Psychogenic Cardiovascular Reaction Interpreted and Successfully Treated with Hypnosis

The therapeutic value of abreaction of traumatic experiences in certain types of illnesses has been appreciated and utilized for many years as a result of which a considerable literature on the subject has been accumulated. The publications of experiences with the method during World War I are readily accessible. It seems that during World War II the induction of sleep-like states by means of drugs, especially pentathol sodium, has largely supplanted the hypnotic technique, for therapeutic purposes, in the production of cathartic release of repressed, affect-laden experiences. A currently employed method of inducing abreaction is the technique of narcosynthesis employed by Grinker and Spiegel.

It is difficult to estimate the extent to which therapeutic hypnosis has been utilized in military neuropsychiatry during this War, but if the current literature is an index of its application, it would appear that it has not been used extensively. For this reason alone the case presented should be of interest, but beyond this it deserves attention in view of mounting concern with the meaning and treatment of somatic symptomatology of psychogenic origin. The hypnothera-peutic technique for arriving at an interpretation of the somatic symptomatology in a setting of meaningful interpersonal relationships, resulting in a dramatic cessation of symptoms, is deserving of comment.

The patient was a twenty-one year old non-commissioned officer in the Army Air Forces. He was single, white, born and reared in a mid-western community. When seen in consultation he had already served more than two and a half years with six months in the European Theatre of Operations as tail gunner on a bomber. He was the only child of a mother described by him as “nervous” and irritable. Since his childhood she had “picked on” the patient, holding him unwarrantedly responsible for circumstances said to be beyond his control. On such occasions he “felt badly”, but her irritability was apparently c