Post-Freudian Developments in Psychoanalytic Views of Hypnosis: From Libido Theory to Ego Psychology*

Starting with his 1888 preface to the German translation of Bernheim's Suggestion, Freud repeatedly attempted to conceptualize theoretical explanations for the phenomenon of hypnosis (Silverstein and Silverstein, this volume). His final major theoretical statement on the issue came in 1921, in “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.” Here, Freud presented a view of hypnosis that, while distinctly psychoanalytic, nevertheless remained in harmony with his first major statement on the issue in that he consistently opted for a two-sided view of hypnosis. For Freud hypnosis had to be understood both in terms of psychical functions and an organic substrate. By 1905 Freud believed that (a) the organic substrate of hypnosis lay in human sexuality (even though the physiology of this organic foundation remained unknown to him) and (b) the psychical factor was transference, “an unconscious fixation of the subject's libido to the figure of the hypnotist” (p. 150). By 1921 he asserted that the unique aspects of hypnosis lay in the interaction of transference elements with both an extreme state of focused attention and an inherited psychical predisposition to assume a submissive attitude to the primal father, that is, a transpersonal factor rooted in the primeval times of the human family.

In this chapter we review the major psychoanalytic theories of hypnosis that followed Freud's final statement of 1921. In examining post-Freudian theoretical developments concerning hypnosis, we can observe