15th International Congress of Hypnosis of the International Society of Hypnosis (ISH)
October 2-7, 2000
Munich

hosted by
Milton Erickson Society for Clinical Hypnosis, Germany (MEG)

 

Some Recommendations About the Use of Hypnosis with Subjects referring Experiences like Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind.

Presentation for the World Congress of the International Society of Hypnosis “Monaco 2000”.
Monaco (Germany) October 2000

Cigada M.V1, D’Ambrosio G.M.
1:AMISI – European School for Hypnotic Psychotherapy

The Close Encounters discussed theme is going to be relevant for a greater and greater number of psychotherapists. The Authors want to recall to the general specialistic attention a phenomenon that is spreading all over the world and that is named as “Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind” (CE IV), with a particular regard to the ones defined as “abductions”.
We don’t think this is the place to dissert about the whole phenomenon; our aim is to present two different cases and describe an approaching method that has demonstrated to be useful in taking care of these subjects. Then the Authors base their recommendations on the observations and experiences with them and on the para-scientific literature already existent: they suggest caution about the way of using hypnosis and in choosing application times of the method; in particular:
• to use hypnosis with therapeutic purpose only, being careful with the verbal interaction with the subject, with the processing of the emergent material – any way it is – and maintaining an equal distance with all the matter;
• don’t surrender if the patient, a relative of his/her or an ufologist insists to use hypnosis only to obtain more and more information about the presumed events which happened to the subject: the Authors recommend to maintain the setting;
• remind the patient that a memory that has been caught during a hypnotic trance is not more real than others;
• a work leaded with the psychotherapy techniques is necessary to link the revealed topics to already known data about the subject’s speech, dreaming and imagining;
• remember that our choices must be guided by the intention to assuage the patient’s suffering.

History of V
The first subject is a man – that we call V. He is a teacher, about 40 years old. He is fitted well in his social life, job and with his affective life; his mind seems completely present to his memories and he is not easily moved. He has been working in a psychotherapeutic setting for two years before he allows a hypnotic intervention.
His story began with some visions he had like dreams during the night, after having read a famous book about the question of abductions by the Harvard psychiatrist John Mack (1). Then he remembered that he had a circular scar over his left leg whose origin was not clear. His brother has a similar one.
He discovered a strange object under his face skin, an object that was studied and classified as an “implant” of unknown origin.
He had some dreams that upset him and that seemed like recallings. A peculiar remarkable particular of his dreams was that the ones with elements that recalled his strange experiences intruded into his “normal” dreams, breaking them.
During the psychotherapeutic work these dreams began richer in particulars and assumed a sharper temporal collocation.
His mother and a paternal uncle had referred to him analogue strange experiences. What shocked him was that his five years old son was referring the same kind of encounters too.
Then he was perplexed and angry with this reality he couldn’t fight. The psychotherapeutic work had the aim to help him to face his memories and recallings better and make him feel not so bad and insecure.
This work lasted two years, time that some ufologists judged too long.

Hystory of M
The second subject is a woman – that we call M. She is an housewife about 70 years old but all her physic and psychological functions we can age about 60. She is intelligent, intuitive, aggressive, empathic. She arrived to the observation because of strange dreams that she couldn’t link to any memory, but the setting was immediately invaded by her life story: she was born in an insane familiar context, not desired; her father beat her mother and she has a memory of a father’s attempt to kill her mother.
She was put in a religious boarding-school when she was 4 years old. She seldom met her parents. The nuns were very aggressive. A normal punishment was to force children to sleep out of the bed all the night, squatted on the floor, when the temperature was less than 9 degrees (Celsius). The poorer children – like M. – had to go to cry to the funeral ceremonies, so to support themselves at the boarding-school.
In this severe and deprived environment, her pleasure was to study – when she came to the observation, she was studying German at a good level.
But as a child she expressed affirmations that increased her punishments – like the one that the planet Jupiter was a star that had not expanded: this is true, but in the ’20’s this fact was not known.
Her life was not easy. She got married, she had two sons and left the work as employer after having the second one. She tried to educate them in a particular way, due to the fact that she is very involved in Nature. Her husband had never been a particularly strong figure beside her.
Beyond this tiring part of her life, there was another, when she had some agitation attacks, so sometimes she took shelter in the bathroom hoping the attack passed spontaneously. Because of these attacks – that now we can recognize as panic attacks, but that at that time were not a nosologic recognized distress – she had a lot of hospitalizations where they practiced electroshocks. Indeed it was surprising to notice what a good quality of integrity she has been able to preserve after these treatments.
She reproduced some of these attacks during the psychotherapy. The psychoterapy lasted 2 years and half. During the first and the second one, the therapist gave her an homeopathic remedy, Arnica, that is good for traumas, recognizing the attack as a consequence of some kind of mental shock. The successive attacks were not so severe and they passed only speaking about.
M. had not particular images of strange creatures in her mind, but only the impression to spend nights in other places that were not her bed, after that she was very disturbed. She affirms to be terrorized by acuminate instruments and she seems to have a memory of an intrusive manneuver in her nose. An NMR was not accurate enough to let us to give her a sure answer.
All the psychotherapeutic work, that has surely improved her life, was not enough to let her to form a coherent recalling that could explain her dreams and sensations.

Brief History of the Hypnotic experience

We made three hypnotic inductions both with V. and with M.

V. The first suggestion was an open one to allow him to recreate a pleasant place “from your memory or from your fantasy”.
V. chose to imagine a beach in Sicily with gold sand. We anchored these sensations in such a way that we could recall them during eventual future recalling of traumatic experiences. It is interesting to note that V. has referred a better eyesight without glasses during the imaginations and for some hours after the hypnotic experience.

During the second hypnosis we suggested to V. to imagine a room to be reordered where he found a book with a history that interested him - the history of the world.
V. started his remembering from the imagine of a small hammer. Then he had the feeling of hiding himself and peeping someone from a little forgotten room of the house, and at the meantime he remembered he saw a strange being without hair.

During the third hypnosis, after a while V. started remembering a traumatic experience where he was manipulated, bound, seized. He had a remembering about a phenomenon like a CE IV: he recalled having got up from his bed and gone without walking passing through the door, and that it was not the first time. He was frightened and he cried during the recalling. He repeated several times the words “they want the seed”, “semah” or “seman” and that someone was telling him “don’t fear”.

M. The first suggestion was the same made for V.
M. remembered a place “that doesn’t exist anymore”, a rock called the “witch rock”. She also remembered herself climbing over something (the rock?).

During the second hypnosis we suggested to M. to go down along a stair, to go across a garden and to cross a bridge; at this point M. had a panic attack, we succeeded in giving her some relaxation suggestions going back to the garden, but after a while, as soon as we suggested some rememberings, she had a second panic attack, so we brought back to the flowers of the garden and from there to the awakening. Once awake she told us of some traumatic experiences during the years of the boarding-school.
The panic attack was very long and it seemed referred to a severe shock. We couldn’t convince her that what she felt had gone or was in the past. Sometimes M. seemed to enter in her crying like a little child, and she wasn’t able to stop if her therapeutist didn’t intervene with decision. This was not only during the hypnosis, but during all her therapy every now and then her therapeutist had to take her with decision.

During the third hypnosis we suggested to M. to visualize a wood and the wooden rings inside the tree trunks, as a metaphor of memory and remembering. M. referred a place somewhere in the mountains (the Pyrenees ?), where a young woman or a child had to escape because some people wanted to burn her; so we used the V-K dissociation to reduce the emotional impact of traumatic experiences and M. referred the imagine of a bird flying high (a crow?).
During the same meeting, we made a second induction where we recalled the tree rings, M. quite immediately started speaking about the black bird, “it is not a bird – she said – it is a flying machine and they want me to enter “. There was a being that impressed her very much, with great eyes, a being that was partly a machine. Then she was terrorized because she felt herself disappearing. The strange being was doing this to her in aim to let her enter in the flying machine.

Follow up
After his hypnotic work-session, V. was very grateful: his memories and recallings were much more vivid and richer in particulars. Two months later, he decided to end the meetings with the therapist because his recallings were “opening” automatically, on and on, so he felt he could continue by himself.
After the work, M. was much calmer during the day as well as during the night. She became patient with herself; she presented some personal belongings, stating that she was no longer attached to the past as if thoughts and things were a ballast only.
Her heaviest memories were becoming lighter, slighter, and she could spend her time in pleasant situations. But she was not satisfied because she had no proofs of a CE IV.

Some observations about the Hypnotic experiences

It seems useful to us pointing out some aspects of the two subjects’ hypnotic rememberings.

V.
1. hiding himself
2. peeping
3. “they want the seed”
4. the word (name?) Semah or Seman (in Italian seme= sperm)
5. being able to watch his own genitals
6. being impotent (“I feel like a prey”)
7. being bound, controlled, manipulated
8. strange smell (cold sulfur)
9. strong emotions (he cried and was frightened).

M.
1. escaping toward magician or exotic places (India)
2. “nobody believes me”
3. special relationship with animals and Nature in general
4. suffering for bindings or tight dresses
5. strange smell (like mould or deserted ant-hill or wet cardboard)
6. swimming-pool phobia
7. anger
8. necessity to fight
9. a young woman cudgeled
10. boarding-school, hospital, electroshock
11. panic attacks.

Discussion

We found four interesting points for a methodological discussion that we shall develop in other contexts but that we want just to report here.

First: there are surprising analogies between the subjects. The points 1- 6- 7- 8 of V.’s history and the points 1- 4- 5 of M.’s history are very close.

Second: several points suggest the importance of a psychotherapeutic setting in handling these subjects to help them to face anger, phobia, a sense of impotence or abuse, and to help them to find a correct way to manage emotions (points 6 and 9 for V. and 1 2 6 7 8 11 for M).

Third: we know that all the information we get during hypnosis is not necessarily “the truth”, so hypnosis cannot be used to prove that a subject has had a real CE IV experience. So the subjects must be previously informed about this: they have to know that the hypnotist is not a person who has the power to verify proofs and to declare that their statements are an objective truth or a false one. We have to remember that the hypnotist always has a great ascendancy over people due to the way they fancy him.

Fourth: we have compiled a protocol of intervention and we believe that it is necessary that the subjects read it before using hypnosis. The protocol is available in Italian and English at http://www.cun-italia.net/parsec/parsec.htm

Conclusions

The therapist has to respect his patient’s system of beliefs. Till we will not have enough scientific proof of the reality of these phenomena, and till we will have a certain number of subjects well handled in this research, we must consider CE IV a firm belief like a religion or a philosophy and our duty is to help these subjects to reduce their discomfort. Handling emotions must be lead in a psychotherapeutic -like context.
So at the moment our goal is “simply” an hypnotic psychotherapy (2) based on the consideration and evaluation of its modern concepts.

Up to recent times, the study of hypnosis was limited only to its external phenomena. Now it is clear that it is useless to study it only as an end in itself. (M.Erickson)

Bibliography

1. John Mack – “ Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens” – 1994
2. G.P. Mosconi et al.
Hypnosis , Hypnotic Psychotherapy and “Neo-Ericksonian” Principles,
Quarant’anni di Ipnosi in Italia: presente e futuro- Atti XI congresso nazionale AMISI
AMISI Ed. - 1998 Milano
An English version can be found in
Rivista Italiana di Ipnosi e Psicoterapia Ipnotica
Anno 20°, N°3 pg 72-75

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