Erickson Paper on Pain Control
Milton Erickson’s paper, “An Introduction to the Study and Application of Hypnosis for Pain Control,” was first published in French in 1965 in Cahiers D’Anesthesiologie. It was later published in English in April 1967 in College of General Practice of Canada Journal.
Erickson presented the paper during the 1965 International Congress for Hypnosis and Psychosomatic Medicine, held in Paris, France from April 28 to 30. It was a landmark event organized under the patronage of the World Federation for Mental Health and hosted by French physician, Jean Lassner. The congress brought together international experts to discuss the role of hypnosis in psychosomatic medicine, focusing on its applications in psychotherapy, neurology, and behavioral science. The proceedings, later published by Springer, documented clinical research and theoretical debates on hypnosis as an altered state of consciousness versus a cognitive-behavioral phenomenon. The event played a crucial role in the professionalization of hypnosis, contributing to the formation of international networks such as the International Society of Hypnosis (ISH).
The following is the introduction for the paper. The rest of this lengthy paper can be read online at:
INTRODUTION
Hypnosis is essentially a communication of ideas and understandings to a patient in such a fashion that he will be most receptive to the presented ideas and thereby motivated to explore his own body potentials for the control of his psychological and physiological responses and behavior. The average person is unaware of the extent of his capacities of accomplishment which have been learned through the experiential conditionings of this body behavior through his life experiences. To the average person in his thinking, pain is an immediate subjective experience, all-encompassing of his attention, distressing, and to the best of his belief and understanding, an experience uncontrollable by the person himself. Yet as a result of experiential events of his past life, there has been built up within his body, although all unrecognized, certain psychological, physiological, and neurological learnings, associations, and conditionings that render it possible for pain to be controlled and even abolished. One need only to think of extremely crucial situations of tension and anxiety to realize that the severest pain vanishes when the focusing of the sufferer’s awareness is compelled by other stimuli of a more immediate, intense, or life-threatening nature. From common experience, one can think of a mother suffering extremely severe pain and all-absorbed in her pain experience. Yet she forgets it without effort or intention when she sees her infant dangerously threatened or seriously hurt. One can think of men in combat seriously wounded, but who do not discover their injury until later. There are numerous such comparable examples common in medical experience. Such abolition of pain occurs in daily life in situations where pain is taken out of awareness by more compelling stimuli of another character. The simplest example of all is the toothache forgotten on the way to the dentist’s office, or the headache lost in the suspenseful drama portrayed at the cinema. By such experiences as these in the course of a lifetime, be they major or minor, the body learns a wealth of unconscious psychological, emotional, neurological and physiological associations and conditionings. These unconscious learnings repeatedly reinforced by additional life experiences constitute the source of the potentials that can be employed through hypnosis to control pain intentionally without resorting to drugs.
