The Good Doctor

Dr. William Jennings Bryan, Jr.--the world's leading practitioner, professor and promoter of medical hypnosis--is worried. Dr. Bryan is chief of staff of the American Institute of Hypnosis (A.I.H.) and the person most responsible for taking hypnosis out of magic shows and putting it into clinics, where it belongs; his work has been the main reason that the American Medical Association has recognized the legitimacy of medical hypnosis--but still he's very worried. In fact, he's scared to death. Bryan has been trying to hide his concern here at the Banff Springs Hotel high in the Canadian Rockies as he gives A.I.H. postgraduate course number 506--Successful Treatment of Sexual Disorders--to an attentive class composed of 60 physicians, their spouses, nurses and associates. All morning long, he has been guiding them through case studies of doctors who can't keep it up for their 200 girlfriends, of frigid social workers and of housewives who vomit after climaxing. But as he helps the doctors understand the psychological origins of these sexual disorders, Bryan finds that he can no longer keep his own problem secret: "Sam," he yells to his executive assistant at the back of the conference room, "where's Brenda?"

Sam, a striking woman in her mid-30s who was crowned Miss Nude America in 1971, yells back that Brenda is still upstairs in Bryan's room. The physician, who at 49 has analyzed over 20,000 patients ("more than Adler, Freud, Jung and Mesmer combined"), calls a brief "bladder break" and runs upstairs to find Brenda, the 28-year-old who has recently become the center of his life. Bryan has made no secret about the fact that Brenda is the woman he has been searching for all his life. Although, at this writing, the distinguished medical hypnotist's divorce from his wife of 23 years is still in the preliminary stages, he openly tells the class of his determination to marry Brenda.

Bryan, who says he has averaged five orgasms a day since turning 21, has not made his decision about Brenda lightly. All told, he has slept with 11,999 women. "I would have hit 12,000 if it weren't for Brenda," says the good doctor. "But now I don't want anyone else."

"To see what I love about Brenda, you'd have to go to bed with her," Bryan told one of his students earlier in the day. In one of his first number 506 lectures, on sex potential, the father of medical hypnosis pointed out: "My gal Brenda can hit 60 times a day." She achieves this through application of multiple-orgasm techniques pioneered by Bryan himself. The medical hypnotist, who, on special occasions, is able to come as many as 15 times a day, explained that the mathematics behind Brenda's monumental achievement are simple. Since "she can come four times to my one every time," there is no problem getting her up to 60.

This revelation caused quite a stir in the class. In the back of the room, one of his associates quietly put the whole matter into perspective: "That's a lot, but remember, he's been conditioning her. Brenda's been great for Bill. He's finally found a woman who can satisfy his sex potential."

After class, Brenda confirmed her mentor's claim: "Since I met Bill, my sex potential has gone from seven to 60 orgasms a day."

Although there appears to be little doubt about their compatibility, both Brenda and Bryan know their future is not going to be easy. The physician's responsibilities include treating hundreds of patients at his Sunset Strip headquarters, giving roughly 30 three-to-five-day hypnosis courses every year to doctors, dentists, therapists, attorneys, nurses, theologians, et al., training A.I.H. fellows and residents, helping lawyers such as F. Lee Bailey pick juries, writing books, editing the A.I.H. journal and otherwise tending to the needs of the world's sole hypnosis conglomerate.

Bryan, a devout man who serves as a deacon in the Old Roman Catholic Church (a sect originating among Roman Catholic opponents of the Vatican council's doctrine of papal infallibility), made the decision to leave his wife for Brenda only after God gave him His personal OK. Because the medical hypnotist enjoys what amounts to a hotline to the Lord, Bryan and Brenda have already been able to start anticipating some of the highs and lows of their life together. Just the night before, at dinner, Brenda paused between sips of her daiquiri to tell one of the number-506 students a bit of information that the Lord had recently passed down to Bryan: "God said we'll have five children. The fourth will be a boy and he will drown, maybe in a pool in the back yard."

Minutes after leaving the conference room, Bryan is back, paging for injectable Compazine: "We both woke up nauseated as hell this morning. It must have been something in those daiquiris we had last night. I kept wondering why they were yellow instead of green. At least I can eat, whether I'm nauseated or not, but poor Brenda is really sick. I'm going to have to give her a shot." After injecting Brenda with Compazine, he returns to call the class back to order.

Through courses such as the one being given in Banff, Bryan has taught over 20,000 physicians how to use hypnosis to uncover the real sources of patients' problems and then provide appropriate therapy. He has also showed them how to diagnose such common afflictions as "The Walking Zombie Syndrome (W.Z.S.)," "The Ponce De León Syndrome (P.D.S.)" and "The Snapping Pussy Syndrome (S.P.S.)."

The hypnotist relies heavily on case histories taken from his own Los Angeles--based practice. There, patients pay $100 an hour for his help on a wide range of emotional, medical and psychosomatic problems. After inducing them into a deep hypnotic sleep, Bryan proceeds to uncover the subconscious factors that contribute to their problems. Then he offers positive suggestions aimed at helping impotent pharmacists, homosexuals, alcoholics, child molesters, asthmatics, chain smokers, kleptomaniacs, the obese and other kinds of patients solve their problems.

The "Bryan method" involves a wide variety of imaginative techniques. The hypnotist does not coddle his patients and frequently insists that they change their ways immediately. For example, heroin addicts who come to Bryan are subjected to some of the same brainwashing techniques the physician learned when he ran an Air Force brainwashing program years ago. They are indoctrinated six hours a day, while a private policeman baby-sits with them for the other 18.

Unlike conventional therapists, Bryan often uses the most direct approach possible to help his patients. Instead of tying them up with years of expensive therapy, he will often take short cuts to a cure. For example, under hypnosis, one woman patient in her 60s explained that she had found it nearly impossible to have an orgasm since the death of her lover, a conductor with the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe railroad. She indicated that the only way she could come was to climb on top of an Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe railroad car and let her hands and legs go limp. Bryan solved the problem by getting a friend to install Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe wallpaper and a ladder in her bathroom. Then, simply by climbing the ladder and pretending she was on a railroad car, the woman came every time.

While Bryan is treating one patient, a prerecorded library of 250 cassette tapes enables him to simultaneously treat patients in four other rooms. After initial sessions, a patient can simply walk into a treatment room, put on a pair of earphones and listen to a tape that induces him into a deep hypnotic sleep. Then a technician puts on the Bryan tape appropriate to the patient's particular case. That way, therapy can continue while the doctor is out of town.

Through his broad clinical experience, Bryan has found that some afflictions--such as S.P.S., a common cause of male impotence--are relatively easy to diagnose through age regression. Simply by hypnotizing the patient and taking him back into his childhood, he can learn where he picked up the subconscious belief that the vagina has teeth capable of chopping off his penis. But sometimes medical hypnotists must age-regress patients back before birth into a previous incarnation to get to the root of their problems. Bryan wrote about one such case in a May 1974 article published in his A.I.H. journal.

The subject of the report was an impotent 33-year-old man attached to General Custer's forces at the Battle of the Little Big Horn in his last life. Too cowardly to fight, he hid from the Indians and became the sole white survivor of the battle. Ashamed of his cowardice, he developed a guilt complex that made him impotent. He died in 1888, of a gunshot wound. After being reborn in 1934, the impotence caused by cowardice (continued on page 160) Good Doctor (continued from page 84) in his previous life remained with him. Finally, under hypnoanalysis, the man was reassured that, far from being a coward at the last stand, he had actually used good sense to save his life in a hopeless situation; suddenly he became potent--for the first time since the battle.

Cures like that one help explain the broadening appeal of hypnotherapy, which seems to reach into realms untouched by conventional therapists. And when practiced by the Bryan method, it can also be very lucrative. Under his ingenious tape system, Bryan can earn $500 an hour when all five treatment rooms are in use. The physician, who makes $250,000 a year and "spends every bit of it" to keep himself and the A.I.H. happy, stops periodically to tout his automated hypnotherapy system to the Banff audience: "I've never had a single resident come out of the institute and make less than $100,000 the first year with the Bryan method." Already, the first wave of Bryan disciples is moving out of his Los Angeles headquarters and setting up offices across America, where the miracle of tape allows them to treat five patients at a time. Bryan sees this as the beginning of a medical revolution that will supplant much of conventional psychiatry and psychotherapy. "Our system is faster, it's cheaper and it works," he says. "I'm so confident of my results I'm willing to do what no psychiatrist is willing to do--charge a flat fee."

When one of the doctors asks how they should set their fees, Bryan enunciates his personal rule of thumb: "You should charge the highest fee you can without feeling guilty about it." There are, of course, certain exceptions. For example, he never charges a lee to other physicians or their families. And already he has offered to treat a "hate fucker" here at Banff for free. This particular physician, who has been discussing his problem with Bryan between sessions, suddenly finds his case being incorporated into the number-506 lecture. The A.I.H. leader tells his class: "Now, I'm not going to mention any names, but I want you all to know that we have one hate fucker here with us today. These guys love their wives and have had an active sexual past. But somehow they get the idea that sex is disgusting and turn into hate fuckers."

Just then, there is a knock at the door and Brenda, who is very slim, very blonde and very pale, walks in to join Bryan at the podium. The physician decides to give his voice a rest and let Brenda take over the reading of the case studies. She begins with the story of Mr. E. E., a 40-year-old hospital administrator who insists the best piece of ass he ever had was with a Spanish goat. Bryan is obviously delighted with the way Brenda, who was a Cincinnati doctor's assistant when he met her at a number-101 course in Pittsburgh, takes control of the session. Following a brief courtship, Brenda left her Ohio job, took a position with the institute and began traveling with Bryan. At first she resisted the rotund physician's marriage proposals. In one desperate plea for her hand, on the first night of a number-101 course in Oklahoma City, he asked, "What do I have to do, Brenda, bleed for you?" She brushed aside his rhetoric, but the very next day, Bryan collapsed, started spitting up blood and was rushed to the hospital, where ulcers were diagnosed. Brenda agreed to marry him (as soon as he could get a divorce) and the ulcers cleared up in a few weeks.

That evening, Bryan and Brenda are only too happy to teach his sex-development techniques to the class in a partitioned-off section of the Alberta dining room. While Banff Springs guests dine noisily on the other side of the plastic room divider, Bryan and Brenda sit down to demonstrate a variety of techniques designed to produce multiple orgasms. Bryan lies back while Brenda sits on his thighs and lets him use his hands to rock her by her thighs. Unfortunately, Brenda's long dress interferes with his effort to teach the best route to multiple orgasms: "You had to wear that dress tonight, didn't you? You should have worn your shorts." Finally, the physician gets a good grip and goes to work jerking his paramour back and forth: "Look at the speed you can get with this; it'll really surprise you girls. Most of you don't fuck this fast now, I bet."

After demonstrating several other high-speed techniques, Bryan and Brenda turn to psychological methods aimed at helping along multiple orgasms. "You have to get them up to their climax and then talk them into having another one before they come down. One method is to tell them, 'You can't stop fucking, no matter how hard you try,' and they come all over the place. Or, with an inhibited girl, you can say, 'It's the good girls who can keep coming. Come on, good girl, give it to me, give it to me, give it to me, you can do it good.' "

Then Brenda takes her turn to chant a few of her favorite preclimax chants that turn Bryan on: "Show me what a real fuck you are, shoot your gun into me. Come on, baby, you're onstage and everyone is waiting for you to come." Everyone scribbles notes furiously as Brenda shouts another of her favorites into the mike: "Come on, man, you are all man, you are a big man. Everyone is watching, everyone else out there wishes he was screwing me. The whole world wants me, but you've got me." By the time Brenda finishes, a hush has come over the noisy diners on the other side of the partition. They have all put down their prime rib and turned toward the room divider, waiting for more of this unexpected audio entertainment.

Thanks to techniques such as these, Bryan has been able to personally help many women along the road toward achieving their sexual potential. Likewise, he has found his sexual experiences with 11,999 women to be most educational: "I enjoy variety and I like to get to know people on a deep emotional level. One way of getting to know people is through intercourse." Unfortunately, this warmhearted attitude has created some difficulties for Bryan. In the spring of 1969, the California Board of Medical Examiners found him guilty of unprofessional conduct in four cases in which he had sexually molested women patients. He was given five years' probation with the understanding that he would have an adult woman present whenever he was treating females. After fulfilling the terms of probation, the physician has had his license fully restored.

After the Banff Springs course, things between Brenda and Bryan began going downhill. The relationship that had seemed too good to be true was. Completely exhausted by the good doctor's whirlwind schedule, she checked into a hospital. After consultation, it was decided that preservation of Brenda's health dictated her leaving the doctor and the institute. The young woman returned to her family in the Midwest, where she continued to recuperate. Bryan finds it painful to speak of the breakup: "This girl was the love of my life. I just don't know what I am going to do without her."

Bryan--who has, among other things, been a drummer with the Tommy Dorsey band, flown commercial planes, directed medical-survival training for the Air Force in northern Nevada, where his patients included employees of several local bordellos, hypnotized the Boston Strangler and served as technical advisor for The Manchurian Candidate--feels no remorse about his affair with Brenda or any of his past ones: "I don't regret any piece of ass I've ever had or any affair. You shouldn't be afraid of extramarital intercourse. God is watching you and if He doesn't approve of who you are screwing, He can change it right now. God saved Lot. even though He knew he was screwing his daughter. Don't worry, no one can separate you from the love of God, no matter who you fuck. If you start denying your sex potential or the extramarital love you need, your whole body will suffer."

By the last clay of the Banff number-506 course, Bryan's students seem nearly as tired as he is. Many of them have been up half the night, practicing his new techniques. Some have technical questions about the three basic fellatio methods he has been teaching on large red-candy penises: the silken swirl, the butterfly flick and the Hoover. When one doctor's wife indicates that she simply can't stand the idea of swallowing semen, the professor encourages her to give it a try: "It tastes like potato chips, only a little stickier." By now, Bryan himself is beginning to show signs of exhaustion. He is having a hard time keeping his eyes open and his voice is going fast. The thought of repeating number 506 for a new class at Grossinger's in a few days only adds to his weariness. Despite the fact that he uses self-hypnosis to ward off illness, Bryan has had a stroke, hepatitis, bleeding ulcers, rectal surgery, a gall-bladder operation and an intestinal bypass in the past four years. Although the last operation succeeded in bringing his weight down from over 300 pounds to a more realistic 250, it also hurt his liver. As a result, he went back into the hospital to have his intestines hooked back up.

Bryan's staff and his friends have been suggesting that perhaps it were time he slowed down a bit. But the world's leading medical hypnotist can't stop himself from working too hard. He must continue teaching too many courses, treating too many patients, writing too many articles and training too many hypnotherapists. As long as there is an undiagnosed case of The Snapping Pussy Syndrome, as long as there is a person guilt-ridden by an extramarital affair, as long as there is a single kleptomaniac out there stealing toilet paper, Bryan will not be able to rest. He will hypnotize crocodiles, put medical-hypnosis courses to music, publish articles on "Suicide as a Means of Sexual Gratification in Young Females" or do anything else necessary to bring the eyes of the medical world to his new form of therapy. He won't be satisfied until a whole legion of hypnotherapists comes forth from the A.I.H. Sunset Strip headquarters, fans out over America and wipes out the problems that traditional therapists, psychiatrists and psychologists have failed to solve. "I'm fortunate to have enough ego to think I know more than Freud, Adler, Jung and all those old guys," says Bryan. "I'm not knocking them: I'm just practicing 20th Century medicine the way it should be practiced. I'm sure about 2150 some new guy will come up with a better idea, and then everyone will say, 'That Bryan sure was crazy.' "

As the A.I.H. leader raises what's left of his voice to conclude his final lecture, the entire class rises to give him a standing ovation. After picking up their number-506 diplomas, many of the students rush forward to thank him. Among the most grateful is a young doctor's wife who has been greatly relieved by Bryan's reassurances that there is no harm in her seven-year-old daughter's experimenting with a vibrator. The woman who was afraid to swallow semen also thanks the doctor for helping her overcome her inhibition. And even the hard-nosed hate fucker comes forward to promise he will reconsider the error of his ways. This delights Bryan: "I know, if you really try, you can stop hate fucking and learn to start really loving your wife."

The hate fucker nods and says, "You know, there's something I've been wanting to tell you."

"What's that?"

"Well, you know how sick to your stomach you got the other day."

"Yes."

"Well, you know that lime juice they put in daiquiris is very strong. It can cause gastritis."

Dr. William Jennings Bryan, Jr., M.D., J.D., Ph.D., LL.D., F.A.I.H., F.A.C.M.H., slaps his blond head, then cups his hands to his mouth and shouts across the room in a raspy voice: "Hey, Brenda, you know what gave us all the trouble? It was the lime juice. Can you believe that?"