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Is the following quote based on truth?
Classical hypnosis involved three stages of trance, each deeper than the one preceding it. The first, to be employed for people who wanted to give up smoking or stop eating, was really not a trance at all but a state of deep relaxation. The second brought the patient to a stage at which he retained his sense of feeling but had little sense of pain. He would be aware of a pinprick but not wince to it. A heightened sense of memory and an acceptance of post-hypnotic suggestion characterized this stage. The third stage produced a trance so complete that patients were fully anaesthetized. People with deadly allergies to conventional anaesthetics underwent major surgery in third-stage trances: Caesareans, breast implants, thyroidectomies, even battlefield amputations in World War I. Only one person in four or five, however, could be put into a third-stage trance. only in the third stage could the hypnotist achieve ‘regression’. Regression was a voyage into the client’s past life. What was involved was a kind of play-acting with the hypnotherapist assuming different roles, friend, mother, father, boss, to spur the client’s memory. The aim was to find in that exploration of the past explanations for the client’s problems, to discover positive feelings, attitudes on which to anchor a therapy of post-hypnotic suggestion.
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