It is almost universal for us to be born with two feet and two hands, but what bearing does it have upon the question of health or sickness? As far as I know, [tag-tec]hypnosis[/tag-tec] as a form of human behavior has been in existence since the beginning of the human race. Then why should hypnosis necessarily be singled out from the entire variety of human behaviors and designated as something that is highly specific or even slightly specific in relationship to mental health or mental sickness, emotional health or emotional sickness?

Yet there is much thinking along that line because so many people believe unthinkingly that hypnosis is an abnormal state. Furthermore we may ask, are not the manifestations that are developed in the [tag-tec]hypnotic trance[/tag-tec] the behaviors learned in an ordinary waking state? One could parallel this type of thinking by the statement that the circulation of the blood is highly specific to mental, emotional, and physical health, and that such circulation varies according to sleeping, waking, and activity states. All of this is true, but it neither discloses nor constitutes any specific understanding of health or of blood circulation until it is refined in relationship to highly specific items of special reference.

In illustration of some points I wish to make I will cite the instance of a paralyzed man bedridden for 15 years. I saw him when he was in his 80s. He had pneumonia, was dying, and was delirious. The thing that astonished me was what that man was doing in his delirium. His history was this. His mother had been a very religious woman who compelled her children, from the age of four, to listen to her give a daily prolonged reading of the Bible. Year after year, every day, this was done without fail so that she repeatedly read through the Bible. Before his mother died this man had had six years of that daily listening to the Bible. His reaction to her death and to that Bible reading had been one of utter bitterness and resentment. At his mother´s death he was placed in a foster home where there was no Bible reading, no church attendance, and no going to Sunday school. He grew to manhood with these foster-home attitudes, married, never allowed his wife or children to go to church, and declared the Bible and all religion to be unacceptable.

In his early 70´s he suffered a paralyzing cerebrovascular accident that rendered him permanently bedridden. Then he developed pneumonia, became delirious, and in that delirious state he recited the Bible, chapter by chapter, hour after hour. Using a Bible to check his recitation, I found that he was reciting it correctly. To everybody´s knowledge in the community he had not even looked at a Bible since the age of 10.

I encounter people in the psychology laboratory and in the field of psychiatry and medicine who say in all seriousness, “Hypermnesia and those regressive phenomena attributed to [tag-tec]hypnotic subjects[/tag-tec] are dubious, questionable, open to question,” and they work out all manner of experiments to prove that hypermnesia and regressive phenomena are impossibilities and, what is worse, they believe their inadequate findings.

That dying old man proved that regression to childhood memories is an actual phenomenon. Yet there are any number of attitudes taken to disprove the legitimacy of [tag-tec]hypnotic[/tag-tec] experiments and the concepts that one deals with in [tag-ice]hypnosis[/tag-ice] despite their occurrence in the ordinary course of human events. If that aged, sick, delirious, brain-damaged man could recover childhood memories, is it not reasonable to assume that comparable behavior can be achieved by the young and healthy?