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Presenter: Richard P. Kluft, MD, PhD

Hypnosis and Psychoanalysis: Twelve Steps toward Mutual Enrichment --Toward Recapturing Squandered Opportunities

Sigmund Freud?s psychoanalysis emerged from his study of the work of Bernheim, Liebault, and Charcot with the ?Grand Hysterics? in fin de si?cle France, and his work with Josef Breuer in Vienna. In short order Freud repudiated hypnosis, the importance of dissociation, and the role of trauma in the etiology of the ?Grand Hysterias,? or what modern psychiatry has termed the dissociative disorders. Most proponents of psychoanalysis have considered Freud?s transition away from a psychology of dissociation and constitutional differences in the strength of individual?s ?mental cohesion.? They see his movement toward a psychology of active conflict and defense, resistance analysis, unconscious motivations and fantasies, and the therapeutic use of transference analysis as well-grounded and progressive scientific advances. However, neither the attacks by psychoanalysis on hypnosis nor the attacks from hypnosis against psychoanalysis hold up well when subjected to serious scrutiny. Freud?s rationales for abandoning hypnosis and the classic psychoanalytic rationales offered in support of his stances reveal startling failures of both accuracy and logic. For a century and a quarter, psychoanalysis and hypnosis have developed in a manner that has precluded either a circumspect reconsideration of the schisms that once divided them or the rationales used to justify this ongoing separation. For example, both psychoanalysis and hypnosis appear to have forgotten that Freud?s instructions for free association are replete with both suggestions and visual imagery. They bear the clear markings of the world of hypnosis he claimed to have left behind. This workshop will begin with a brief review of the curious decisions and logical failings often presented as wise and scientific rationales for these curious circumstances. Thereafter it will explore twelve specific ways in which knowledge from the field of hypnosis can be used to enhance the power of psychoanalysis, and twelve specific ways in which knowledge from the field of psychoanalysis can be used to enhance the power of hypnosis.