There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
When Shakespeare wrote these famous lines from Hamlet at the turn of the sixteenth/seventeenth century, he was referring to the current thinking about the way in which the mind works. And, of course, no one really knew back then how the mind functioned until the German philosophers, Emmanuel Kant (1724-1804) and Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, began to ponder the question. The final cementation of psychological wisdom was then synthesized by the psychiatrists Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and Carl Jung (1875-1961) who introduced their concept of psychoanalysis.
Today we have taken a clipping from these roots and grown the tree into a viable treatment for the mind based largely on the work of Freud and his successors who through clinical practice devised a means of allowing the client to heal his/her own mind with minimal intervention from the practitioner.
Freud’s principal contribution to clinical practice was the phenomenon of employing the free association of ideas in order to encourage the client to unravel his/her own distress. Free association empowers the client to link seemingly unrelated episodes in his/her life with the emotive impact of such events. The client’s unconscious mind, housed in the limbic system, can chain link his/her thoughts and emotions in order to assess the innermost nuggets of his/her dilemma. This facility is built into our survivalist instincts as a self-healing mechanism for the mind – just as we are capable of recovering from physical injury or disease.
This invaluable tool of utilising free association is used in all branches of clinical psychotherapeutic practice regardless of whatever discipline with which the practitioner may be working. And, of course, analytical hypnotherapy is no exception because it will be important for the client to assess the bedrock of his/her emotive responses retained in the limbic system so that his/her distress can be untangled, emotive reactions defused and unwanted behaviour relinquished successfully.
Free association is most prominent in our dreams and daytime reveries but can easily be assessed via hypnotic relaxation and, from this vantage point, the client can be assisted to instigate his/her own creative healing process and to manifest his/her own enlightened understanding of his/her psyche. The therapeutic journey is, consequently, a process from which everyone can benefit in numerous and unexpected ways.
Help for yourself
If you feel the need to untangle the distress and suffering within your own mind which might hold you back for living a stress-free life, then please visit the “Find a Practitioner” page of the JMHT website (www.jmhypnotraining.co.uk) in order to help yourself to overcome this imbalance.
Jacquelyne Morison
Jacquelyne Morison Hypnotherapy Training