This daring, controversial book is an excellent illustration of Léon Chertok’s original methodology and of his great intellectual rigor and honesty. He presents here the research carried out at the Laboratory of Experimental Hypnosis, founded at the Institut de la Rochefoucauld in 1971 and regarded as a heresy at the time. Not only are we shown the great Léon Chertok at work, using his own methods to gather and analyse results obtained from hypnotised patients, but we also see how Chertok became aware of the unspoken foundation of psychoanalysis: What would happen if Freud’s final pessimistic judgement on the therapeutic ineffectiveness of psychoanalysis were seriously confronted? Chertok asks if it isn’t in the very nature of psychoanalysis itself to avoid the issue of hypnosis, and he goes on to conjecture that perhaps it is hypnosis that calls our attention to something that escapes our understanding: the workings of the psyche and of human relations.
This long-awaited new edition of a disturbing but useful book will help readers understand the interactions between hypnosis, psychoanalysis and biology; it will also remind them of the limits and limitations of human knowledge.

Léon Chertok was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. He is known word-wide for his work on hypnosis.