hypnosis---what-is-it

Other uses

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 03:19:23 +0100

Hypnotism has also been used in forensics, sports, education, physical therapy and rehabilitation.^[64] Hypnotism has also been employed by artists for creative purposes most notably the surrealist circle of André Breton who employed hypnosis and automatic writing and sketches for creative purposes.

Some people have drawn analogies between certain aspects of hypnotism and areas such as crowd psychology, religious hysteria, and ritual trances in preliterate tribal cultures

Stage hypnosis

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 03:18:24 +0100

Stage hypnosis is a form of entertainment, traditionally employed in a club or theatre before an audience. Due to stage hypnotists' showmanship, many people believe that hypnosis is a form of mind control. However, the effects of stage hypnosis are probably due to a combination of relatively ordinary social psychological factors such as peer pressure, social compliance, participant selection, ordinary suggestibility, and some amount of physical manipulation, stagecraft, and trickery.^[62] The desire to be the center of attention, having an excuse to violate their own inner fear suppressors and the pressure to please are thought to convince subjects to 'play along'.^[63]^{[page number needed]}

Stage hypnosis traditionally employs three fundamental strategies,

1. Participant compliance. Participants on stage tend to be compliant because of the social pressure felt in the situation constructed on stage, before an expectant audience.

2. Participant selection. Preliminary suggestion tests, such as asking the audience to clasp their hands and suggesting they cannot be separated, are usually used to select out the most suggestible and compliant subjects from the audience. By asking for volunteers to mount the stage, the performer also tends to select the most extroverted members of the audience.

3. Deception of the audience. Stage hypnotists are performers who traditionally, but not always, employ a variety of "sleight of hand" strategies to mislead their audience for dramatic effect.

The strategies of deception employed in traditional stage hypnosis can be categorised as follows,

1. Off-microphone whispers. The hypnotist lowers his microphone and whispers secret instructions to the participant on stage, outside of the audience's hearing. These may involve requests to "play along" or fake hypnotic responses.

2. Failure to challenge. The stage hypnotist pretends to challenge subjects to defy a suggestion, e.g., "You cannot stand up out of your chair because your backside is stuck down with glue." However, no specific cue is given to the participants to begin their effort ("Start trying now!"). This creates the illusion that a specific challenge has been issued and effort made to defy it.

3. Fake hypnosis tricks. Stage hypnosis literature contains a large repertoire of sleight of hand tricks, of the kind used by professional illusionists. None of these tricks require any hypnosis or suggestion, but depend purely on physical manipulation and audience deception. The most famous example of this type is the "human plank" trick, which involves making a subject's body become rigid (cataleptic) and suspending them horizontally between two chairs, at which point the hypnotist will often stand upon their chest for dramatic effect. This has nothing to do with hypnosis, but simply depends on the fact that when subjects are positioned in the correct way they can support more weight than the audience tend to assume.

Self-hypnosis

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 03:17:27 +0100

Self-hypnosis happens when a person hypnotizes himself or herself, commonly involving the use of autosuggestion. The technique is often used to increase motivation for a diet, quit smoking, or reduce stress. People who practice self-hypnosis sometimes require assistance; some people use devices known as mind machines to assist in the process, while others use hypnotic recordings.

Self-hypnosis is said to be a skill one can improve as time goes by, and can help reduce stage fright, promote relaxation, and enhance physical well-being.

Psychotherapy

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 03:16:28 +0100

Hypnotherapy is the use of hypnosis in psychotherapy.^[55] It is used by licensed physicians, psychologists, and in stand-alone environments. Physicians and psychiatrists may use hypnosis to help treat depression, anxiety, eating disorders, sleep disorders, and posttraumatic stress disorder.^[56]

Certified hypnotherapists who are not physicians or psychologists often do treatments for smoking cessation and weight loss. (Success rates vary: a meta-study researching hypnosis as a quit-smoking tool found it had a 20 to 30 percent success rate, similar to many other quit-smoking methods,^[57] while a 2007 study of patients hospitalized for cardiac and pulmonary ailments found that smokers who used hypnosis to quit smoking doubled their chances of success.^[58])

In a July 2001 article for Scientific American titled "The Truth and the Hype of Hypnosis", Michael Nash wrote that "...using hypnosis, scientists have temporarily created hallucinations, compulsions, certain types of memory loss, false memories, and delusions in the laboratory so that these phenomena can be studied in a controlled environment."^[46]

Controversy surrounds the use of hypnotherapy to retrieve memories, especially those from early childhood or (alleged) past-lives. The American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association have cautioned against the use of repressed memory therapy in cases of alleged childhood trauma, stating that "it is impossible, without other corroborative evidence, to distinguish a true memory from a false one."^[59] Past life regression, meanwhile, is often viewed with skepticism.

Medical applications

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 03:15:31 +0100

Hypnotherapy has been successfully used as a treatment for irritable bowel syndrome, a pair of researchers who recently reviewed the best studies in this area, conclude,

The evidence for hypnosis as an efficacious treatment of IBS was encouraging. Two of three studies that investigated the use of hypnosis for IBS were well designed and showed a clear effect for the hypnotic treatment of IBS. ^[40]

Hypnosis for IBS has also received moderate support as an evidence-based treatment in the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence guidance published for the UK health services.^[41] It has been used as an alternative to chemical anaesthesia,^[42]^[43]^[44] and it has been studied as a way to soothe skin ailments.^[45]

A large number of clinical studies show that hypnosis can reduce the pain experienced by people undergoing burn-wound debridement, bone marrow aspirations, and childbirth. The International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis found that hypnosis relieved the pain of 75% of 933 subjects participating in 27 different experiments.^[46]

In 1996, the National Institutes of Health declared hypnosis effective in reducing pain from cancer and other chronic conditions.^[46] Nausea and other symptoms related to incurable diseases may also be controlled with hypnosis.^[47]^[48]^[49]^[50] For example, research done at the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine studied two groups of patients facing surgery for breast cancer. The group that received hypnosis reported less pain, nausea, and anxiety post-surgery. There was a cost benefit as well: the average hypnosis patient reduced the cost of treatment by an average of $772.00.^[51]^[52]

Hypnodermatology is the practice of treating skin diseases with hypnosis: this therapy has performed well in studies treating warts, psoriasis, and atopic dermatitis.^[53]

Hypnosis may be useful as an adjunct therapy for weight loss. A 1996 meta-analysis studying the effectiveness of hypnosis combined with cognitive-behavioral therapy found that people using both treatments lost more weight than people using CBT alone.

Hypnotherapy

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 03:14:10 +0100

Modern hypnotherapy can be divided into several major sub-modalities, most notably regression hypnotherapy (or "hypnoanalysis"), Ericksonian hypnotherapy, and cognitive-behavioural hypnotherapy.

Hypnosis has been studied in many clinical situations with varying degrees of success.^[30] It has been used as a painkiller,^[31] an adjunct to weight loss,^[32] a treatment of skin disease,^[33] and a way to soothe anxious surgical patients. It has also been used as part of psychological therapy,^[34] a method of habit control,^[35] a way to relax,^[36] and a tool to enhance sports performance.^[37]

Self-hypnosis is popularly used by people who want to quit smoking and reduce stress, while stage hypnosis can be used to persuade people to perform unusual public feats.^[38]

Cognitive-behavioural

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 03:09:12 +0100

In the latter half of the twentieth century, two factors contributed to the development of what subsequently became known as the cognitive-behavioural approach to hypnosis. 1) Cognitive and behavioural theories of the nature of hypnosis (influenced by the seminal theories of Sarbin^[21] and Barber ^[22]) became increasingly influential. 2) The therapeutic practices of hypnotherapy and various forms of cognitive-behavioural therapy overlapped and influenced each other.^[23] Although cognitive-behavioural theories of hypnosis must be distinguished from cognitive-behavioural approaches to hypnotherapy, they share similar concepts, terminology, and assumptions and have been integrated by influential researchers and clinicians such as Irving Kirsch, Steven Jay Lynn, and others ^[24].

Hypnosis was used during the 1950s, at the outset of cognitive-behavioral therapy, by early behaviour therapists such as Joseph Wolpe^[25] and also by early cognitive therapists such as Albert Ellis^[26]. The term "cognitive-behavioural" was subsequently introduced to describe their "nonstate" theory of hypnosis by Barber, Spanos & Chaves in Hypnotism: Imagination & Human Potentialities (1974)^[27]. However, Clark L. Hull had introduced an influential behavioural psychology approach to the study of hypnosis as far back as 1933, which was preceded by Ivan Pavlov's own writings on the subject^[28]. Indeed, the very earliest theories and practices of hypnotism, even those of Braid, resemble the cognitive-behavioural orientation in some respects

Milton Erickson

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 03:04:35 +0100

Milton H. Erickson, M.D. was one of the most influential post-war hypnotherapists. He wrote several books and journal articles on the subject. During the 1960s, Erickson was responsible for popularizing a new branch of hypnotherapy, which became known as Ericksonian hypnotherapy, eventually characterized by, amongst other things, the absence of a formal hypnotic inductions, and the use of indirect suggestion, "metaphor" (actually they were analogies, rather than "metaphors"), confusion techniques, and double binds. However, the lack of resemblance between Erickson's methods and those of traditional hypnotism led some of his contemporaries, such as André Weitzenhoffer, to seriously question whether he was actually practising "hypnosis" at all, and the status of his approach in relation to traditional hypnotism has remained in question.

Erickson had no hesitation in presenting any suggested effect as being "hypnosis", whether or not the subject was in a hypnotic state. In fact, he was not hesitant in passing off behavior that was dubiously hypnotic as being hypnotic.

Clark L. Hull

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 03:02:31 +0100

The next major event in the history of hypnotism came as a result of the progress of behavioural psychology in American university research. Clark L. Hull, an eminent American psychologist, published the first major compilation of laboratory studies on hypnosis, Hypnosis & Suggestibility (1933), in which he conclusively proved that the state of hypnosis and the state of sleep had nothing in common. Hull published many quantitative empirical findings derived from experiments using hypnosis and suggestion and thereby encouraged subsequent research into hypnosis by mainstream academic psychologists. Hull's behavioural psychology interpretation of hypnosis, in terms of conditioned reflexes, rivalled the Freudian psychodynamic interpretation in terms of unconscious transference.

Émile Coué

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 03:00:43 +0100

Émile Coué (1857-1926) served for around two years as an assistant to Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault in his group hypnotic at Nancy. However, after practising for several years as a hypnotherapist employing the methods of Liébeault and Bernheim's Nancy School, Coué gradually began to develop a new orientation called "conscious autosuggestion." Several years after Liébeault's death in 1904, Coué founded what became known as the New Nancy School, a loose collaboration of practitioners who taught and promoted his views. Coué's method did not emphasise "sleep" or deep relaxation and instead focused upon teaching groups of clients how to use autosuggestion by trial and error learning involving a specific series of suggestion tests. Although Coué argued that he was no longer using hypnosis, some of his followers, such as Charles Baudouin, viewed his approach as a form of light self-hypnosis. Coué's method became an internationally renowned self-help and psychotherapy technique, which contrasted with the methods of Freud's method of psychoanalysis and prefigured subsequent self-hypnosis techniques and, in some regards, the development of cognitive therapy.