Josephine R. Hilgard

Josephine "Josie" Rohrs was born and raised in the community of Napoleon, Ohio.[1][2] She graduated from Smith College in 1928, and earned her PhD in child psychology from Yale University in 1933.[3][4] She married Ernest Hilgard, a fellow psychologist whom she had met at Yale, in 1931.[3] They had a son, Henry, in 1936, and a daughter, Elizabeth Ann, in 1944.[3]

Hilgard earned an M.D. from Stanford Medical School in 1940.[3][2] She completed psychoanalytic training at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute in Washington, D.C., and at the Washington-Baltimore Psychoanalytic Institute.[2]

Hilgard held various clinical positions across the country over the subsequent years: she was a Rockefeller Fellow at the Institute for Juvenile Research in Chicago, where she worked with Franz Alexander; she treated adolescents with mental health issues at Chestnut Lodge in Maryland, under the supervision of Frieda Fromm-Reichman and Harry Stack Sullivan; and later she would become director of the Child Guidance Clinic at a children's hospital in San Francisco.[3] Finally, she accepted a position as clinical professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Stanford Medical School.[3] She conducted clinical work throughout her career as a psychiatrist and later as a psychoanalyst, and had a therapy office attached to her home.[1]

Hilgard died in 1989 in Palo Alto, California.[3]

One of Hilgard's contributions was her work on the "anniversary reaction," which described the finding that psychotic or neurotic episodes often occurred at the anniversaries of significant life events; for example, when a patient reached the age at which one of their parents had died, or when a child of the patient reached the age the patient had been, when one of their parents had died.[3][5][6] Hilgard reviewed this early work in her last peer-reviewed journal article.[3]

Hilgard investigated undergraduate students' experiences of hypnosis at Stanford's Laboratory of Hypnosis.[3] She published her findings in 1970 in her book, Personality and Hypnosis: A Study of Imaginative Involvement.[7] She found that there was a relationship between individuals' absorption in hypnotic experiences and their history of imaginative involvement as children.[3] She also discovered that children's experiences of physical punishment may predict the development of high hypnotic ability.[3][8]

Hilgard also conducted research on the use of hypnosis to manage pain.[9][10] She wrote two books on hypnotic analgesia: Hypnosis in the Relief of Pain (1975; co-authored with her husband),[11] and The Hypnotherapy of Pain in Children with Cancer (1984; co-authored with Samuel LeBaron).[12] She co-authored the Stanford Hypnotic Clinical Scale for Children.[13]

In 1982, the Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis presented Hilgard with the Bernard B. Raginsky Award for being a "distinguished teacher, researcher and pioneer in the field of hypnosis."[3] In 1985, the International Society of Hypnosis awarded her the Benjamin Franklin Gold Medal for Excellence, for being a "distinguished clinician and scientist whose insightful research serves as a model for the integration of clinical sensitivity and scientific rigor."[3]