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Quote:No one has ever conclusively explained hypnotism. This week a successful practicing hypnotist, Andrew Salter, made a plausible try (What Is Hypnosis— Richard R. Smith, $2). Frowning severely at the hocus-pocus that has surrounded his clouded calling, Salter argued that hypnosis is just another conditioned reflex. No “trance,” no “suggestion,” no “mind over matter.”Salter is a quick, intense, 30-year-old Manhattan psychologist who has made a very good thing out of mesmerism. His psychotherapy by means of autohypnosis (TIME, June 2, 1941) is currently a Park Avenue rival of psychoanalysis. For fees from $1,000 up, he has greatly helped a golf professional who was off his game, brooding artists, jittery businessmen, neurotic housewives, drunks, insomniacs, kleptomaniacs — usually in not more than six sessions. Some enthusiasts think that Salter’s methods actually threaten psychoanalysts.In support of his theory, Salter cites experiments by Psychologist C. V. Hudgins, who conditioned human subjects to contract the pupils of their eyes, first in response to a flashing light, then to a bell, then to the word “contract,” then to the mere thought of the word “contract.”Conditioned Saints. Carrying on, Salter suggests that hypnosis is one kind of response to words that touch off associations. “What are words,” says he, “but the bells of conditioned reflexes?” The words “heavy” and “sleep” are the bells that enable Salter to close some subjects’ eyes ; he conditions patients to hypnotize themselves by thinking the same words. He believes the word-conditioning theory also accounts for hallucinations, ghosts and the visions of saints. He has found that artists and highly intelligent persons are the easiest to hypnotize, because they have deeper and clearer word-associations.Salter’s experiments have produced amazing results. He trained patients to anesthetize themselves by autohypnosis; they jabbed needles into their arms without feeling it and, by means of posthypnotic suggestion, remained indifferent to the pain even after they “awoke.” Salter also conditioned patients to deafness to all sounds but his own voice. When a gun was fired behind a patient, he gave no sign of hearing it; his blood pressure did not even rise. Salter played a recording of an air raid so loud that he could not hear his own voice, but the patient heard Salter’s questions and gave the right answers (read from his lip movements). Salter’s patients took to this game so eagerly that he had to warn them : he found that they hypnotized themselves to deafness while walking in the street and failed to hear approaching cars.Salter’s alcoholic patients condition themselves to hate liquor by repeated doses of self-hypnosis. In treating neurotics, the psychologist helps patients relieve themselves by making a clean breast, under hypnosis, of their unconscious fears and troubles. In What Is Hypnosis Salter offers a breath-taking project: teaching autohypnosis to soldiers. Says he: “Simple mass procedures applied to soldiers could quickly filter out one of five or at worst one of eight who can quickly be taught to make themselves immune to such sounds and pains as they wish. It is not impossible to imagine battalions of self-anesthetized soldiers going into battle.”Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,774859,00.html#ixzz1L2Pu8ag8