Feeling No Pain

The following article by Jerome Beatty and ads were originally published in the November 1945 issue of The American Magazine 
(In the public domain https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_American_Magazine_(1906-1956))
Additional photos of Milton H. Erickson are supplied by The Milton H. Erickson Foundation Archives
Edited by Sarah Clinebell, Archives Specialist

Can hypnotism really take the pain out of childbirth and relieve the torture of mental illness? Our staff writer visits one of America’s leading authorities on hypnosis and learns it has grown from the charlatan, vaudeville-stunt stage into a promising tool of medical science

Mrs. Milton H. Erickson, of Eloise, Mich., has two fine children – Betty Alice, 7 years old, and Allan, 4. When they were born Mrs. Erickson says she felt no pain, since her husband, each time, put her in a hypnotic trance and told her the birth would be painless, and sure enough it was.

To be strictly accurate, she did feel a little pain, she says, because she believes that every mother should experience some pains of childbirth, and she asked her husband, each time, to let a little creep in. So, during the proceedings, he said, “Now you will feel pain,” and she did, but when she said “That’s enough,” he quickly banished it by merely saying, “Now you feel no pain.”

Mrs. Erickson told me she never fears the dentist. Before she leaves for her appointment her husband hypnotizes her and gives her a post-hypnotic suggestion that she will suffer in no way whatsoever. Then he awakens her and away she goes, as high-spirited, she says, as if she were off to buy a new hat, and although she is wide awake in the dentist’s chair, his drills and instruments can never hurt her. 

Dr. Milton H. Erickson, 1945

Mrs. Erickson’s husband is Dr. Milton H. Erickson, a psychiatrist, director of Psychiatric Research and Training at Eloise Hospital, on the edge of Detroit, and is outstanding in hypnotic research. He is one of the leading contributors of reports on hypnosis to medical, psychiatric, and psychological journals. He lectures on hypnosis to medical men throughout the United States and Canada; at Wayne University College of Medicine, in Detroit, where he is associate professor of psychiatry, he gives his students what is generally agreed to be the most practical instruction in the use of hypnosis to be found anywhere.

Thanks largely to Dr. Erickson, medical men are beginning to recognize the therapeutic value of hypnosis. But its use is restricted, because many men and women believe hypnotism is akin to brainwashing, that the hypnotist exercises some devilish power over the mind of his subject, who forever after will be a weak-willed captive, controlled by the hypnotist’s waving hands and evil eye.

I told a number of mothers about Mrs. Erickson’s painless childbirths and asked them “Would you like to try it?” Only one answered, “Yes,” but she had a qualification. She said, “I’d never let my husband hypnotize me. He might control my will for the rest of my life.” The others were afraid that a hypnotic birth might affect the mind of either the mother or child or both.

I can assure you that Mrs. Erickson is a normal, gifted woman, with a mind of her own, and her children are the kind that parents are proud of. When I asked her whether her husband had any spooky control over her mind she laughed and said, “He can’t hypnotize me unless I consent and he can’t make me do anything I don’t want to do or say anything I don’t want to say.”

Dr. Erickson smiled and nodded. “It can’t be done. I have hypnotized some of my subjects more than 500 times over a period of years and have closely noted their reactions. There has never been any alteration of personality and none of them has ever become more susceptible to suggestion.”

Obviously, if his studies had indicated that there was the slightest possibility of any harmful effect from hypnosis, Dr. Erickson would not use it in the birth of his own children.

Dr. Erickson told me he has never used hypnosis in childbirth for anyone but his wife, for he won’t risk a clash with prejudice. Throughout the world babies are stillborn every day, or born with some mental or physical blemish, and nobody blames the obstetrician. But if hypnosis happened to be used at such an unfortunate birth, many an uninformed relative would be firmly convinced that psychological hocus-pocus caused the tragedy and would sue for malpractice.

In Chicago, however, is an obstetrician who, I learned, has made several hundred successful painless deliveries under hypnosis and who continues its use, but the hospital with which he is connected, fearing bad publicity, insists that it all be kept a dark secret.

Fifty years may pass before hypnotic childbirth is accepted even by 100,000 of the nearly 3,000,000 American women who painfully bear children each year, but the value of hypnosis in helping to cure queer quirks in the minds of men and women has been demonstrated by so many doctors, including Dr. Erickson and his students, that in psychiatry it has its foot in the door.

Psychiatrists who have tried and rejected hypnosis give two reasons: Only one out of five persons can be hypnotized deeply, they say, and “cures” are not permanent. Dr. Erickson asserts that both of those contentions are wrong. He states that 95 percent of the would-be subjects can be put into a deep trance (if he fails, usually one of his students succeeds) and that cures are permanent, provided treatment is given by a psychiatrist who is as skilled in his technique as a surgeon who performs a gall bladder operation.  The therapeutic use of hypnosis, he says, is nothing to be attempted by vaudeville hypnotists, not even by professors of psychology.

Dr. Erickson and colleague with a demonstration subject, 1960

Dr. Erickson let me sit in at a session with Dorothy X., one of his patients, a pretty, highly intelligent girl who had just been graduated from an Eastern college. After a lecture on hypnosis she had gone to her professor of psychology to ask whether hypnosis might help her, and the professor, a friend of Dr. Erickson’s, had sent her to him.

Ever since she could remember, she told us, she had been afraid of the water. It had affected her nerves, impeded her social life, for she lived convenient to a beach, her friends went boating and swimming, and she had to either refuse almost all invitations in summer or suffer emotional tortures on shore and in boats. Sometimes she would force herself to go into the water, but, once in, would suffer uncontrollable terror and would run out and as far away as she could get.

“I know enough about psychiatry,” she told Dr. Erickson, “to realize that if I could remember what caused my fear, it could be cured. I’ve tried hard but I can’t.”

Some unqualified psychiatrists and some quacks, Dr. Erickson told me, would hypnotize such a patient, tell her that the next time she went into the water she would have no fear, and probably the post-hypnotic suggestion would work – once or twice. Almost invariably, her fear would return. Dr. Erickson doesn’t attempt to bring about a cure by demanding that the patient get well. As you will see, he seeks the cause of the trouble and uses his psychiatric skill to help the patient cure himself.

Dr. Erickson said he had had his first session with Dorothy a week before, hypnotizing her for the first time, lightly, asking no questions. At this second session, in the evening in his office at Eloise Hospital, in addition to the three of us, there were present Dr. Erickson’s secretary, taking notes, and another psychiatrist. I report only the highlights of the session, which lasted nearly two hours.

Dorothy smilingly settled herself in a comfortable chair. Dr. Erickson said quietly “Close your eyes. Go into a deep sleep. Go sound asleep. When you are sleeping deeply and soundly, raise your left hand, but not until you are sleeping deeply and soundly.” He repeated this for a minute or so and finally Dorothy lifted her left hand.

Dr. Erickson asked softly, “Do you like to go swimming?”

She shook her head and opened her eyes, although she was still in a deep trance. “I have horrible visions of people turning blue and drowning.”

Dr. Erickson asked, “What year is this?”

She answered, “1945.”

“Now it’s 1944,” he said. What year is it?

“1944,” she answered.

Gently he took her back, year by year, by an involved, psychological technique, until he finally said “Now you are six years old. How old are you?”

“Six years old,” she said.

“I am your best friend,” he said. “The person in whom you confide, to whom you take all your troubles. Who am I?”

“My grandmother,” she said, looking him squarely in the eye.

“Do you like to go swimming?” he asked.

“No,” she answered, shuddering slightly. “I’m scared. People get drowned.”

“Do you know anybody who was drowned?”

“Once I thought Marty was drowned.”

“Tell me about it.”

She looked surprised. “You know all about it,” she said.

“Tell me again.”

“But you know all about it,” she resisted. She didn’t want to talk about it.

No dramatist could write a more tense scene than the one that followed. Apparently some horrible event had happened when she was 4 or 5 years old, and it was causing her fear of water. According to psychiatrists, if the unconscious mind of a child of 6 would reveal the forgotten experience, Dorothy could be cured. Would she tell, or would she refuse? I sat on the edge of my chair, holding by breath.

“I want to hear all about it again,” Dr. Erickson, playing the role of her grandmother in her unconscious mind, said very gently.

She took a deep breath, looked at him with a slight protest in her eyes, then began slowly, “Marty was just a tiny little girl, so pretty in a little pink dress.” Marty was her younger sister, probably about 2 years old.

Suddenly Dorothy exclaimed excitedly “She was standing beside a big washtub filled with water. In the kitchen. She fell in the water. I tried to pick her up. She fell in the water. I screamed, but Mother didn’t come. Marty cried. I lost my balance and fell in the water. Dirty, soapy water. We were drowning. No one would save us. Marty was drowning and I couldn’t save her. Then Mother heard us and came.”

She began to sob. “I thought Marty was dead. She was blue, and water was coming out of her nose. She looked awful. I thought I’d killed her. She was sick all day. It was all my fault.”

Dr. Erickson relaxed. I relaxed. The other psychiatrist whispered to me, “By ordinary psychoanalysis it might have taken 50 to 100 sessions before the psychiatrist could have made her remember.”

Dorothy gave more details, then Dr. Erickson said quietly, “You understand that this has something to do with your fear of swimming?”

She nodded. “Then there was Mr. Johnson,” she said, the words pouring out pell-mell. “At the shore. He knew I was afraid to go in the water, but he persuaded me to go out on a pier, and he lifted me up and jumped in the water with me. He thought that would cure me of my fright. I screamed. I wanted to kill him. I really did. He was a nice man and wanted to help me, but I wanted to kill him. I fought and screamed, and finally he let me go, and I ran and ran and ran, and I wanted to get something and kill him.” Later she said, “I’m afraid I’ll push somebody in the water and kill them.”

Dr. Erickson quietly analyzed the situation for her, showed her she had no reason for fear, then he said, “When you are a big girl, you will remember all this and will realize that you have no reason to be afraid, nor to blame yourself for anything that happened.”

Slowly he brought her back, year by year, to 1945. “When you awake,” he said, “you will remember these things and will discuss them. Now you will awake.”

She awoke smiling. “I feel as if I had lost a war,” she said.

I thought, “That’s a strange thing for her to say. She hasn’t lost a war, she’s won one.”

She began to talk about Marty. Presently Dr. Erickson put her in a trance again. He had noted the phrase, and he knew what it was all about.

“When you awoke,” he said, “you said you felt as if you had lost a war. That was a slip of the tongue. You meant you had lost something else. You left two letters out of the word. Do you know what they were?”

She shook her head. He gave her a pencil and paper. “Look at me,” he said. “Don’t think of the pencil. It will write the missing letters.”

Slowly her fingers moved and, her subconscious mind making the correction, wrote “te.”

“Look at what you have written,” he said. “The missing letters.”

She looked and smiled and nodded. “Water,” she said.

“When you awake,” he said, “you will remember that. You have lost – your fear of water.”

The treatment by no means had ended. Dr. Erickson asked her to go home and to think over her case, to remember every experience she had ever had in which she was afraid of water. Then she was to come back and they would talk about it again. There would be several sessions, he told her, until Dorothy had gained complete understanding of the fear, and would banish it herself forever….

TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 2….