Reconstructing the Mythic Body in Milton Erickson's Hypnotherapy

Dissertation, Emory University (1994)
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Abstract

This dissertation examines Milton Erickson's hypnotherapeutic and metaphorical treatments of cases involving somatic changes. Cases involving bedwetting, breast growth, "tubal spasms", and the case of Pietro, the flutist with the fat lip, serve to focus discussion of metaphorical interventions in somatic conditions. Erickson's use of rapport, metaphor, and activation of individual bodily experience creates conditions in the hypnotic setting that produce, in the subject, a state similar to the maternal-infant relationship that exists prior to symbolic communication. Both Daniel Stern's thoughts on maternal affect attunement and Mark Johnson's description of the bodily basis of image schemata and metaphor serve to interpret Erickson's ability to effect bodily changes. It is argued that because metaphor arises from bodily experience and in nonverbal communication between mother and infant, that hypnotic communication of the type Erickson employed invokes shared bodily experiences. Hypnosis, by establishing a condition of unity through techniques used to create rapport, recreates conditions similar to those between mother and infant when nonverbal communication was central to shared experience. By creating conditions of preverbal communication, Erickson takes the hypnotic subject out of the socially constructed order. When the subject is removed from the contextual structure, in hypnosis, new or forgotten bodily experiences become possible and the bodily state is malleable. Metaphor or narrative, which arise from bodily experience originally through cross-modal matching, may also return new structures to bodily experience as they are actively interpreted by the subject

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