THE CHANCES WE TAKE WHEN WE THINK THAT WE KNOW

[Juan Illan]

Jack Gibson was an Irish surgeon who performed a few thousands painful surgical and non-surgical procedures (taking off a heavy coat from someone with a collarbone broken in a car accident can be as painful as cutting off a gangrenous leg), with no other anaesthetic than hypnosis, which he learnt to induce by watching stage hypnotists in South Africa.

Mr Gibson would be better described as a busy practitioner than as a scholar. He, for instance, didn’t keep a record of his surgical procedures using hypnosis as anaesthesia because he ‘didn’t know that statistics were so important’.

It is not impossible that he never heard of metaphors and other so-called Ericksonian procedures. His inductions -as heard on his CD for smoking cessation- were rather fast and authoritarian, which is very suitable to produce anaesthesia in an emergency situation.

In December 1982, however, he finished a lecture on hypnotherapy to the Medical Society of University College, Dublin in the way that follows:

“You are all looking very glum, so I’m going to tell you a story which I hope will amuse you. One fine summer morning a young woman, who had just passed her exams in psychiatry, got up early to go for a walk down by the sea. The water was tempting and, since no one was about, she took off her clothes and went for a swim. But on the same morning, a young man had also got up early and was out for a walk on the cliffs. When he saw a bundle of clothes on the beach and, out in the sea, the head of the young doctor, the ‘divil’ got into him and he sat down beside the bundle of clothes. The girl kept swimming around and around until she could stand the cold no longer. She came out and, flinging her arms across her chest, walked toward the young man. While she was doing so, she kicked something and, to her delight, picked up a frying pan. Holding it in front of her, she walked up to him, looked him straight in the eyes and said, ‘I’m a psychiatrist and I know what you’re thinking, and you didn’t know I would find a frying pan on the way out of the sea’. He looked her straight in the eyes and replied, ‘I am not a psychiatrist, but I know what you are thinking -you think there’s a bottom in that frying pan!’

[Steph]

Dave Elman teaches a fast induction method too ... It seems a bit strange to me, I'm more familiar with the slow relaxation process.
Lx,
S.