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medical practice.
    The relinquishment of hypnosis as an agent in analysis was encouraged by the early analysts. They urged, in the first place, that itsuse was limited since (they claimed) not all patients could be hypnotized. Now it seems that this criticism is not only unjustified but, in a sense, ludicrous when it originates with practitioners of a method which is confined to individuals under a certain age, possessed of a certain level of intelligence and generally obliged to fulfill other conditions. And what is more, it is not conclusive that all individuals cannot enter the hypnotic state. While this writer has encountered persons whom he could not immediately hypnotize, he has found that failure was usually due to (1) the fact that in the eyes of his subject he lacked prestige; or (2) that he too soon abandoned his efforts. It is now his belief that there is no other reason for the inability of some persons to enter a hypnotic trance than the fact that in such cases the transference—depending as it does upon the neat balance of prestige, flow of energy toward the analyst and the analyst’s own attitude—is inadequate. Where the transference is complete and adequate, hypnosis can be accomplished. Positive transference in a very real sense is actually the end-product of disintegrated resistance. Hypnoanalysis offers a means to the dissolution of the resistance normally present when treatment begins, and for the continual control of the transference as treatment proceeds. Moreover, with such a method Stekel’s objection that the patient “is never freed from the transference” is meaningless, since its dissipation becomes, through hypnosis, a relatively simple matter.
    In the past hypnosis was likewise regarded unfavorably since it was said that although a specific symptom could be ‘cured’ through the emotional catharsis during the trance, the ‘cure’ was temporary. Anna Freud has even stated that in hypnosis the ego could take no part in the therapeutic procedure, implying that the patient was robbed of the cathartic working-through of the precipitating events. But the hypnoanalytic method—as will be explained and demonstrated subsequently—guarantees the full effect of the cathartic action by providing not only that the emotion these events evoke
sich auswirken
in the trance state but in the waking state as well. It is a sort of ‘double-action,’ certifying the reliability and validity of what transpires, enabling the clinician to measure accurately the depth and color of feeling involved and, above all, is one in which the
whole
personality shares. The further objection to hypnosis on the score that it influences those ‘unconscious’ factors which have been striving for expression and does not effect the prohibiting ‘forces’responsible for their exclusion is correspondingly obviated by the peculiar hypnoanalytic concern with resistances and their dynamic treatment.
    Through the use of hypnoanalysis the period of treatment for most if not all psychopathological conditions can be shortened effectively without loss to the patient, for the cathartic and abreactive processes are just as complete and the therapeutic yield as rich as that claimed for any other given psychotherapeutic tool. In this respect the method may be viewed as an heroic one, assaulting the organism somewhat in the manner of metrazol or electric-shock therapy, literally tearing aside the veil. Hypnoanalysis should last no more than three or four months, the final month being devoted to reorientation, exposition and re-education. With Stekel, the writer holds that the orthodox analysts betray a lack of psychological acumen in their naive dependence upon patients to disclose their secrets voluntarily. It is always to be reckoned with that there is in any psychological condition of mal- or dysfunction a gain to the patient that bids him cling to his symptoms or ways of behavior. It is in the establishment of satisfactory