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Various approaches to an understanding of the sexual aspects of hypnosis have been attempted by several investigators including Davis and Husband, Ferenczi, Freud, Lorand, Schilder and Kauders, Speyer and Stokvis, White, and Wolberg. A review of all pertinent material is not intended but a reiteration of some opinions should be of interest in connection with the case to be presented.
The ideas of Ferenczi regarding mother and father hypnosis are fairly well known. Some direct quotations from his contribution are as follows: “The capacity to be hypnotized and influenced by suggestion depends on the possibility of transference taking place, or, more openly expressed, on the positive, although unconscious, sexual attitude that the person being hypnotized adopts in regard to the hypnotist; the transference, however, like every ‘object-love,’ has its deepest roots in the repressed parental complexes.” Ferenczi had occasion to investigate the dynamic significance of hypnosis for patients who had at first been hypnotized and later psychoanalyzed. In regard to various cases discussed by him, he stated: they “confirm Freud's view that the hypnotic credulity and pliancy take their root in the masochistic component of the sexual instinct.”
Freud commented: “The hypnotic relation is the devotion of someone in love to an unlimited degree but with sexual satisfaction excluded; whereas in the case of being in love this kind of satisfaction is only temporarily kept back, and remains in the background as a possible aim at some later date.” Later he remarked: “Hypnosis resembles being in love in being limited to these two persons, but it is based entirely upon sexual tendencies that are inhibited in their aims and substitutes the object for the ego ideal.”
Wolberg pointed out that sexual fantasies involving the hypnotist may occur with some persons even during the first hypnosis and that in these instances hypnosis is regarded probably as a sexual experience comparable to other types of