I assumed that the paralysis had some function in her life, so rather than take it away entirely, I moved it again. She ended up walking out with paralyzed fingernails, which she complained about bitterly! How would you feel if your fingernails were paralyzed? What if you started out with just a paralyzed arm, and ended up with the fingernails on every single finger of your hands paralyzed!
When Erickson wrote about the case in which he moved someone's hysterical paralysis, he alluded to the main criticism of hypnosis as a treatment procedure: that hypnosis only treats the symptom and not the "basic need," so a hypnotic "cure" will only result in some other symptom appearing.
This notion of needs evolved out of the work of Freud. He believed that people had certain needs. In those days they accepted "needs" as a well–formed description of something that happened inside someone's mind. Once someone had a need, there was nothing that could be done about it. It was only a question of how the need would express itself.
Let's say you had a need to get attention. If that need wasn't being fulfilled, you might break out in hives or something like that to get attention. The attention would be the "secondary gain" that you would get from having hives. If you had a need for people to be more supportive of you and take care of you, you might get a paralyzed arm.
Back in Freud's day there was another guy named Mesmer, and Mesmer used to do things that intrigued Freud. Mesmer would take somebody with hysterical paralysis and make the paralysis go away, but later on the person would end up having some other kind of problem.
Freud got the idea that if you cured someone's paralyzed arm, the symptom would of necessity express itself in another way. Her paralyzed arm might go away, but her face would break out in hives. He even gave this a name: "conversion." It's also called "symptom substitution."
Hypnosis has often been accused of only resulting in symptom substitution. Critics have claimed that while hypnosis may remove one symptom, the client will of necessity get another symptom in its place. When I entered the field of psychology, I was interested in testing this criticism of hypnosis.
I became very curious about hypnosis because just about everyone in the field of psychology told me "Don't learn about hypnosis. It only treats the symptom." I learned a long time ago that anything in life that is avoided strenuously is probably worthwhile, so this aroused my interest. While there are exceptions, I've noticed that people tend to avoid things that are very powerful.
People said "Don't learn hypnosis, because it only treats the symptom" and my first response was "Well, I'd like to be able to treat the symptom. If I can't do anything else, that might be worthwhile." They said "No, no. If you only treat the symptom and you cure it, it will pop out somewhere else."
Since I am a mathematician, the idea of getting something to pop out somewhere else was so much like an equation that it was attractive. I thought "Oh, I'd like to be able to do that! "So I started learning about hypnosis, and experimenting to find out what happened when you took away symptoms. I tried taking a few volunteers who had some problems, hypnotizing them, and removing symptoms carte blanche, without doing anything else. I wanted to find out where the symptom came out, to find out if there was some systematic pattern in how the conversion took place. Any good mathematician is going to ask the question "How does the symptom know where to come out next?" Nothing is random. If atomic particles aren't random, it takes a lot of audacity to think that symptoms can violate the laws of physics.
I began to notice that there were certain patterns to how symptoms came out. The new symptoms seemed to accomplish the same purpose that the old ones had accomplished. When I removed someone's symptom with hypnosis, she got another symptom that resulted in getting the same goodies.
The other thing that I noticed —which I hate to inform the world of psychology of—is that the symptom didn't always come back. In fact, people were better off when it did come back. If the only way someone could get attention was with her paralyzed arm, and I hypnotized her and took that symptom away, then she simply did not get attention. That seems to me less useful than having a conversion.
When I watched therapists work, I started noticing that very often they succeeded in "fixing" someone by making the person more limited! That may be a difficult idea to understand at first. However, if somebody is not in touch with her feelings—for example, if she is closed off to the world as a way of protecting herself against a lot of the hurt and suffering that one can feel in life —and you take that away from her, she ends up getting slaughtered emotionally. That doesn't strike me as being a useful outcome.
I know a man who had that happen. The clinician who worked with him thought his ideology was more important than his client's experience. The therapist believed it was good for people to feel everything intensely, so he set about teaching his client to respond intensely without asking the question "When he does feel things intensely, how is he going to deal with that?" That clinician didn't consider that the mechanisms which have protected his client from feeling things intensely must be there for a purpose.
The difference between conscious reasoning and unconscious response is that responses seem to have purpose and not meaning. It's very hard for people to understand the difference between those two, because they usually try to figure it out consciously. And, of course, consciously you are trying to discern the meaning of the difference between meaning and purpose. That is a really good way to confuse yourself. And as some of you begin to engage in that process, I want to speak to the rest of you.
Purpose is simply a function. If something has a function, it accomplishes something. What it accomplishes is not necessarily worthwhile. However, it is habitual. It accomplishes something that at some time in the history of that organism had a worthwhile meaning to it. Most of you who are clinicians have noticed that people engage in behaviors which would be useful and appropriate for someone who is five years old, but not for an adult. However, once the program for the behavior was set up, they continued to use it.
For example, there are some adults who cry and whine to get their way. They don't realize whining isn't going to help them any more. When you whined as a child, if you had the right parent, you got things you wanted. But when you go out into the world as an adult, it only works with a few people. So you whine about the fact that it doesn't work, and get even less of what you want.
When I learned about hypnosis, I decided I'd find out if you could just make something go away without ramifications. I hypnotized eight smokers, and just took away their smoking habit. There were no detectable ramifications at all with four of them. If ramifications aren't detectable, that's satisfactory to me. If there is some underlying "pressing need" that never surfaces, that's all right with me. If the Freudian analyst says it will hang on forever, that's OK, too. If it works, I don't care if it leaves some "pressing need" as long as it never has an impact on the person's life.
However, with the other four people whom I worked with, conversions did take place. I checked up on all of them periodically, because I wanted to find out if anything had occurred that was unusual, strange, inordinately pleasurable, or an interference in their lives. 1 also had them come in and sit around in my office, because I wanted to observe whether there were any radical changes in their behavior that they didn't report.
Another man who had been a smoker had a very interesting and unusual response. When this man called me to report, he said the following: "Everything is going beautifully. I haven't even wanted a cigarette. Everything has been really cool. I haven't had any other problems whatsoever. By the way, do you do any marriage counseling?"