Gene expression and brain plasticity in stroke rehabilitation: a personal memoir of mind-body healing dreams

Transforming grief into peace: The normal grieving mind-Memory construction, deconstruction, and reconsolidation

On the 19^th of September 2020 Ernest Rossi, my husband, professional partner, and best friend of 30 years left this mortal world. His passing was a comparatively rapid process of dissipation extended over a period of approximately six days. In addition to the complex of emotions and physical responses, I experienced grief. This grief affected me more than any prior loss or sadness in my life as my consciousness was altered into fluctuating quantum trance states characteristic of hypnosis while dancing on the spacetime continuum. As I transformed grief to peace, I utilized established "Rossi" principles as guidelines for effective therapeutic hypnosis and developing a satisfying life. In the tradition of our life together, I was the "operator" who had a subjective experience and yet, at the same time, I was also the "observer" who would watch, learn, and discover new knowledge. This paper is the emergent outpouring of the dynamic interplay between the observer and the operator, which is, therefore experiential, revealing, revelational, and numinous.

Leaving hypnosis behind?

Our consciousness and our practice of hypnosis co-evolve. From earliest civilizations to the present, we can think of the source of our abilities and knowledge, along with our self-awareness, as progressing from external and imperative to internal and autonomous. This perspective aligns with Jaynes' thesis on the origin of consciousness and its trajectory from a bicameral mind, to increasing self-efficacy, and on toward higher consciousness. With the ongoing emergence of our subjective and narrative consciousness comes shifting and multiplying resources for rational, shared, compassionate, and creative self-determination. However, the formal practice of therapeutic hypnosis - especially within reductive and diagnosis-based biomedical and psychological models - has lagged behind the evolution of consciousness. Most of the history of hypnosis has adhered to the bicameral paradigm. We have reserved a place for the authority of an externalized, revered entity whom we credit nonconsciously with our innate and extraordinary abilities. The creative applications of hypnosis by Erickson and the expansion of that work by Rossi signaled a fundamental emergence from that paradigm that encourages self-authorization and moves hypnosis practice toward a more evocative, systematic, and numinous horizon.

A Psychosocial Genomics Pilot Study in Oncology for Verifying Clinical, Inflammatory and Psychological Effects of Mind-Body Transformations-Therapy (MBT-T) in Breast Cancer Patients: Preliminary Results

Several studies have highlighted the key role of chronic inflammation in breast cancer development, progression, metastasis, and therapeutic outcome. These processes are mediated through a variety of cytokines and hormones that exert their biological actions either locally or distantly via systemic circulation. Recent findings suggest that positive psychosocial experiences, including psychotherapeutic interventions and therapeutic mind-body protocols, can modulate the inflammatory response by reducing the expression of genes/proteins associated with inflammation and stress-related pathways. Our preliminary results indicate that a specific mind-body therapy (MBT-T) could induce a significant reduction of the release of different cytokines and chemokines, such as SCGFβ, SDF-1α, MCP3, GROα, LIF, and IL-18, in the sera of breast cancer patients compared to a control group, suggesting that MBT-T could represent a promising approach to improve the wellness and outcome of breast cancer patients.

The "Instinct" of Imagination. A Neuro-Ethological Approach to the Evolution of the Reflective Mind and Its Application to Psychotherapy

Recent neuro-psychoanalytic literature has emphasized the view that our subjective identity rests on ancient subcortical neuro-psychic processes expressing unthinking forms of experience, which are “affectively intense without being known” (Solms and Panksepp, 2012). Devoid of internal representations, the emotional states of our “core-Self” (Panksepp, 1998b) are entirely “projected” towards the external world and tend to be discharged through instinctual action-patterns. However, due to the close connections between the subcortical and the cortical midline brain, the emotional drives may also find a way to be reflected within an intrinsic self-referential processing, evident when the organism is not actively engaged with the external world. Thanks to such endogenous functioning, the core-Self emotional dispositions are not overtly executed, but they are organized within coherent dynamic mental structures, called “feeling-toned complexes” by C. G. Jung and “unconscious phantasies” by Melanie Klein. The intrinsic self-referential dynamism of the “brainmind” originated from REM sleep arousal and then evolved in the resting-state activity of a complex of cortico-limbic midline brain structures (CMS), also called Default Mode Network (DMN). From our neuro-ethological perspective, it is sustained by an “introverted” SEEKING activity leading to the subjective exploration of internally constructed virtual scenarios. This “mind wandering” function, implicated in dreaming, fantasy processing, remembering and thinking, is the essence of the imaginative function and constitutes the first form of reflection, where intentions and drives gain a primordial form of conscious (but not self-conscious) representation. During postnatal development, this original (“archetypal”) imaginative function is slowly attuned in a relational “transitional” space and may be expressed first in non-verbal and eventually in abstract-verbal social communicative patterns. Our view has noticeable implications for psychotherapy. Instead of trying to directly modify interpersonal, extrinsic relationships (a top-down approach), dysfunctional emotional-relational patterns may be modified by a process in which the patient is helped to let-go of the perceived feeling-objects in favor of an immersion, via the actual feeling, from the superficial level of perception towards a void feeling-state, empty of images. Only starting from this “anoetic” feeling-state, the deep imaginal creative and re-structuring self-referential activity may be reactivated by a process of spontaneous imagination.

Prospects for exploring the molecular-genomic foundations of therapeutic hypnosis with DNA microarrays

A new perspective on how therapeutic hypnosis and neuroscience may be integrated on the molecular-genomic level is offered as a guide for basic research and clinical applications. An update of Watson and Crick's original formulation of molecular biology is proposed to illustrate how psychosocial experiences modulate gene expression, protein synthesis, and brain plasticity during memory trace reactivation for the reorganization of neural networks that encode fear, stress, and traumatic symptoms. Examples of the scientific literature on DNA microarrays are used to explore how this new technology could integrate therapeutic hypnosis, neuroscience, and psychosocial genomics as a new foundation for mind-body medicine. Researchers and clinicians in therapeutic hypnosis need to partner with colleagues in neuroscience and molecular biology that utilize DNA microarray technology. It is recommended that hypnotic susceptibility scales of the future incorporate gene expression data to include the concept of "embodied imagination" and the "ideo-plastic faculty" on a molecular-genomic level as well as the psychological and behavioral level of ideomotor and ideosensory responses that are currently assessed.