New Recording Captures Mahler's Seventh Symphony's Mysterious Qualities.

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: AUGUST 06, 1997
Time: 12:00
Tran: 080601np.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: Hypnotherapist David Calof
Sect: News; Domestic
Time: 12:00

MARTY MOSS-COANE, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Marty Moss-Coane in for Terry Gross.

Hypnosis has been used as a technique to stop smoking, to improve athletic and academic performance, control pain, and quell anxiety. But hypnosis has had a murky reputation.

It's also been used as a party trick or a form of entertainment, with practitioners using hypnotic techniques to get members of their audience to embarrass themselves in front of others. And it's been called into question as a method for uncovering memories of childhood abuse.

My guest, therapist David Calof, uses hypnosis in his private practice to explore and understand the world of the unconscious, and as a potential stepping stone to mental health and healing. Calof has written a book with Robin Simons (ph) about some of the families and couples he's treated, called "The Couple Who Became Each Other."

I asked David Calof since hypnosis has been around for centuries, it continues to be a questionable approach to therapy.

DAVID CALOF, HYPNOTHERAPIST AND AUTHOR: Well, you're correct. It's always had a mixed reputation. Sometimes it's been more in favor; sometimes less.

In particular, it came back into favor in modern history after the world wars, when it was used as a short-term solution for what we now call "post-traumatic stress disorder," but what of course they called then "battle fatigue."

And so it gained favor. And then in the mid-'50s (ph), both the American and the British medical associations approved it as a bona fide.

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CALOF: Then since then, it's come in and out of favor. And I think some of the reasons for that are that it sort of, in an archetypical kind of way, reminds us all of the unknown.

We think about hypnosis as probing the depths of the unconscious and perhaps finding out things about ourselves that we'd rather not know or rather not experience. I think that's one of the reasons.

I think the other reason is that it has a bad rap in terms of kind of the modern connotation of it is that it's an operator doing something to a subject, that we're overpowering the subject. And of, you know, no one would want to submit to something like that.

And then lastly, and I think this is perhaps a reason in the professional community, is that not everybody is trained in it. And I know that people in the professional community tend to eschew that which they're unfamiliar with.

So I think all those factors probably conspire to some extent.

MOSS-COANE: Well, I think it's important for us to talk about how hypnosis works and how you can use hypnotic techniques to activate and get to the unconscious. Let's begin at the beginning and, again, this is probably from movies and television shows, what we see then is the hypnotherapist telling their subject to think about something or to focus on something. Why is that important to begin hypnotic trance?

CALOF: Well, in general, inductions to begin with, almost always, with some kind of focal point. And the only purpose for that, really, is to simply concentrate the attention so that there's less attention to extraneous things and more attention to simply the task at hand. In the therapeutic setting, that, of course, would be the objective to be achieved.

And so all you're really doing is trying to reduce outside input, and that object of concentration can be an external focus, like a, you know, looking at an object, a light for example. Or, more often in modern hypnosis, it's an internal focus where you think about an early experience or you listen to a captivating story or you're remind -- you're told to remember times when you were, you know, ultimately relaxed and didn't have a worry in the world. Those are also ways of focusing attention.

MOSS-COANE: What happens, then, when you begin to focus? What happens to that outside world?

CALOF: Well, it tends to go away. The person in hypnosis will say, depending upon the depth of hypnosis, but generally will say, you know, I knew there were things happening around me. I could hear the traffic noises. I could hear the sounds in the room. But they really didn't matter to me.

Really, in the same way that you and I are concentrating right now. We're really tuned into each other, into the questions and the responses, and less concerned with what's happening in the room around us. That kind of concentration is very much the same.

MOSS-COANE: Is it also the same kind of trance you can center as a driver? You get into your car, you hop on the highway, and half an hour later you arrive at your destination and you have absolutely no conscious idea about how you got there.

CALOF: You got it exactly. As a matter of fact, that's been known as highway hypnosis.

MOSS-COANE: And I guess, again, the question is where does your mind go, then, under those circumstances? We know where we aren't. Where are we?

CALOF: Well, I think what it does is it allows us access to sort of non-linear, non-conscious ways of thinking. It allows us access to, you know, past learnings, to past associations. The mind, in the unconscious, works in a more circular fashion so our logic isn't bound by straight lines.

For example, if I asked you, as a conscious process, to tell me -- to name your most favorite piece of music in the world, and to only do that with your conscious mind, it would literally be impossible because the task -- the computing task would be enormous. You'd have to compare every piece of music you'd ever heard to every other piece of music you'd ever heard -- it would take forever.

Unconsciously, you can tell me in the flash of an eye. And the reason is is because it isn't bound by linear kinds of logic. We can synthesize an awful lot of data unconsciously, almost instantaneously. So it's sort of -- the answer is where do we go, it's kind of like if you're quiet, then you're more able to hear that still voice inside -- those intuitions, that imagery that floats through your mind -- more or less the products of the unconscious.

MOSS-COANE: Why, though, is there this division? Why is certain material then in the unconscious that we can only get through -- either through perhaps dreams or hypnosis or daydreaming or, you know, a piece of music that can take you back to the '60s when you heard it for the first time?

CALOF: Exactly. Well, there's probably two major reasons for that bifurcation. One is that some information in there we simply don't need to have.

And if I can just tell you a brief little story to illustrate that. You may have heard the story of the frog and the centipede. And the frog had watched the centipede for years walking, and he was marveled by this. He couldn't understand how this creature could coordinate the movement of 100 legs all at once. He felt so inadequate with his four legs.

So one day, he approached the centipede and he says: "You know, I've been watching you." And he says, "I have no idea how you walk. How is it that you know which legs to pick up and which ones to put down and which ones to swing at which times?" And the centipede said: "You know, it's a great question. No one's ever asked me that before. Let me think on it."

So he strained and he strained and he strained, and he finally says: "You know, I don't know." And with that he turned to walk away and fell over.

And so -- the idea there is that some things are simply left better at the unconscious -- how we walk, when to take a breath, you know, when the body needs sleep. Many things are simply best left to that computer, if you will. That's one of the reasons.

MOSS-COANE; Well, if we're talking, then, about hypnosis and we've gotten that person, then, to focus on something, make that outside world go away, how then does a hypnotherapist work with a subject? With a patient?

CALOF: Well, there's many different ways to do that, obviously. In general, the kind of orientation that I have, and really very much the orientation of modern hypnotherapy, is different than the old notion. The old notion was that somehow or another, you were deficient in certain kinds of suggestions, or you had too many of a kind of suggestion. So we would, figuratively speaking, open your head up, take out the bad suggestions and put in good ones.

Now, on occasion we still do that. We might do that for performance issues, for example -- the person who's constantly telling themselves "I'm terrible at math" and then, true to form, you know, flunks the test.

MOSS-COANE: Right.

CALOF: We might simply point out in hypnosis that their already doing bad self-hypnosis, and literally help them change that input. That's one way of working. But in modern hypnotherapy, we're really more interested in accessing the client's own problem-solving resources.

I'll give you maybe more of an example of that. A woman once came to see me who had just been elected to the presidency of a club. And she said "I can't do this because I can't speak in public." Well, it turned out that she was a performer in the arts. She was, in fact, a dancer and was a very skilled dancer.

So in hypnosis, I didn't tell her she wouldn't be afraid of public speaking. I simply reminded her she already knew how to perform in front of an audience and how to put her nervousness aside. So she simply translated those skills to the skills of being a speaker and it worked.

So in a sense, that was her problem-solving. I didn't add something that wasn't already there. I just helped her evoke a potential she had.

MOSS-COANE: But if you're speaking to someone's unconscious through hypnosis, you have to figure out, then, what the language, what the metaphors, what the poetry of their unconscious world is.

CALOF: That's really well-put. And we do a lot of that. We listen very carefully for, you know, phrases and words that are repeated, for certain kind of personality values. So we're constantly looking for what we call the entry point. What way of talking will they be able to process that will mean something to them and be able to effect change.

MOSS-COANE: But how do you know that you're tapping into their unconscious mind? Or maybe they're just faking?

CALOF: Well, that's always a possibility. And in fact, that's one of the recognized defenses against hypnosis. And there's ways of telling, you know, to a trained observer, whether someone is actually simulating or not.

I'll give you an example. If someone in a deep trance is told that they don't see a chair in front of them and they're told to walk forward, they will, but they'll walk around the chair. Now, someone simulating will walk into the chair. So there's a number of ways of telling.

MOSS-COANE: Are some people, though, more hypnotizable than other people?

CALOF: Well, let me answer that question in two parts, let me break it down. Are there some people who -- when we say "hypnotizable", generally speaking, we're talking about somebody doing it to them. If we say "can everybody go into a state of hypnosis," the answer is "yes."

And you gave a beautiful example of that, you know, the highway hypnosis example; or the twilight state of sleep at night, you know, when we're sort of half between awake and asleep. That's a time, by the way, when we're very suggestible. If we say that tomorrow's going to be a rotten day, generally it is. So anybody can enter into that state.

But when you put it into what we call "hetero-hypnosis" context -- that is, the context of working with another person, then you put all kinds of other relationship dynamics on top of that. So then, you're working with more than just the inherent ability of that subject to experience hypnosis.

Then you're working with all of the dimensions of an interpersonal relationship. And of course, there can be trust issues. There can be transference issues. There can be any kinds of issues that stand in the way.

So it's very possible that someone who has the capacity of going into hypnosis might not work well with me, for a variety of reasons. Maybe my voice reminds them of a cousin or something they didn't like. But they could walk down the hall and work with someone else and do just fine.

So -- and then also you asked if there's some people that sort of do this a little bit better.

MOSS-COANE: Yeah.

CALOF: The more, in terms of personality characteristics, the greater the ability to become absorbed in something -- you know, like that highway hypnosis experience -- generally speaking, that's a good predictor of a good candidate for hypnosis. On a scale of artist to engineer, although this is an over-generalization, artists do a little bit better. People -- this is not actually technically correct -- but people who use a lot of right-brain kind of thinking -- non-linear, artistic, spatial -- tend to do better.

And then lastly, people who had to dissociate as children, either because of some kind of trauma or, you know, low -- traumatic demand -- or sometimes, like, characteristically, the only child who didn't have a lot of external input, so had to create a rich inner world. Sometimes, that person will also be very adept.

MOSS-COANE: Now how do you then bring this person out of a hypnotic trance? And how much do they actually, then, consciously remember what went on?

CALOF: Well, there's any number of ways of bringing them out. Sometimes you just reorient them to the conversation before the induction of hypnosis. They -- sometimes we use a count to bring them out. Generally speaking, after the first induction, if we're going to work with the person more than once, then we put in a suggestion that makes future inductions easier.

So for example, in the future, when I count from one to five, you go right back into this state. And it just -- that means we can spend more of the time in the session doing the therapy.

MOSS-COANE: And they literally can learn to do that -- one, two, three, four, five -- and there they are?

CALOF: Oh, sure. If you don't -- that's just simple conditioning. I mean, if you've -- if you see an eight-sided red sign, chances are your foot wants to go to the brake pedal without any conscious mediation.

MOSS-COANE: Right. We're talking about Skinner here, I guess.

CALOF: Yeah, exactly. Now, do they remember, you asked. Well, in general, yes. In general, they do. Most hypnotherapy is done not at the deepest state of hypnosis, what is called the somnambulistic state -- somnambulism, which comes from sleepwalking.

Most hypnotherapy is not at that state and doesn't need to be. And one of the characteristics of that deep state is spontaneous amnesia. Typically, you don't find that in the more moderate levels of trance, which most hypnotherapy is done in.

Now, it's more like when you come out of it, it's, you know, if anyone was rambling on to you for 20 minutes, it would probably be somewhat dream-like. And so the people say "yeah, I can remember it, but I don't really need to or want to. It's just kind of in the back of my mind, kind of dream-like."

Sometimes, the more they focus on it, the more it goes away. And in general, the orientation is to just sort of let it cook in the back of your mind. Don't bring it up and look at it critically.

MOSS-COANE: My guest is therapist David Calof. We're talking about hypnosis, the subject of his book "The Couple Who Became Each Other." We'll talk more after a short break.

This is FRESH AIR.

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MOSS-COANE: David Calof is our guest. He's a family therapist, uses hypnosis in his private practice and he's also the author of a book called "The Couple Who Became Each Other."

You credit someone named Milton Erickson (ph) for giving hypnosis more respectability. And from his perspective, he saw hypnosis as a form of communication. You've taken that, I think, one step further, to say that there's a kind of hypnotic communication that exists within families; it exists between couples; and that family interactions can be hypnotic.

What do you mean by that?

CALOF: Well, if we go back to the definition of suggest as being the uncritical acceptance of an idea, one of the simplest examples of that would be, and this is a very simple example, would be the parent who, in essence, and I'm putting this in quotes, hypnotizes a child to develop a certain self-image.

For example: "You're just as clumsy as your father." Or: "You're just as sensitive as your mother." Or whatever it may be.

Well, one of the things that we know about suggestion is that it's potentiated when it's received from an authority figure. Well, certainly are parents are the supreme authority figures in our lives. And so there tends to be an uncritical acceptance of that.

In some abusive circumstances, for example, a parent may frame the abuse of the child as something other than abuse -- that this is how we love in this family; or in fact what you think is happening isn't really happening. It's just your imagination. That, in itself, is a form of hypnosis.

MOSS-COANE: You have a number of case histories in your book. And what I found most interesting had to do with a family that literally passed 15 pounds between them. And this was a family where one of the children was really beginning to move out of the family. Tell us this story.

CALOF: Yeah, this is an important story in my own development. It was one of my first family therapy experiences, as a matter of fact. It occurred very early in my practice. It really taught me something about how families function as systems.

The long and the short of it is that a 19-year-old girl was referred to me to work on weight management. And typically, when someone calls a hypnotherapist for weight issues, they're really in trouble.

And typically, the hypnotherapist is seen as the course of last resort. And so people that call me over the years typically for weight loss, you know, have been morbidly obese -- as much as, in one case, 250 pounds overweight.

So I asked her, I said, well, how many pounds are you overweight? And she said "fifteen." And I remember thinking that was odd because people generally don't feel too much in trouble with, you know, 15 pounds. And knowing that symptoms can point beyond themselves to other areas of dysfunction, both in our personal lives and in our family lives, I was intrigued by this and I wondered what she might be saying, symbolically.

So I consented to see her; brought her in -- and the story I learned was that she basically was on her way to college and had delayed going to college for a year, wasn't quite sure why she had done that, and in that year, she'd gained a lot of weight, or gained this 15 pounds and had basically retired from her social life.

Well, I worked with her in a pretty straight-ahead way -- just basically a behavioral approach to weight loss; kind of asking her to become mindful of her eating; and to chew her food and et cetera et cetera. And again, to make a long story short, she lost the weight in a number of weeks. And I thought that was the end of the case.

A few weeks after, though, her 17-year-old sister called me and said: "You know, you were really helpful to my sister, and I wonder if you'd work with me?" And I said, well, what's up? And she says: "Well, I've gained a little bit of weight in the last few months." I said, "Oh really, how much weight have you gained?" And she said: "Fifteen pounds."

And I thought, well I've heard that before. That was interesting. But I didn't put it together. I didn't yet get that this was commentary on a family process. And so frankly, from a narcissistic point of view, I thought, well, here's a chance to be successful with two members of the same family. And so I was thinking it from that point of view.

So she comes in. I work with her in very much the same way I did with the first daughter, with a few minor differences. And she also lost the weight in a fairly short period of time. Now what was also happening, I should say, for these two sisters, is as they lost the weight, they re-entered their social world and were spending less time at home.

Well, the capper came just a few weeks after that, when the mother in this family called me and said: "You know, you were so successful with my two daughters, I wonder if you'd be willing to work with my 15-year-old?" So what's the problem? She said: "Well, she's gained some weight."

I said, well, tell me about that. And she said -- well, the long and the short of that was that she had gained 15 pounds during the time that her two sisters had lost the weight.

And I remember in that moment, something of an epiphany for me, because I had this image in my mind of these daughters standing as though in a bucket brigade, passing this 15 pounds down the line. And I didn't quite know what that meant, but I knew it was important. And I knew that it spoke to the family process.

So I basically at that point brought the family in. And what I discovered was a -- fortunately, I think -- a fairly simple matter, although an important one. The family -- the parents had married very early in life and had started their family very early on. Now, about 20 years into their marriage, they were facing the prospect of becoming a couple again, having not really been a couple since they were very young.

And this can be a time of anxiety for a family. And there's all kinds of currents that call on children in a family like this to, well, I'll use this word carefully, but to babysit their parents. So what was happening was the 19-year-old had delayed her going away to college because she perceived that her parents might have difficulty adjusting to becoming a couple again. And so she spent an awful lot of her social time with her parents.

Well, when she lost the weight, her self-confidence increased; she went back into a social life. The burden of caring for the parents shifted to the next sister and then -- and so on to the third sister.

MOSS-COANE: So these pounds really represented something about the unconscious life of this family; about how scary it was to leave home; or how scary it was for the parents to have their children begin to leave home and leave them with each other.

CALOF: Both. Exactly. Both. And the interesting point about how families operate is that when I worked -- at this point, I decided to simply work with the parents, and not the children. I worked with the parents. I basically helped them through that transition. And as if by magic, the 15-year-old daughter's weight fell off of her without any hypnotic intervention.

MOSS-COANE: David Calof is a therapist and author with Robin Simons of "The Couple Who Became Each Other." He'll be back with us in the second half of the show.

I'm Marty Moss-Coane and this is FRESH AIR.

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MOSS-COANE: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Marty Moss-Coane.

Our guest is David Calof. He's a therapist in private practice in Seattle and uses hypnosis in his work. He's written a book with Robin Simons about some of the families and couples he's worked with called "The Couple Who Became Each Other."

He says that hypnosis is a form of communication -- a key to exploring the parts of the self that are hidden from conscious understanding.

The way you talk about the unconscious makes it sound like it's smarter than out conscious life. Is that true? Is that really where some of our important wisdom is?

CALOF: Yes. It can also be, in its wisdom, it can also be incredibly stupid, and I'll explain what I mean by that. But yes, it's very different than the Freudian notion of the unconscious, which sort of holds it as this amoral, anti-social, you know -- has to be herded and controlled kind of force. Our notion of the unconscious is more as this creative resource.

Sometimes, the creativity, though, can be somewhat silly. An example of that. I remember once a woman consulted me who had horrible pain in her shoulders and these knots of muscles in her shoulders that just wouldn't go away, despite many kinds of medical treatments.

And when we finally -- in hypnosis, when we finally got to the source of it, she literally said. "You know, my boss likes to lump work on me -- likes to lump work on my shoulders." Now, so that was a brilliant metaphor so it was a way for the unconscious to say to her. "Look, get what's happening here" -- what we refer to as "organ language" -- language that references organs of the body. Understand that you're taking lumps here.

That was brilliant. What was not brilliant, although from the point of view of the unconscious, it was smart -- because of this, she couldn't do her job. She couldn't type. So the unconscious was protecting her from this kind of tyrant of a boss.

Well, in an adult mind, when she could reexamine that decision, of course, she had other ways of dealing with his stress. She set better limits and negotiated better. So sometimes the unconscious takes these extreme measures.

MOSS-COANE: What's curious, too, is why, then, it becomes therapeutic and healing to make that unconscious conscious -- that somehow putting words to a conflict or words to some kind of emotions, brings about some kind of change for the better.

CALOF: It doesn't always. In fact, sometimes insight does not produce change. When it does work, it's because we can reexamine an earlier decision and we can examine it with the point of view and with the resources that we've garnered in the time since that experience. In other words, a childhood experience can be examined in adult -- with adult wisdom.

In that way, we can change the unconscious, because it has new input. But sometimes we don't need to bring that to a conscious level. Let me give you an example of that.

I worked with a woman once for six months of therapy who had a variety of issues with her father, who had been to some extent abusive with her; and a mother who'd been alcoholic. And we never really -- we talked about that just to get the information.

But the way I worked with her was very much in symbolism. We would basically, in the session, induce a state of hypnosis and then tell her to have a dream that would be relevant to the issues at hand.

Well, she had a series of dreams and they were all of a similar theme. They were of doing laundry. And they went in a progression from going to her backyard and seeing all these dirty clothes hanging on her laundry line. That was the first dream. And they're not washed and she's wondering what they're doing there.

As the dreams progress over time, this transmogrifies into a dream in which she sees that her father's dirty underwear is mixed in with hers. Now, it would have been very tempting at that point to interpret that. It would have been tempting to say. "Well, this is the dirtiness from, you know, the molestation and you're trying to separate out your identity from your father's."

And that would have been correct. But it probably wouldn't have done anything. What we did instead was, in hypnosis, she simply rescripted the dreams. She -- in the dream, she took down her father's clothes; she washed it; gave it back to him. She took her own clothes down; separated them. And in this process of six months of therapy, a very profound depression lifted. We did very little insight.

MOSS-COANE: So you literally, then, had her reprogram her dreams.

CALOF: Precisely.

MOSS-COANE: Well, one of the very controversial areas for the use of hypnosis has to do with child abuse and what's called "recovered memories." First of all, how can a person -- a child -- wipe out a traumatic event or a series of horrific traumatic experiences? How can that possibly take place 'cause I think for most people who live in a sort of -- in their conscious world, it's hard to imagine having a whole chapter of their life which is erased?

CALOF: Well, I'll answer that question, but it's also true for other contexts as well. There's numerous case reports over the last 100 years of people who forgot automobile accidents and natural disasters and domestic violence, and people who were in plane crashes who were rescued -- had no memory of being rescued.

So there's plenty of literature to show that we can put out of our minds overwhelming events, overwhelmingly traumatic events in a variety of contexts. It only became controversial when that idea was applied to the notion of child abuse.

So let's talk about that for a moment. What are the motivational dynamics that would make a child forget multiple episodes of child abuse? There's numerous ones. First of all, any child in the world will trade their perceptions away for at least the illusion that their parents are adequate caregivers.

So they set it aside and forget it because the knowledge of it destroys the illusion of the caregiver. They set it aside because it's overwhelming, physical and emotionally. And they set it aside because oftentimes in abusive families, there's directives to keep the secret.

Well, the child who's able to dissociate the experience and literally forget it has what in politics is called "plausible deniability." Not only can they not tell the story, but they don't even look like they're lying because they don't have the story on board.

MOSS-COANE: So while the abuse, then, is literally going on, a child can use part of their mind to disappear -- to disappear that abuse.

CALOF: Well, they'll talk about that. They'll say things like "as it was happening, I went into the wallpaper." It -- what's important to understand here, that in those cases, the memory of that event or events has never been intact.

It's not like the memory was on board and then they repress it. That's really a mistaken notion. That's not how it works at all.

In fact, what happens is, if you imagine the experience as a ribbon, coming -- this is a horrible metaphor, but it works -- coming over a series of razor blades, so that as the ribbon of experience comes into your perception, it's being split into its components so that you never really have the whole of the memory.

That comes together only in therapy. What may happen, though, is that little aspects of the memory may intrude. An example of that would be, let's just take an adult -- an adult woman, let's say, who has been raped who wants to put that experience out of her mind for a variety of reasons. Well, she may find at various times the smell of the assailant's after-shave coming into her mind; or a certain color of clothing may trigger her to an anxiety attack.

So she's broken the experience up into these little components, and then those components tend to intrude in their component form. The memory has never been whole for that experience.

MOSS-COANE: But the process, then, of trying to figure out what happened, then, of trying to reclaim or recover those memories -- I would think that's a fairly treacherous process because as much as all this stuff can happen, memory, it seems to me, is also easily contaminated.

CALOF: Well, yes. And I think we need to make an important distinction that generally is not made in this debate. And that's the distinction between psychotherapy on one hand and forensic psychology on the other. Those are two different worlds, and they operate with two different sets of ethics; two different sets of underlying values.

In psychotherapy we're primarily concerned with the patient's narrative history -- the stories they tell themselves about their experiences. We're less concerned about what we call the veridical (ph) truth of that -- the legal truth of that -- than we would be in a forensic setting.

If that client remembered -- has memories occur to them in therapy and decides to take those memories before a trier of fact like in a legal case or something like that, the burden of proof is on them, and it should be on them. They should be that, you know, the same burden as anybody else.

We are not as concerned about that in therapy. And as a matter of fact, in my therapy, I discourage them from bringing these truths into the forensic arena because I simply -- it's simply usually not a good idea.

Now, can memory be distorted? Of course it can be distorted. When, you know, I gave you an example earlier of the parent who abuses a child and tells him it's just a bad dream, and the child, you know, believes that. Or prior to the renascence about sexual abuse in the world, psychiatrists regularly told women who reported abuse that it was merely fantasy. Some women left those sessions believing it was merely fantasy. That, too, is a distortion of memory.

MOSS-COANE: Well, I know you're aware of Elizabeth Loftus (ph) who has done some research on memory. And she says that memory is famously unreliable; that when you go back to find out what happened in the past, that it's not something you can necessarily depend on. What do you say in response to her?

CALOF: Well, she's speaking, again, from a forensic context. So if you're sitting in a witness seat in a trial, yes, you need to corroborate a memory that you're -- you know, if you're using a memory to bring a civil or a criminal charge, you have to corroborate it. You cannot -- anyone's memory, whether it be recovered or just the memory of driving to work this morning, can be suspect in that way.

So I agree with her in that regard. And she again, though, is speaking in the forensic field. What she basically does is she's an expert witness for people who have been, as they say, falsely accused of these allegations based on recovered memory.

So all of her work really falls into that forensic field. And she's not a trained therapist nor is she licensed to be one.

MOSS-COANE: Well, I'll tell you what -- we're going to take a short break and then we'll talk some more. And our guest today is David Calof. He's a family therapist and uses hypnosis in his work. He's also the author of a book called "The Couple Who Became Each Other."

We'll be back after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

(BREAK)

MOSS-COANE: Our guest is David Calof, and his book is called "The Couple Who Became Each Other." He's a family therapist that uses hypnosis.

When you're working with someone and they do discover memories of being abused or traumatized by a family member, is it necessarily therapeutic to confront that person? Or is it therapeutic enough just to have that kind of knowledge where the conscious and the unconscious then can work together -- can understand something together?

CALOF: I tend to be more in that camp. Actually, for about 15 years now, I've pretty much advocated against confrontation for a variety of reasons. And let me just talk about a couple of them.

One is: ultimately, you know, this is the hand you were dealt. If you're going to have a successful life, you've got to play that hand. If you need people to validate your reality; if you need people to apologize to you; if you need people to take responsibility in order to have a good life, then you're still, in a sense, in a dependent position.

So what I say to people is, you've got to embrace your reality and move on. If you're going to confront your parents about this, understand they're probably not prepared to hear this.

Chances are, if they did this, then this was ego-alien to them, that is to say, unacceptable to them. Chances are they've put it out of their mind as well and don't think of themselves that way. So what in the world makes you think that if you confront them about this you're going to get anything other than a hostile reaction? So I'm opposed to it for that reason.

And I think it also tends to perpetuate a violent dynamic. In some cases where people have confronted their parents, where it's perhaps worked a little better, is when they say, "You know, I know what's true and I've worked it through and, you know, I don't even have a lot of energy towards you any more, but I simply want you to know that I know it's true and this is how things are going to be between us from now on. These are the limits I'm going to set. This is how I want to be treated."

In those kinds of circumstances, sometimes it's worked very well.

MOSS-COANE: Is all hypnosis, in the end, self-hypnosis?

CALOF: That's very well-put. And as a matter of fact, I've said that myself over the years. I really believe that's the case. I think that at best, we're facilitators. At worst, we get in people's ways of accessing their own inner resources.

But ultimately, the state of hypnosis belongs to the subject. It's a naturalistic state. We go in and out of it our entire lives. All we hypnotherapists learn how to do is to be able to guide someone into that state, stabilize it, and then operate as something of a guide in that state to direct them to their own resources.

But I think the best way to think about that is literally that all self-hypnosis -- all hypnosis -- is self-hypnosis. I think that's a very well-put idea.

MOSS-COANE: When you're working with a whole family, do you sometimes hypnotize the whole group?

CALOF: It can either happen that way or individual members. But yes, I'll sometimes do the whole group. But it does several things. It can be a means of stress management for everybody. It's also a very intimate experience. You have a -- I'll put them in rapport with each other so they're aware of each other's presence in the room. And it's a -- it can be a tremendous experience of intimacy.

You know, it's very -- like if you're with a loved one and you're having a wonderful day and there's very few words exchanged, but you feel like there's this rich communication between you nevertheless. It takes on that kind of quality. So, yes, it's possible to do that, as well as working with individual members.

MOSS-COANE: And sometimes in this family session, do you ask one member of the family to be another member of the family, and have them talk to each other?

CALOF: Well, in some cases. I've done that with siblings before, where they've actually exchanged identities and renegotiated their differences. And then I've also done that in their -- actually, the title chapter of the book "The Couple Who Became Each Other" was in fact a couple that had been at horrible loggerheads in their marriage for five years; had been to a number of marriage therapists; had failed miserably and came to see me.

And fortunately, both were excellent hypnotic subjects with some experience. And so I, in essence, had them become each other and in that deep trance of being each other, they could call upon their unconscious knowledge of each other and in the exchange of identities renegotiate their differences and were very successful.

MOSS-COANE: I'm curious what a whole family in hypnosis looks like.

CALOF: Basically, it looks like a bunch of people taking a nap, is what it -- it's not very ...

MOSS-COANE: You get paid for this stuff, right?

CALOF: And I get paid for this stuff. Actually, I'll tell you, it's interesting because there's sort of the loneliness sometimes of the hypnotherapist. Please understand, that's not all that I do. But for me sometimes it's more interesting when I'm more engaged with someone at a more conscious level, it's more, you know, rather than my just simply drolling on and their eyes are closed, I sometimes feel lonely in those moments.

MOSS-COANE: David Calof, we are out of time, and I thank you very much for joining us on FRESH AIR today. Thank you.

CALOF: It's been my pleasure. Thank you.

MOSS-COANE: David Calof is a Seattle-based therapist. His book, written with Robin Simons, is called "The Couple Who Became Each Other."

Dateline: Marty Moss-Coane, Philadelphia
Guest: David Calof
High: Hypnotherapist David Calof has been using hypnosis for 20 years to help clients discover -- through their own subconscious -- the way to solve their emotional problems. He's written a new book about his work, "The Couple Who Became Each Other: And other Tales of Healing from a Hypnotherapist's Casebook." (Bantam Books) Calof practices family therapy and hypnotherapy in Seattle.
Spec: Therapy; Health and Medicine; Hypnotherapy
Copy: Content and programming copyright 1997 WHYY, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by FDCH, Inc. under license from WHYY, Inc. Formatting copyright 1997 FDCH, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to WHYY, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission.
End-Story: Hypnotherapist David Calof

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: AUGUST 06, 1997
Time: 12:00
Tran: 080602np.217
Type: REVIEW
Head: Mahler's Seventh Symphony
Sect: Entertainment
Time: 12:58

MARTY MOSS-COANE, HOST: Mahler's Seventh Symphony is considered by many to be his most elusive symphony. But classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz says it's always been one of his favorites.

A new recording by Pierre Boulez, Lloyd says, captures its mysterious qualities.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP OF ORCHESTRA PERFORMING MAHLER'S SEVENTH SYMPHONY)

LLOYD SCHWARTZ, MUSIC CRITIC: I love Mahler's Seventh Symphony the way I love Shakespeare's so-called dark comedies like "Measure for Measure" and "Troilus and Cressida." Its intricate network of ironies and teasing instability reflect my own experience of the world more closely than the tragic grandeur of some of Mahler's other symphonies, which I also love.

I got to know the Seventh from the amazing 1968 recording by Otto Klemperer, which usually gets dismissed with perfunctory comments about how slow it is. It's nearly 25 minutes longer than most performances.

But it's an object lesson in how relative the idea of tempo is. It's expansive, rather than weighted down, spacious, crystalline, passionate, and rhythmically alive at every moment.

You can hear everything and it never feels slow. And Klemperer, who is a disciple of Mahler's, really captures this symphony's slippery tone, its marching ghosts and spidery dances, its nostalgia for country innocence, and equal delight in the romance of urban night life.

The middle of the Seventh Symphony has two sophisticated, yet creepy night music serenades. The second, marked "Andante Amoroso" comes complete with guitar and mandolin. They, in turn, surround an eerie scherzo -- a waltz marked "Shadowy." War and memory and desire, deep sadness, and the celebration of life's pleasures are all bound together here in one inextricable web.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP OF ORCHESTRA PERFORMING MAHLER'S SEVENTH SYMPHONY)

SCHWARTZ: And now we have an extraordinarily seductive recording by Pierre Boulez and the Cleveland Orchestra, and it does everything. It races and lingers, confronts and teases, tickles and terrifies. The playing of the Cleveland Orchestra has such eloquence of phrasing and rhythmic elan, it's irresistible.

These two conductors are utterly divergent in their approaches, yet they capture the same unsettling tone. Here's how Boulez conducts the music we just heard by Klemperer.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP OF ORCHESTRA PERFORMING MAHLER'S SEVENTH SYMPHONY)

SCHWARTZ: In the "Rondo" finale, though, Boulez radically departs from Klemperer's imposing nobility or Leonard Bernstein, who made the finale sound like Richard Strauss at his most bombastic.

This may be Mahler's most maligned single movement. Critics find the thematic material thin and forced. Yet I've always loved its complicated happy ending, and Boulez's ebullience is completely convincing.

In this symphony, Mahler isn't reaching for the stars. His C-major ending, checkered by joyful, is a whole-hearted embracing of life in this world, a mingled yarn, as Shakespeare writes in another dark comedy, "All's Well That Ends Well," of infinitely variegated colors and shades.

MOSS-COANE: Lloyd Schwartz is classical music editor of the "Boston Phoenix." He reviewed a recording of Mahler's Seventh Symphony by Pierre Boulez and the Cleveland Orchestra on Deutsche Grammophon.

For Terry Gross, I'm Marty Moss-Coane.

Dateline: Lloyd Schwartz; Marty Moss-Coane, Philadelphia
Guest:
High: Classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz reviews a new recording of Mahler's Seventh Symphony by Pierre Boulez and the Cleveland Orchestra (Deutsche Grammophon).
Spec: Entertainment; Culture; Lifestyle; Music Industry
Copy: Content and programming copyright 1997 WHYY, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by FDCH, Inc. under license from WHYY, Inc. Formatting copyright 1997 FDCH, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to WHYY, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission.
End-story: Mahler's Seventh Symphony
Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.