or "He deserves it," etc., where it is obvious that the
therapist is co-living, co-sweating, co-fearing or co-raging with the patient.
More often the therapist's suggestions and interpretations are unemotionally phrased. "You
are angry at your father," "Sometimes you wish he were dead," etc. The cognitive
understanding is there, but the emotional "withness" is lacking, and the patient is being left to
confront his traumatic crisis experientially alone.
There is too much therapy today that is.purely cognitive, and in fact the treatment
approaches most researched and advocated in the litera-ture are those called "cognitive
therapy". However, for the therapist to be involved emotionally, motorically or viscerally
risks professional disapproval. Accordingly, most therapists opt for "safe" procedures, even
though by so doing they may lose opportunities to make large therapeutic gains more rapidly.
It should be pointed out that the re-experiencing of the patient's trauma by the therapist
must be a temporary one, initiated purely (or largely) through resonance. If this reaction is
simply tripping off a similar personal experience of the therapist's then it does become
"counter-transference", and can involve the dangers of "acting out" (Freud, 1920).
The abreactive co-experiencing of the therapist's trauma may even be personally
therapeutic for the clinician, but it is his/her's treatment, not the patient's. Accordingly, it may
or may not he good for the patient. That is why abreactions should not be undertaken by
thera-pists in areas which involve as yet unresolved personal problems - and which constitute
a good argument for personal therapy or analysis by the clinician.
References
AMERICAN PSYCHIATRIC ASSOCIATION (1994). DSM-IV. Washington, DC.: The