Observations placeholder

The spirit or soul is described as "an animating force." Put more simply, the spirit affects the mind and the mind affects the body. We know from our experiences of life that our physical condition affects the mind and that if the mind is disturbed, so is the soul.

Again I wish to recall what I have said in the introduction. The answer to disease is not simple, not "either-or" but "both-and."

We are so marvellously built that our nerves are set up in reflex patterns for our automatic protection and to keep us from being distracted when we are concentrating on something. As an example if something touches our eyes, without thinking we blink. We breathe and our hearts beat automatically. If we get infections by bacteria, we do not have to think "Now I have to get the white cells of my body together to fight this bug." It happens automatically.

************

When he came in for his psychiatric history and mental status. I found a polite, personable, clean-minded twenty-three-year-old married man. He had already spent time in jail and regardless of this had had two more convictions in the past year. The judge had informed his lawyer that he would be facing a long jail term on this second conviction since it was quite evident he wouldn't control his exhibiting.

The lawyer had discovered the same thing I discovered in taking his past history. This man had been very reluctant to admit he had such a problem because he was so terribly embarrassed by his behavior. Even more important, in listening to this young man both the lawyer and I began to comprehend something that the judge and most people didn't understand: it wasn't that he wouldn't control his behavior; he couldn't, even though he was facing another jail term.

After I explained to him that hypnosis, as we use it in psychiatry, has no danger, I taught him how to relax so that I could induce the hypnotic trance state. I took him back through age regression to the worst thing that had ever happened in his life. He centered upon an event where his Mother was spanking him when he was three years of age. He had urinated outside in the yard. His mother came rushing out and, in anger, pulled his little shorts down, bent him over her leg, and hit him on his bottom. She also hit his penis and testicles with her hand, which caused him a great deal of pain and fright.

Before bringing him back to a conscious state, I gave him two post-hypnotic suggestions: "When your mind is ready to consciously remember what happened to you at three years that made you afraid something had happened to your penis, you will." I also gave him instructions tailored especially for his case, which would assure him that he had a normal penis and was a normal man.

Following this first hypnotic session he ceased to exhibit. He was given seven more hypnotic sessions, with all of the post-hypnotic suggestions being more strongly enforced. Within three days after the first session, he had fully recalled the spanking incidence.

During the seventh and last session, while hypnotized, he was given the suggestion that a picture would form in his mind which would explain his tendency to exhibit. Upon coming out of the trance state he described a symbolic picture that formed in his mind and that he interpreted himself as a castration fear that had come about as a result of what happened when he was three years old.

When the judge learned that he had received psychiatric treatment for his condition, instead of sending him to jail, as he had threatened to do, he put him on two years' probation. My patient fulfilled his probation. Ten years later when my patient came through town and stopped by to see