In plunging the patient into the hypnoidal state, we have him revert to a primitive rest-state with its consequent beneficial results. The suggestibility of the state, if skillfully handled, is apt to increase the therapeutic efficacy. Relaxation of nervous strain, rest from worry, abatement of emotional excitement are known to be of great help in the treatment of nervous troubles of the neurasthenic, or of the so-called “psychoasthenic” variety. That is what we precisely observe in the treatment of psychopathic or neurotic diseases by means of the agency of the hypnoidal state, the efficacy of which is all the greater on account of the presence of the important trait of suggestibility.
The most important fact, however, is the access gained through the hypnoidal state to the patient’s stores of subconscious reserve neuron energy, thus helping to bring about an association of disintegrated, dissociated mental-systems.
Dr. John Donley in his article, “The Clinical Use of Hypnoidization” (Journal of Abnormal Psychology for August-September, 1908), gives the following account of the method of hypnoidization:
“The treatment of that large group of disorders, forgotten memories, and emotions is operative in the production of mental disaggregation, but also in those numerous instances where the experience causing the obsessive idea or emotion is well known to the upper consciousness.
“In hypnoidal states they were made to reproduce their obsessive thoughts and images and then to describe them in words. When this had been accomplished and they had received further assurance and persuasion from the experimenter, although the purely intellectual content of their obsessions remained known to them, the insistent automatic character and disturbing emotional factors had disappeared. In this metamorphosis of emotional reaction we may observe one of the most interesting and useful attributes of the hypnoidal state.”
Dr. Donley gives a series of cases which he treated successfully from psychognostic and psychotherapeutic standpoints. The reader is referred to the original article.
“The value of hypnoidization,” says Dr. T. W. Mitchell, “in the resurrection of dissociated memories is that which is perhaps best established. And this applies not only to the restoration of the forgotten experiences of ordinary amnesia, but to the recovery of dissociated memories that are of pathogenic significance.... Sidis himself has insistently taught that the reassociation of dissociated complexes effects a cure of psychopathic disease.... My own experience, so far as it goes, tends to corroborate in every respect the claims put forward by Sidis....”
While in the hypnoidal state the patient hovers between the conscious and the subconscious, somewhat in the same way as in the half-drowsy condition one hovers between wakefulness and sleep. The patient keeps on fluctuating from moment to moment, now falling more deeply into a subconscious condition in which outlived experiences are easily aroused, and again rising to the level of the waking state. Experiences long submerged and forgotten rise to the full light of consciousness. They come in bits, in chips, in fragments, which may gradually coalesce and form a connected series of interrelated systems of experiences apparently long dead and buried. The resurrected experiences then stand out clear and distinct in the patient’s mind. The recognition is fresh, vivid, and instinct with life, as if the experiences had occurred the day before.
It cannot be insisted too much that the hypnoidal state is not a slight hypnosis. The hypnoidal state is a light sleep state, a twilight state. The hypnoidal state is the anabolic state of repose, characteristic of primitive life.