[Hypnosis within the framework of psychotherapy]

Apart from special cases, hypnosis cannot be used to combat symptoms, nor to give the patient something he does not yet have. That it cannot be employed, as in the preanalytic period, as a means of interpretation and psychological exploration is clear from what is said by Anna Freud. After discussion in deep analysis during wakefulness, and in the light of the psychodynamic concepts of psychoanalysis, of the what interpretat to be given to the dynamic process of the symptom, we can exactly repeat this interpretation in a hypnotic trance. It is vulnerable, like hypnoid states (emotion, fear, anxiety, anger, fatigue, surmenage, transition from wakefulness to sleep) in which a psychic pathological process may easily start due to "difference of level, blank in the consiousness" and absent "abreaction". This vulnerability and increased tendency to accept has been encountered in hypnoid states as in artificially induced trances, and gives a much more rapid entrée to the patient's integration process. The interpretation of the dynamics of his symptom, once accepted, becomes an active force, and produces effects that would, in any event, have been produced if the integration process had occurred normally, without the acceleration provided by hypnotism, leading to resolution of the symptom. What is involved, therefore, is acceleration of the psychoanalytic process.