Josephine "Josie" Rohrs was born and raised in the community of Napoleon, Ohio. She graduated from Smith College in 1928, and earned her PhD in child psychology from Yale University in 1933. She married Ernest Hilgard, a fellow psychologist whom she had met at Yale, in 1931. They had a son, Henry, in 1936, and a daughter, Elizabeth Ann, in 1944. Hilgard earned an M.D. from Stanford Medical School in 1940. She completed psychoanalytic training at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute in Washington, D.C., and at the Washington-Baltimore Psychoanalytic Institute. 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. Finally, she accepted a position as clinical professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Stanford Medical School. She conducted clinical work throughout her career as a psychiatrist and later as a psychoanalyst, and had a therapy office attached to her home. Hilgard died in 1989 in Palo Alto, California.
Research
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 the their parents had died. Hilgard reviewed this early work in her last peer-reviewed journal article. Hilgard investigated undergraduate students' experiences of hypnosis at Stanford's Laboratory of Hypnosis. She published her findings in 1970 in her book, Personality and Hypnosis: A Study of Imaginative Involvement. She found that there was a relationship between individuals' absorption in hypnotic experiences and their history of imaginative involvement as children. She also discovered that children's experiences of physical punishment may predict the development of high hypnotic ability. Hilgard also conducted research on the use of hypnosis to manage pain. She wrote two books on hypnotic analgesis: Hypnosis in the Relief of Pain, and The Hypnotherapy of Pain in Children with Cancer. She co-authored the Stanford Hypnotic Clinical Scale for Children. In 1982, the presented Hilgard with the Bernard B. Raginsky Award for being a "distinguished teacher, researcher and pioneer in the field of hypnosis." In 1985, the 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."
