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It has long been realized that the phenomena of hypnotism have a special relationship to those of mental illness. With the work of Bernheim at Nancy, and of Charcot and his many students, this relationship became a little clearer, in that an analogy was recognized between the physical disturbances which could be produced by direct hypnotic suggestion and those of the conversion hysterias.1 Freud has described the influence which his observation of this work had upon his own development; and perhaps the first direct reference to hypnotism from a psychoanalytic point of view is Freud's comment in The Three Contributions to the Theory of Sexuality (3a) that the influence of the hypnotist probably depends upon an unconscious masochistic libidinal tie between the subject and the hypnotist.
Since then there have been several important discussions of hypnotism in the psychoanalytic literature: Ferenczi (2), Freud (3e), Jones (5), Sadger (8), Rado (7), Schilder (9). These have dealt largely, however, with the nature of the unconscious relationship between the hypnotist and the subject, i.e., the unconscious fantasies which enter into the two rôles, and the identifications which make possible the whole phenomena. Because the present contribution is not concerned with this problem, and has nothing to add to these earlier and well-known formulations, there is no need to summarize them here.