Dealing with the roots instead of just cutting back the weeds.
A new and exciting approach to hypnoanalysis.
Jure Biechonski MSc
Essex, United Kingdom

What is Transactional Hypnoanalysis (THA)?

THA is part of transpersonal psychology and works with the theory that our personalities are made up of many different parts. The aim of THA is to integrate the aware ego within the personality by teaching us how to access our different personality parts in hypnosis. During hypnoanalysis we learn how to nurture those parts of our personality that have been suppressed, and how to disempower those that have become inflated.

By learning to access the different parts of our personalities we gain a much deeper understanding of ourselves, which then affects our relationships, our ability to express our spiritual experiences and ourselves. The overall aim of ego integration in THA is healthy psychological management of the personality as a whole.

“The only devils in the world are those running in our own hearts, that is where the battle should be fought” - Mahatma Ghandi.

Ever since Rene Descartes (French philosopher and mathematician; 1596—1650) split the human being into two separate but interacting entities, body and mind, philosophers, psychologists, physicians, and others have been trying to put the organism back together again, to treat it as a unified, organised whole. The holistic, or organismic, viewpoint, as expressed in the field of medicine, holds that in any illness, whether physical or mental, both mind and body must be treated. A holistic theory of personality focuses on the whole organism as a unified system rather than on separate traits, drives, or habits.

As we experience the tensions and strains of life we store in our body different feelings and emotions protected by our mind-body defences.

CARL GUSTAV JUNG 1875-1961
Jung disagreed with Freud’s mechanistic view of the world; for Jung, human behaviour is conditioned not only by what happened in the past but by what people envision will happen in the future - by their aims and aspirations.

For Jung, the personality, or psyche (from the Greek for ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’ known also as mind), embraces all thought, feeling, and behaviour, conscious and unconscious. The psyche guides us in adapting to our social and physical environment.

The psyche is from the beginning a unity. According to Jung, we are born with wholeness, or with the potential for wholeness, and what we experience and learn serves to fulfil this potential.

In the western society through the Christian history, there was a view that each person had a soul. And as the soul came from God it was like God, made in his image, and as there is only one God in the monotheistic society, there is only one identical soul.

As the western world became more secular and atheist, the thought became more based on logic and science, the idea of the mind replaced the concept of the soul. And as the concept of the mind had to be scientifically respected and accepted, much of the idea of the soul was transferred into the mind, who once again was supposed to be single and united. (John Rowan 1990)

CONSCIOUSNESS
Consciousness appears early in life, perhaps even before birth. Gradually, consciousness becomes differentiated from the infant’s general, or gross, awareness of stimuli.

The baby learns to distinguish among individual members of its family and to differentiate these familiar faces from the unfamiliar faces of strangers. According to Jung, one of the first products of this process of differentiation is the ego.

As the organisation of the conscious mind, the ego plays the important role of the gatekeeper; it determines what perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and memories will enter consciousness. If the ego were not so selective, we would be overwhelmed by the experiences that would crowd into our minds. By screening experiences, the ego attempts to maintain coherence within the personality and to give the person a sense of continuity and identity.

The conscious has four psychological functions:
SENSING, THINKING, INTUITION AND FEELING, (S.T.I.F.)

SENSING a reaction to external factors and tends to be irrational. (body)

THINKING thinks things out - with neat formulae - base life on principles. His formula is absolute truth (rational or logical, or thinks it is) can repress all emotion and tends to be cold in relationships. (mind)

INTUITION all things possible, can appear to be an adventurer. (soul)

FEELING takes everything as it comes and desires to help - quickly recognise injustice - can be crucified in the process of life. (heart)

All four functions should interact - when one becomes inflated - problems.

But we have managed to split our mind from our body, by rationalising our feelings and labelling them, we are avoiding the true experience of feeling and sensing.
Even science has split into the science of the body – medicine, and the science of the mind – psychology.

Character is the fixed individual form of a human being. Since there is a form of body as of behaviour or mind, a general charatecterology must teach the significance of both physical and psychic features. The enigmatic oneness of the living being has as its necessary corollary the fact that bodily traits are not merely physical, nor mental traits merely psychics. (Jung 1933)

Jung claims that the distinction between mind and body is an artificial dichotomy, based more on the peculiarity of intellectual understanding rather then on nature of things.
In psychology, psychotherapy and hypnotherapy we are taking the mind as our starting point, by doing this we work our way from the relatively unknown mind the know body. Ignoring the advantage that we can have by starting from something known, which the visible body is.

Despite all the psychology we think we possess today, the psyche is still infinitely more obscure to us then the visible surface of the body. The psyche is still a foreign, almost unexplored country of which we have only indirect knowledge; it is mediated by conscious functions that are subject to almost endless possibilities of deception. (Jung 1933)

So it will be much safer for us to proceed from the outer world inwards, from the known to the unknown, from the body to the mind. All sciences have started from the outside world, astrology, palmistry, phrenology, all those attempted to use external visual data to explain inner psychic phenomena. But as psychology is the youngest of all sciences, and therefore the ones that suffers most from preconceived opinions.

If we rely too much on one of the four we will be rejected by society and then into a vicious circle of increasing intrusion by the shadow into the ego.

According to Jung, consciousness is the only part of the mind that is known to the individual and probably appears prior to birth and develops daily through INDIVIDUATION through the four functions. As the child grows - so does conscious awareness and the consciousness of an EGO -usually from the age of 8-9 onwards, the child realises ‘I am’. The EGO is composed of conscious perceptions, memories, thoughts and feelings. Unless the EGO acknowledges the presence of these things, it cannot be brought into awareness. Jung stated that what is notably absent in consciousness will be found in the unconscious.

The unconscious has two parts:

Personal Unconscious & Collective Unconscious
Personal Unconscious: the experiences which are not entered into consciousness - that are too weak to remain in the conscious, are not lost. They enter into the personal unconscious and are available when the need arises.
The personal unconscious was developed by the influence of society in which we lived, in three ways:
family influence, group influence and society at large. We try to develop our best part and to inhibit the worst - and we do this by assuming different Persona.

THE PERSONA is the mask - the face the world sees of us. It enables us to play a part not necessarily our own. These roles enable us to function, but if the role takes over, then problems. If the persona takes over or identifies with the ego (consciousness) then a problem of INFLATION occurs.

There is another side to our nature, Jung calls this the SHADOW - the part we wish to inhibit and which contains everything we are not. An analogy might be that of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Jekyll is the persona and Hyde the shadow. THE SHADOW keeps breaking through and examples of this can be heard in colloquial speech “I am not myself’, or “I don’t know what came over me” or “that’s the worst side of me” etc..., It is the shadow which challenges our ego and when it is too great the result is a complex. Jung describes the tighter our image (and we all have to live up to one) the more there is to inhibit and thus the greater possibility of strife between the ego and the shadow.

Collective Unconscious: one of the most contentious part of Jung’s theories. It was this theory that brought Jung’s name into attention of the scientific world - describing it as the plane of universal knowledge.

Jung states that evolution/heredity plays a part in the development of the Psyche, just as much as it plays a part in the body. According to Jung, the mind is pre-figured by evolution - and we get examples of this: why do we have certain fears without justifiable cause? Why children are afraid of the dark when they have had no traumatic experiences of the dark? Indication then, of a collective unconscious (universal knowledge - up there, a Storehouse of information, passed on through generations). a race memory - that below the shadow are engrams (traces) from the distant past. Engrams are archetypal tendencies and are congenital (inborn) conditions of intuition from a collective unconscious.

The collective unconscious contains an almost unlimited number of images, or thought-forms, but Jung focused on several that contain a particularly great amount of emotion.

These are ARCHETYPES like all primordial images, they are “forms without content, representing merely the possibility of a certain type of perception and action” Jung 1936, p.48.

Yet they have great strength, carrying as they do the weight of thousands of years of human experience.
An archetype is like an elevator in a department store. The same elevator can let you off on the first floor at women’s shoes, on the second floor for men’s clothes, or you can go straight to the restaurant at the top. Similarly, any archetype can express on many different levels.
(Sasportas 1987)

There are an unlimited number of archetypes. The first was the God archetype. Experiences relevant to the God Archetype become attracted to it - and form a complex. Jung postulates that down within us, there is the potential of a God archetype. If the complex forces its way into the consciousness, then this may cause us to behave like gods i.e. we can do no wrong - everybody else is wrong.

The persona is necessary for survival, for it helps us to control our feelings, thoughts, and behaviour. If people identify completely with their persona, however, it can lead them to become alienated from themselves and from their true feelings.

The persona may mask another important archetype: the anima (in men) and the animus (in women). Everyone, Jung said, has qualities of the other sex, not only physiological characteristics, such as sex hormones, but feelings, attitudes, and values. The anima reflects the “feminine” side of the male psyche - feeling and emotionality; the animus reflects the “masculine” side of the female psyche - logic and rationality.

The anima and the animus can help men and women understand and respond to one another, but they can also cause misunderstanding if people project them without regard for others’ real qualities. Jung felt strongly that men must express the female aspects of their personalities. If they do not, he asserted, these traits will remain unconscious and undeveloped, and as a result the unconscious itself will be weak and immature.

The shadow archetype reflects the animal instincts that human beings have inherited in their evolution from lower forms of life. The shadow is probably the most dangerous of all the archetypes. Yet because it represents strong emotions, spontaneity, and the creative urge, it is also the source of all that is best in human beings.
When the ego and the shadow work together, the forces of the shadow are channelled into useful behaviour, and the person feels full of life and vigour. But if adequate outlets are provided for the shadow, the individual may become self-destructive or destructive of others.

The self motivates the person towards wholeness. The self archetype becomes the mid point of personality around which all system cluster. It directs the process of individuation, through which the useful and creative aspects of the unconscious are made conscious and channelled into productive activity.

Mind-Body Defences
Throughout life a person will develop many defences to protect themselves against any realistic or imaginary threat. When the heart stops a beat or races it is because we experience anxiety at the very core of our being. When a person has built up solid defences (which soon become unconscious response-patterns or automatic behaviour) they will not allow the heart to be touched easily and will not respond to the world from his heart. The defences work in four layers, from the known to the unknown, from a biological organ, to the vague idea of the ego :

I. The core defence or the heart from which the feeling to love and be loved derives, at the centre of which is the soul or spiritual identity. This is always present, even if defences on further layers make it unconscious.
II. The emotional layer of feelings which include the suppressed feelings of rage, anxiety, panic or terror, despair, sadness and pain.
III. The muscular layer in which is found the chronic muscular tensions that support and justify the ego defences and at the same time protect the person against expressing the underlying layer of suppressed feelings that he dare not express.
IV. The ego layer is the outermost layer of the basic sense of self or identity, and which contains the typical ego defences of denial, distrust, blaming, projections (other-determined viewpoints), plus rationalisations (excuses) and intellectualisations.

The breakdown of defences has necessarily to consider each of these layers. While we can help a person become conscious of their tendencies to deny, blame, project or rationalise, this awareness rarely affects the muscular tensions or releases the suppressed feelings. If these layers are not cleared, the conscious awareness can easily degenerate into a different type of rationalisation with a concomitant but altered form of denial and projection.

Assuming it is possible to eliminate every defensive position in the personality, how would such an 'open' person function?

The four layers still exist but now they are co-ordinating and expressive layers rather than defensive ones. Core impulses reach the real world. The person puts their heart into everything they do. He loves doing whatever they choose, whether it is work, play or sex. They can be angry, sad, joyful or frightened depending on the situation. These feelings represent genuine responses since they are free from contamination by suppressed emotions stemming from childhood experiences. And since his muscular layer is free from chronic tensions, his movements reflect their feelings and are subject to the control of the ego - they are appropriate, meaningful and co-ordinated.

ENERGY

Most people have grown up thinking of themselves as very physical beings. It is only in more recent years that there has been an increasing interest in awareness of the more subtle levels of our being.

Human beings have a physical body, with mental capacities and emotions, but all this is useless without an animating energy or life force. A universal / natural life energy sustains all living organisms.

Although the idea of a subtle, vital energy is only beginning to be accepted in Western medicine, it has long been a feature of Eastern therapeutic systems. In India for example the energy is called PRANA, and is associated with the breath. From ancient times, breathing exercises known as "pranayama" were designed to enhance well-being through a balancing of the life-energy flow.

Currently the universal life energy is seen as exhibiting the characteristics of a force field. Gravity is a force field existing everywhere in space but being more intense in the area around a planet or any celestial body. Similarly, the vital life energy is a field which permeates space, becoming more concentrated within and around living organisms.

Thus all living things share in a general life-energy field in the same way that all physical objects are subject to gravity.

This energy field can be considered as the electromagnetic circulation.

In a state of health, the life energy flows freely in, through and out of the organism in a balanced manner, nourishing the organs of the body. In disease, the energy flow is disrupted, obstructed, disordered or depleted.

Energy flows into the body through breathing, through the chakras and through fresh foods.

The electromagnetic energy field surrounding an individual human being is often referred to as the "subtle body", or aura. The subtle body animates the physical body; it is not normally visible to the eye, but is as much part of us as our physical body.

It can be described as a luminous body, emitting its own characteristic radiation.
Based on their observations, researchers describe the aura as divided into several layers. These layers are sometimes called "bodies", (e.g. etheric body) and they interpenetrate and surround each other in successive layers. Each successive layer is composed of finer substances and higher vibrations than the previous one.

MAJOR CHAKRAS AND THE AREA OF THE BODY THEY NOURISH

THE PERSONAL EXPERIENCE

As we allow ourselves to develop new sensitivities, we begin to see the whole world quite differently. We begin to pay more attention to aspects of experience that might have seemed peripheral before. We find ourselves using new language to communicate our new experiences. Terms like "bad vibes" or "the energy there was great" are becoming household phrases. We start noticing and giving more credence to experiences like meeting someone and instantly liking or disliking him without knowing anything about him. We like his "vibes' " We can tell when someone is staring at us, and we look up to see who it is. We may have a feeling that something is going to happen, and then it does. We begin to listen to our intuition. We "know" things, but we don't always know how we know. We sense that a friend is feeling a certain way, or needs something, and when we reach out to fulfil that need, we find we are right. Sometimes during an argument with someone we may feel as if something is being pulled out of our solar plexus, or we may feel "stabbed”. We may feel as if we have been punched in the stomach. Or it may feel like someone is pouring thick, gooey molasses on us. On the other hand, we sometimes feel surrounded by love, caressed by it, bathed in a sea of sweetness, blessings and light. All these experiences have a reality in the energy fields. Our old world of solid concrete objects is surrounded by and permeated with a fluid world of radiating energy, constantly moving, constantly changing like the sea.

As a therapist (or healer of any kind) it is important to be aware of possible effects we might experience as two energy fields / subtle bodies intermingle. During a treatment an exchange of subtle energy may be experienced as prickling or pulsating sensations, as a feeling of heat or cold, a trickling sensation or a momentary discomfort. The practitioner may begin to experience the symptoms of the client or have a sudden intuitive insight about the client. (These latter two can also occur the other way around if the client is sensitive to energies!)

Many therapies work directly with the energies flowing through the body, for example acupuncture, shiatsu, bioenergetics, kinesiology, healing, reiki, radionics, Tai Chi, crystal therapy, Yoga, homoeopathy & reflexology.
Meridians are energy channels running through the body and they are utilised in acupuncture, shiatsu and kinesiology. Six of the meridians end in the toes, six in the fingers.

Various life situations impede the natural flow of energy, for example stress, illness, pollution, injury and physical, mental, and emotional trauma; this can lead to obstruction & depletion of the subtle body, and ultimately if not corrected to physical symptoms & disorders.

There is a clear two way effect: mental / emotional / physical disorders all the subtle body and conversely changes in the subtle body affect the physical / mental emotional aspects of our being.

In the case of amputation, although the limb has been physically removed, the subtle body remains.
There may be phantom limb pain even though there is no limb. This may be because:

a) the subtle body remains & retains the memory of the physical limb.
b) the amputation causes a disturbance to the body's electromagnetic Field.
c) the severed nerves may be affected & stimulated by the disturbance in the subtle body.

During times of illness & prolonged stress, the energy field becomes depleted and the client's vital energy may be very low. This may be apparent to the therapist if any of the following signs is observed on the body:

* dull or no response on reflexes
* numbness, loss of feeling
* coldness, damp clamminess
* slack muscle tone
*sponginess
*pale colour
*intuitive awareness of low energy field.

By working with the energy field and helping to restore the natural balanced energy flow, the state of physical, mental and emotional health may be affected.

If at the same time the mental attitude, emotional and physical habits of the individual are modified & improved, in turn will have a beneficial effect on the energy field, enhancing the balancing effect and accelerating the return to well-being.

Practical applications
As we have separated and split our mind from our body, to avoid anxiety, we have disassociated from our body and lost any relationship with it. We are or all mind or all body, we do not listen to our bodies, and any aches and pains or sensations, which is the way that the body communicate with us are immediately suppressed by chemicals, it is like driving your car and listening to a loud noise from the engine, instead of checking what is wrong we put ear plugs in our ears and continue driving.

Or we deny our body or we are constantly preoccupied by our body and its shape and size. And within our body, we are more concerned about its external appearance rather than its internal functions, we have disowned our hearts, our stomach our liver and even our sexual organs.

Unconsciously we store our stresses and anxieties within our bodies, to avoid their existence, by doing that we block energy flows in our bodies, creating energy blockages and develop diseases that mostly do not exist in the natural world.

I believe we create every so called ‘illness’ in our body. The body, like everything else in life, is a mirror of our inner thoughts and beliefs. The body is always talking to us, if we will only take the time to listen. Every cell within your body responds to every single thought you think and every world you speak. (Louise L. Hay 1984)

And as we know that some thoughts can make us feel cold and some feelings can make us hot, we become aware to what extent the mind and the body are affecting each other.

I wonder if sentences like heart ache, follow your heart, feeling dizzy in the head, sick in the stomach, are not part of our collective unconscious and our archetypal tendencies that we have developed as a result of our evolution?
We have also created a dichotomy between our logical thoughts and our feelings and sometimes we experience ourselves as an internal battle field, fighting between how we feel and what we think, analysis-paralysis we find ourselves stuck between two forces, as a battle between the Freudian id and the Freudian super ego, while the ego just hangs around feeling completely redundant.

Follow your heart or follow your head, standing at the crossroad of life for ever, unable to make a decision.

Visualisation
From the known

Make yourself comfortable and close your eyes.
Imagine you can turn your eyes inwards… scan the inside of your head… identify any areas of tension…. Uncomfort… scan the inside of your neck… shoulders …. Arms ….hands ….fingers
Move down to your chest and upper back….. Identify any areas of tension….
Tummy … lower back …. Pelvis …… identify any areas of tension……
Legs… knees.. Calf muscles…. Feet…. Identify any areas of tension…
Complete in your head the following sentence ‘physically I feel ……’

To the unknown:
Make yourself comfortable and close your eyes.
Remember your week, people you met, situations you have been…..
Yesterday evening who where you with? Were you on your own? How did you feel?
You woke up this morning, felt…. Made yourself ready to come on the course, imagine your way to the course…. Any thoughts… any feelings…..
Arriving here…. Meeting the other participants ….
Complete in your head the following sentence ‘emotionally I feel ……

And now explore how emotional reflects physical & visa versa how the emotional and physical sensations can be linked. Because the mind affects the physical body, and the physical body affects the mind.

Ask your client where in their body they feel tense in the moment, identify the organ.
Ask the client to become the organ, give that organ a shape a colour, a noise, a sound, a voice.
Create a dialogue between the organ and the client’s ego (remember the organ is a sub personality)
Ask the client if there is another organ that they will like to talk to, create a dialogue between the organs and the client.

According to Voice dialogue those organs might be part of our primary selves or the place in the body that we store those primary selves, or Jungian personas, we might also have some organs that we disown which will represent our disowned selves. By giving each one of them a voice, by creating a balance between them, by letting your heart speak your mind we are moving towards the aware integrated ego.

To be more creative and avoid as much as possible any interference of the critical factor of the conscious mind I suggest the following:

Ask your client to imagine an animal going out of their head and an animal going out of their stomach, identify the animals, the animals are now walking on the path in front of you, what happens next……
Ask the client to be each animal in turn and create a dialogue between them, what are they saying too each other?....
What are they saying about you?.....
What would you like to say to them?.....

Remember that on an analytical level you are dealing with the inner world of the client, but on a humanistic level you avoid any interpretations and allow the client to give it the meaning that they want, it is advisable also to allow the client to bring the story to an end on their own unique way, even if the outcome is not favourable it still reflects where the client is at.

There are references in the literature suggesting that each part of our body reflects a feeling or has a meaning, I would strongly recommend avoiding other people’s interpretations and allowing your clients to give their own private meaning to their bodies.

The heart:

feeds the mind,
feeds the body
keeps it alive

but

does not get the thanks it deserves

By not listening to the heart and not letting it speak, we are blocking the flow of energy around the body, causing blockages and distress…. so …..

listen to your heart, give it a voice, it is speaking to you, listen from a sacred space..........

By denying the heritage of our soul, our ancient memories and life experiences we are overloading the heart, it needs to off load, it needs to express, to fulfill its sacred destiny of guiding us through our emotional lives.

Let your heart speak to your Mind.

This paper was presented at:

The 16th Annual Hypnotherapy Conference 2001 - Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.
TRANSACTIONAL HYPNOANALYSIS (THA)
Dealing with the roots, instead of just cutting the weeds.

2002 International Symposium in Psychoanalysis – Chengdu, China.
TRANSACTIONAL HYPNOANALYSIS (THA)
Dealing with the roots, instead of just cutting the weeds.

The 17th Annual Hypnotherapy Conference 2002 - Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.
TRANSACTIONAL HYPNOANALYSIS (THA)
From Regression to Progression.

10th Annual International Conference on Conflict Resolution –
St. Petersburg, Russia. May 2002
TRANSACTIONAL HYPNOANALYSIS (THA)
Resolving Inner Conflicts.

Regents College, London, England. July 2002
TRANSACTIONAL HYPNOANALYSIS (THA)
Exploring Relationships.

Sichuan University – Psychoanalysis & Hypnoanalysis November 2002

The Academy for Psychoanalytical Studies
St. Petersburg, Russia December 2002

The 18th Annual Hypnotherapy Conference 2003 - Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.
TRANSACTIONAL HYPNOANALYSIS (THA)
LET YOUR HEART SPEAK YOUR MIND

11th Annual International Conference on Conflict Resolution –
St. Petersburg, Russia. May 2003
TRANSACTIONAL HYPNOANALYSIS (THA)
LET YOUR HEART SPEAK YOUR MIND
TRANSACTIONAL HYPNOANALYSIS (THA)
Dealing with the roots instead of just cutting back the weeds.
A new and exciting approach to hypnoanalysis.
Jure Biechonski MSc
Essex, United Kingdom