Hypnosis

Swiss Medical Society for Hypnosis

Homepage of the Swiss Society for Medical Hypnosis / Schweizerische Ärztegesellschaft für Hypnose / Société Médicale Suisse d'Hypnose / Società Svizzera d'Ipnosi Medica (SMSH)

www.smsh.ch

17.09.201836 Min

Die Hypnose kann dafür sorgen, dass wir Schmerzen ausblenden und Ängste vergessen können. «Puls» begleitet eine Operation ohne Narkose und Schmerzmittel – und zeigt, wieso das Universitätsspital Genf auf Hypnose setzt.

AUTOR: András M. Nagy         KATEGORIE: Hypnose

Siehe vor allem die srf-Film-Ausschnitte
ab 01:23-05:50 // 09:20-11:23 // 12:43-15:54 // 19:38-21:40 // 23:36-27:05 // 28:45-34:10 // 35:05-35:25

Explorative Texts to Hypnosis Therapy

A Blog by Dr. med. J. Philip Zindel - Facharzt Psychiatrie/Psychotherapie, Hauptstr. 17, CH-4102 Binningen, Tel. 061 261 70 70

This Blog (in German) contains details of "wisdom" which Philip, one of the most renowned hypnotherapists in Europe today and a founding father of the «Swiss Medical Society for Hypnosis» (SMSH), has presented over the past several decades to his students and patients in numerous lectures, workshops, supervision and hypnotherapy sessions. His blog is concerned with the theme "Exploring" via the method of "Filling the Space".

Philip is especially looking forward to discussions which might arise from readers of his blog and, in this way, lend his platform a dynamic life of its own. Please feel free to explore and contribute!

www.zindel-hypnose-texte.ch

Breathing Rooms (Do As One)

Although this site is a bit too esoteric for my taste, I can support the overall intention of the authors and recommend the very well constructed, so-called "Breathing Rooms" as practice for relaxation

http://doasone.com/default.aspx

This optical illusion consists of two two-colored yellow-blue circles, which are placed side by side on a gray background. In the center of both circles is then a grouping of black arrows.

The human brain is an extremely complex organ that even the most powerful computer has not yet been able to replace, and the question is whether it will ever succeed. Therefore, it is surprising that the brain also tends to be so easily deceived. Various optical illusions are popular, which can completely drive neurons in the brain and convince them that you are watching something completely different.

The essence of the whole illusion is simple. When you follow the arrows, it seems as if the circles are moving in exactly the direction the arrows are pointing. At the same time, it looks as if the circles are constantly shrinking and growing. But their size does not change at all. If you don't believe it, try putting a piece of paper on top and on the side of the circles. You will see that the position of the circle does not change compared to the paper. The circle does not move sideways by even a nanometer.

The trick is that on the inside and outside of the large circles there are thin circles of the same color: yellow and blue. It is these circles that manipulate your brain. It thinks that the dimensions of large or deeper circles are changing. The arrows then serve as a supplement that will drive the observer's brain even more.

Interestingly, the illusion disappears the moment you start blinking quickly (stroboscope effect). However, this is not exactly a pleasant experience and is definitely not recommended for more sensitive people.

    - Bruno Karett

This is a great video that can be used for a positive self-hypnosis session!

Sit comfortably while breathing in slower than usual (about 4 sec. long) and even slower out (about 6 sec. long), while gazing at the video in a day-dream kind of way.

While breathing out, "make yourself heavy" by imagining you can breathe out through the soles of your feet, through the seat, the backrest, the headrest ...

Sit further back in your chair with your head tipped slightly upwards and with your hands clasped behind your head.

Smile pleasently.

Imagine something positive all the while like feeling happy, having energy, being healthy, being successful ...

Tell yourself something like:

"I'm worthy of being happy, having energy, being healthy, being succesful ... and I'm thankful for every bit of happiness, of energy, of health, of success ... which I may achieve!"

until the film is over.

Enjoy life!

Film Credits:

Music: Young Marco
Video: Rop van Mierlo
Song title: Trippy Isolator
Video title: Dances with Wolves
Photography: Bram Spaan
Post Production: Bernie van Vlijmen
Special thanks: Jerney Silawanebessy

youngmarco.com
ropvanmierlo.nl

My personal definition of hypnosis goes something like this:

"Hypnosis enables a suggestion to become a convincingly believable reality."

Accordingly, mental absorption while simply watching a film is already hypnosis.

A good way to illustrate this is to take a look at the «Kuleshov Effect» - see below.

The Kuleshov effect is a film editing effect. It is a cognitive event in which viewers derive more meaning from the interaction of two sequential shots than from a single shot in isolation. This video essay is part of the "Everything You Need to Know" series created exclusively for No Film School (http://nofilmschool.com) by Senior Post (http://www.senior-post.com).

Yes, the placebo and nocebo effects are two very good examples of hypnosis in everyday life.

I have written two medical text books on both effects - in German - based on the published academic medical literature proving that the placebo effect can be as healing - «Imagination as elixir!» - as the nocebo effect can be deadly - «Imagination as poison!».

Schmid GB (2009) Tod durch Vorstellungskraft: Das Geheimnis psychogener Todesfälle (2. ed.). Springer-Verlag, Wien.

Schmid GB (2010) Selbstheilung durch Vorstellungskraft (1. ed.). Springer-Verlag, Wien.

Attentional blindness arises from a spontaneous hypnotic state induced by suggestive confusion. In the above video, please pay careful attention to the number of passes of the basketball between members of the white team only!

This video displays how our beliefs can be used to allow ourselves to be manipulated.

Murder under Hypnosis?

https://www.dropbox.com/s/eg7nxzig8de6eye/Die%20Macht%20der%20Hypnose%2037min%20SCH%C3%9CTZ%20Gerhard.mp4?dl=0

Irritations to the television film

"The power of hypnosis programmed for murder."

by Dr. Gerhard Schütz

Copy from: www.gerhard-schuetz.de (News)

First broadcast on 10 July 2009, 22.10h Pro7

You can watch a short TV summary (N24, 2012) of this film on the platform youtube.com "Murder under Hypnosis - The Experiment".

Statement on the film "The Power of Hypnosis

We encounter the phenomenon of hypnosis in different variations and manifestations. If, for example, hypnosis is used to help sick people, it is referred to as therapeutic or medical hypnosis.

In addition, there is also an aspect of hypnosis that is of a socio-psychological nature: stage/show hypnosis, advertising, political propaganda or religious indoctrination and manipulation. The following article deals with the socio-psychological aspects of hypnosis and the resulting questions.

Two bank employees are shot, the perpetrator, an alleged bank robber, is arrested without resistance. What stands out is his strange-looking behavior. Something seems to be wrong. He is psychiatrically examined. Since he cannot give any reasonable information, he is hypnotized in order to shed light on the background to the crime. Here the unbelievable comes to light: The perpetrator, a man named Palle Hardrup, was under the control of hypnotic manipulation techniques and thus driven to his terrible deed. What reads like a science fiction story really happened. In Denmark in 1951.

Toolmaker Palle Hardrup was sentenced to prison in Denmark after World War II for collaborating with the Nazis. He shared his cell for a year and a half with another inmate named Nielsen. Nielsen manipulated and hypnotized his prison comrade in this time massively. Using a crude mixture of pseudopolitical and religiously dressed-up hypnotic suggestions, which Nielsen wrapped in fantastic stories, he reshaped Hardrup's world of thoughts.

In this way, Nielson succeeded in making Hardrup, who was by no means simple-minded or stupid, completely dependent.

Nielsen, for example, suggested that there was a guardian spirit X who would give orders that had to be carried out. He commanded Hardrup to rob a bank if he ever receives a certain sign given by this guardian spirit. After both were released from prison, Nielson sent Hardrup this sign as if coming from the guardian spirit X. Accordingly, as ordered by his inner guardian spirit, Hardrup carried out an armed robbery of a bank and shot two people. The Danish court cleared Hardrup of all guilt, while Nielsen, the “hypnotic whisperer”, was sentenced to life imprisonment. Hardrup was committed to a hospital for the mentally ill.

The Palle Hardrup case is one of the best-known cases provoking the question: Can certain people be hypnotized to the extreme of causing physical harm or even death to others?This opens up a controversy that has not yet been resolved.

Let us take a closer look at the arguments put forward by the side which claims that hypnosis cannot bring people to antisocial or destructive behavior. The representatives of this direction claim that:

1. persons, even if they are in a hypnotic trance, would not act against their very own morals. For example, if you tell them in a trance that they should shoot another person with a loaded weapon - yes, such attempts were really made! -, they will immediately wake up from hypnosis.

2. no one can be persuaded under hypnosis to do anything he or she would not do in his or her normal waking state.

3. the test persons feel the "game situation" during the attempts to trigger antisocial and destructive behavior; that is, they play along and do what the external situation requires, and the experimenter expects them to do, without having to fear consequences. It's just a game.

However, these three arguments can be easily refuted, as you will see immediately below:

to 1:

A person's moral development is an extremely complicated process - it goes through different stages of development: According to L. Kohlberg, three levels and six stages. Only very few people reach the highest level (at most 2%, it is estimated). In the case of an induced hypnotic age regression, for example, the level of moral development also regresses with the result that its strength decreases. If a person with hypnotic age regression is led back into his 6th year of life, then the cognitive and moral level of a 6-year-old prevails here.

to 2:

There is no normal state, there is only context dependency. People do not behave normally but, rather, in accordance with the respective social and cultural context. In other words, people react to what they experience under the conditions of a given particular situation. Since situations are constantly changing (politics, family, weather, economy, ...), behavior also changes. By means of hypnosis, the external situation and its perception can be strongly manipulated; this is also referred to as pseudo-reality. If, for example, in a political system certain people are compared with vermin or portrayed as subhumans and one is constantly exposed to these suggestions for a long period of time, it is only a matter of time before many people really believe these assertions. The result: a brutalization of behavior towards these defamed people. In his shocking book “Täter”, H. Welzer has worked out how normal German soldiers, often themselves being caring family fathers back at home, took part in the shooting of women and children in the Second World War. Through hypnotically underpinned propaganda, skillful questions, group pressure, camaraderie and social expectations, a psycho-social climate was created that encouraged such behavior. In this way, ordinary citizens became mass murderers.

Interesting in this context is also the phenomenon of arm levitation. The spontaneous rising of an arm which sometimes occurs by a person in deep trance is probably a culturally acquired, early childhood movement towards the holding and leading hand of the mother or father. In perverted form we also find the arm being raised to Hitler's salutein the mass hypnotic gatherings and demonstrations staged by the Nazis. Especially with regard to our own history, it seems important to me to understand the wheels of hypnotic seduction, which caused the deaths of millions of people.

to 3:

Do you know the German board game «Mensch ärgere Dich nicht»? Of course, you do: It is similar to the American games «Parcheesi» and «Trouble» and the English game «Ludo». Everyone who has played this game has probably experienced how a fellow player has left the game in rage because he wasn’t lucky with the dice. It doesn't help much to say: “It's just a game!” So: The boundaries between a game situation and reality are often fluid and not exactly defined. A game situation can become independent and can lead to reality. Philip Zimbardo had to stop his Stanford Prison Experiment after six days because he no longer had the "game situation" under control and started an uncontrolled, independent psychosocial process. Zimbardo actually wanted to use his experiment to investigate the behavior of guards and prisoners. The self-organizine process led to the fact that, in the experiment, the “guards” became more and more brutal and sadistic towards their “prisoners” and Zimbardo could no longer guarantee the integrity of his prisoner test subjects. In Germany, Zimbardo's experimen became known with the film “Das Experiment” (D 2002) with Andrea Sawatzki and Moritz Bleibtreu.

But now back to the case of Palle Hardrup. Some time ago, I was asked if I wanted to work on a television show about how far one can go with the power of hypnosis. Following the case of Palle Hardrup and Shirhan B. Shirhan, the assassin of Robert F. Kennedy, who claimed to have carried out the assassination under hypnosis, should be investigated as to how strong the negative influence of hypnosis could really be. To this end, an experimental was designed to test whether certain persons in hypnotically induced states of emergency are prepared to inflict massive damage on other people at a certain command (called a trigger):

In the experiment, a test subject should be persuaded to snatch a suitcase from another person standing on a balustrade 10 meters above the ground under the condition that, should this person with the suitcase resist, he or she would be forced to fall down. The consequence of this fall would be severe injury, possibly even death. Of course, what the test subject wouldn’t know is that the situation was so secure that no one could have been really harmed.

A stunt team was hired - a woman from the team took on the role of carrying the suitcase. In addition, cardboard boxes were stacked on the stone floor at the bottom, invisible to outsiders, which were designed to slow down a possible fall and protect her. The test subject knew nothing about all this. He only knew that he was going to participate in an experiment with hypnosis to investigate the limits of social behavior.

To be on the safe side, my colleague, the psychologist Claudia Maurer, stood by me during the entirety of this unusual experiment.

Then I initiated hypnosis with the 39-year-old corpulent man I had selected in advance. In a trance, I told him to feel the spot in his body where he was making decisions. He located this spot behind his forehead. Finally, I told him that he should noticeably turn that spot off, neutralize it, and if he was ready, he should tell me. I also built up the hypnotic setting in such a way that I suggested tasks of varying difficulty to the subject, which he was supposed to carry out. Then I spoke of a game situation in which the subject has found himself, and of his hypnotic trance state which was constantly spreading and deepening throughout his mind. I told the subject a story in which aliens, human-like machines, begin to take control of the world. This story about aliens played a central role in the further hypnotic process. I do not want to say more about the technical approach I used in order to discourage attempts at imitation.

Of course, I wondered whether the test subject would, on my command, really push a stranger from whom he wants to snatch a suitcase and who resists in the process into the depths. But I certainly wouldn't have had anything against it if the test subject didn't follow my instructions, snapped out of the trance and was mad at me for putting them into this difficult situation. But that didn't happen, instead, the subject did everything I asked him to do without resistance. When I gave him the code word "black suitcase", the respondent simply snatched the suitcase from the woman and plunged her into the depths with brute force. The woman screamed and fell about 10 meters down onto the invisible cartons. Then the test person handed me the suitcase, as ordered. At the film location, a bank building in the middle of Berlin, it was quiet as a mouse, somehow a feeling of anxiety lay over the entire scene. Then I dehypnotized the test person, leading him from his trance state back to reality.

During the debriefing, the subject was told what he had done; he denied having ever pushed a woman to her death, he would never do anything like that. He said that he still knew something about a suitcase, but not much more. He had also developed spontaneous amnesia for other details of his behavior.

Hypnosis, that is, the trance state lasted about three hours. In my estimation, I had gained total command of the subject's mind and behavior.

Had I told him to arm himself and rob the next bank, he probably would have done so. As reinforcement, I could have said that this was also part of the game and that cameras were pointed at him all over the street that he couldn't see. Of course, my remarks will not please everyone and certainly give rise to controversial discussions.

But now back to the analysis. Hypnosis is a kind of mental tool, neither good nor bad unto itself. It develops a value only in the context of application, just as a hammer is neither good nor bad. With a hammer you can drive a nail into the wall and hang a picture of a dove for peace, but you can also deliberately hurt another person with it. Depending on who uses hypnotic techniques and what his intentions are, it can also cause harm. With a certain technique, a mixture of hypnotic suggestions, hidden conditioning, game situations, perception supplements and group pressure, it is possible to make people mentally dependent. Whether in barracks, in the military, in the circle of religious fanaticism, or even simply in advertising, the possibilities of influencing our mental world are enormous, and often we cannot really protect ourselves from targeted manipulation. But when the power of hypnotic influence is put to the service of a person’s health, it is one of the most valuable means at our disposal. However, it belongs exclusively in the professionally trained hands of medical doctors, dentists, psychologists, psychotherapists or academically accredited health practitioners.

Ethical questions and follow-up

Why did I do the experiment? Because according to the mainstream doctrine it is apodictically assumed that, in a hypnotic trance, one cannot induce the person being hypnotized to behave in a way that violates his moral principles. I never believed in this thesis.

The naively romanticized explanation of the phenomenon of hypnosis that prevails among some hypnosis experts is unprofessional and negligent; it leads to denying and repressing the shadow aspects and leaving this extremely important field in the unqualified hands of show and stage hypnotists, hypnosis impostors and quacks.

I have been accused by various quarters of having acted unethically. Under the conditions of an absolute ethic which regards human life as sacred and inviolable, any experiment in which there is a danger, albeit short-term, of destabilizing a person's psychological integrity must be rejected. From this strict point of view, criticism is entirely justified. Here human dignity has absolute priority over possible goals of gaining knowledge.

The vast majority of experiments or scientific experiments in social psychology and medicine, however, follow a different model, that of relative ethics. In the experiment described above, the subject signed a formal declaration of consent, lawyers and legal advisors were consulted and the subject was truthfully informed about the procedure. Using relative ethics, the benefit of an experiment is compared with the costs incurred by the subject. Only if the benefits outweigh the costs is the trial justified.

In the run-up to the broadcast, I selected a suitable test subject with the necessary care. He was informed that he was taking part in a hypnotic experiment about the limits of social behavior.

Various written and oral tests were carried out with the test person. Among other things, his ability to concentrate, his sensory perceptual readiness, his degree of linguistic differentiation and his emotional and psychological stability were tested. In addition, the current state of mind of the test person was recorded in detail by me directly before the test.

After the experiment, I explained all important steps to the subject. He was then intensively supervised by my colleague, the psychologist Claudia Maurer. I also did a detailed interview with the volunteer in my practice after the broadcast.

During the first broadcast on the 10^th of July 2009, the test person, others involved in the film, and I followed the program together on the premises of the film production company and then discussed all its implications exhaustively.

Literature:

Gresch, H.U.: Invisible Chains. 2003

URL: http://www.mind-control.psychoprobleme.de/ketten.pdf

Hachmeister, L. & Kloft, M.: The Goebbels Experiment: Propaganda and Politics. Dva 2005

Hypnosis and crime. Basel, 1954

Kohlberg, L.: The Psychology of Moral Development. Frankfurt am Main,1996

Milgram, S.: The Milgram Experiment: To Obedience to Authority. Reinbek, 2004

Contactor. G.: Hypnosis in practice. Paderborn, 2009

Streatfeild, D.: Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control. Published by Picador 2008

Welzer, H.: Perpetrator. How ordinary people become mass murderers. Frankfurt am Main, 2005

Zimbardo, P.: The Lucifer effect. The power of circumstances and the psychology of evil. Berlin, Heidelberg, 2008

© by DP Dr. Gerhard Schütz, Berlin 2009

For more information (in German) about this experiment, please go to the home page of my friend Gerhard Schütz:

http://www.gerhard-schuetz.de

I can especially recommend to my German-speaking colleagues his book:

Schütz G (1999) Träume, Trance und Kreativität: Über Hypnose und die erstaunliche Macht des Unbewussten. Hypnos Verlag, Stuttgart.

What do you think about this experiment?