Rebel Without a Cause by Robert M. Lindner Read Free Book Online

state, when to engraft the interpretations and significances directly onto the personality. The last is probably the most delicate and skill-demanding of all the hypnoanalyst’s tasks. In orthodox analysis the acquiescence of the patient in the new attitudes and ways of behavior is demonstrated by verbalization as well as by action. Apart from utilizing the transference to insure acceptance and comprehension, other means are not available. Hypnoanalysis, on the other hand, has at its command not only the transference but also the prepotent post-hypnotic suggestive method to enforce comprehension and acceptance of those necessary but novel ways of regarding the past, new attitudes, ambitions and patterns of behavior. Through this means the benefits of treatment are assured. And through this means as well is the transference at last dissolved by the displacement and redirection of its energies into the paths prescribed by the recently acquired and developed insights. In all essentials, this is the re-educative process.
    The pith and purport of the method of hypnoanalysis as it has been employed in the case to be reviewed and with other patients and conditions as well are contained in the foregoing. It is, like other ways of approach to the functioning organism, an art requiring a blend of technological skill and judgement and knowledge. In the author’s opinion, it is an approach that offers a rapid, sure and valid way to the understanding and treatment of psychogenic disordersand aberrations of behavior. Its applicability seems limited only by the professional equipment and deftness of the hypnoanalyst. Thus far it has been applied in a wide range of diagnostic entities with a degree of success and a range of usefulness that promises brilliantly for the time when its principles are more fully comprehended.
    Beyond everything, however, the success of hypnoanalysis in penetrating to the core of psychopathic personality for the first time in the long history of psychological concern with this puzzling classification, warrants the direction upon it and its tenets of experimental and clinical regard.…

THE RESULTS

    The history of Harold, our subject, has been made available to the writer in many forms. Each of his delinquent acts when subject to court review was supplemented with detailed social service investigations according to the admirable latter-day judicial routine; and on the occasions of his incarcerations further study was made of the essential features of his home, family and personal life. Rarely has a clinician been provided with a more complete and documented anamnesis. This material proved eminently useful as a constant check and source during the hypnoanalysis, and provided a frame of reference, almost a topography, for the incidents and events elicited from the patient.
    Harold’s father, an unnaturalized Pole and a machinist by trade, came to the United States during the great exodus from Europe at the turn of the century. He was a big, bluff, hearty peasant of excellent work habits. Within a short time he met and married the native-born girl who became Harold’s mother; and having settled in an industrial suburb of a large city in the East the couple soon became the parents of our subject and in time of two daughters. The father contracted an occupational disease early in his career, and the medical regimen imposed on him forced his abandonment of factory employment but permitted his occupation in a free-lance manner. His average earnings, computed over many years by social workers, were twenty-five dollars a week. Investigators described him as a hasty disciplinarian who is more ready with curses and unkind words than blows. He does not smoke or use intoxicants, is cut off from his family by reason of his unfamiliarity with English and his illiteracy (despite his long residence in this country); and the fact that his standards are, on the whole, old-world and markedly unprogressive. His reputation in the