Paper to the 15th International Congress of Hypnosis

Paper to the 15th International Congress of Hypnosis
Munich, Germany, October 2000

In our model of surgical pain control by Hypnosis, we are proposing that it happens in a hypnotic trance state that is accompanied by a reversal of the normal patterns of a person's normal way of thinking.

In saying this, we have to be very clear what a trance state is. Classically it is defined as the condition in which a person's Critical Factor (CF) is set in abeyance. Today, we say that a trance state exists when a person's meta function (m(f)) is inoperative.

Both CF and m(f) is about our ability to have an "about" of a person, thing or situation, i.e. an opinion, critique, criticism,.determination, evaluation, conclusion, judgement. It is about about our ability to think meta.

When I was a stage subject of Reveen the Impossibilist on the stage in Hamilton Place, Ontario before an audience of 3500 people and he told me to conduct the symphony orchestra, I did so and it was Beethoven's V Symphony. My m(f) was completely inoperant. At no stage did it occur to me to say to him, "Don't be an idiot. There is no symphony orchestra here." I was also to swim the length of a Olympic 100m free style race, and there was no pool and no water.

The philosopher, Hans Vaihinger, in his work, The Philosophy of As If, showed how human being things.

Thinking, he said, was about the transits of information from one sensory system to another. And it is clear that these transits are reflected in our speech. A simple example is when you say, "When I saw you, I was so happy." Here the sentence indexes that the information orginally in V(ision), "when I saw . . . " then transits to K(inaesthetics) a.k.a. feelings.

The field of Neuro-Linguistic Programming studied these transits. They named this field of study, Strategies. The above example would be coded V -> K. Thus, people have Decision Strategies that are uniquely their own and they can be of any order of magnitude of complexity. They have procrastination strategies and phobia strategies.

If you can work out the strategy for anything, you can infract across it. It is for this that NLP is famous for their Six Minute Flying Phobia Cure. We can cut across the strategy of a Behavioural Obsessive Compulsive Disorder in three sentences. Of course for the interested and curious student, the question is HOW do you do it? The answer is for another forum and for another time.

If you now set aside the operation of CF or m(f) and then you reverse the normal thinking patterns of a person then you will have secured a true hypnotic trance state.

Now, in life for most of us, are concordant with what Neurophysiology has said of us. We are all Left Brain in our operations and the Left Brain is dominant. It is for this that we can be aware of what our Left Brain is thinking.

This is however, not true of our Right Brain operations. We simply do not know what our Right Brain is doing. However, the evidence is that as it is not dead it is alive, active and is doing something. However, whatever are these Right Brain operations, they remain out of conscious awareness.

We now agree completely with Richard Bandler and John Grinder, that if, in a hypnotic trance (and it can only happen in a hypnotic trance) you invert the above arrangement the a person will be truly in a deep trance. It is then that we have full srugical pain control by Hypnosis.

Victor Rausch a dentist in the late '70s had his gall bladder removed by Auto-hypnosis. I interviewed him 3 days after his operation.

At this interview, Victor, was most eager to tell me how he did it. The plan of my interview finally came to the point at which I asked him, "How did you do it?" He replied, "I did by music!"

At that time, I had become aware of Bandler's and Grinder's proposition. Without what I knew, I would not have understood what Victor had shared with me. But once I heard what he told me, I then realized that here was the sensory based confirmation of Victor's experience of what surgical trance had to be.

Of course, the problem was to develop an efficient and effective model that would encompass these propositions and ideas.

By 1994 when we had tested the model on our last case and it was the 14th or 15th surgical case, we decided to videotape the operation that Janet Bedford had to have and the to proceed to write the book on our model. The work is entitled, The Knife Without Pain.