Hypnosis

The hypnosis stage shows are simply BS. They use a combination of praise, shame, and setting a social contract to get people to do stupid stuff.

They'll invite 10 or 20 people up on stage, and then ask them to do something easy. The ones who don't comply are immediately cleared off the stage, and the rest (the "suggestible" ones) are praised and told that only the most intelligent people are capable of being hypnotized, effectively shaming them into complying with what the guy says to do.

Real hypnosis is completely different, and extremely well documented. Milton Erickson, MD was a psychiatrist and is considered the father of clinical hypnosis, and wrote/co-wrote numerous books on the practice. Like Foxface, I'm also certified in clinical Ericksonian hypnosis and have used it in a variety of clinical settings.

There's also a variant of Erickson's work called NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) which is essentially a very watered down, mechanized form of the work. It, too, has value, but my problem with it is anybody with a pulse can be trained and certified in it, and there are a lot of really shoddy hypnosis "schools", so there are a lot of people using NLP that really have no business using it because they lack the underlying background.

The actual effects of hypnotic work tend to diminish over time, but, particularly with Ericksonian work, the behavioral change that can come about through the work can be persistent and long-lasting.

 

So what, specifically, do you want to know?

 

Erickson was masterful. The cases he treated, and the stories his students tell of watching him working with patients stretch the imagination of what's possible.

One of the most dramatic cases was Erickson's own son. At one time, they lived on a farm in the middle of nowhere. Erickson's son had an accident involving a tractor and tore his arm severaly, severing an artery. It was over an hour's drive to the hospital, and putting a tourniquet on the arm for that long would likely cause the loss of the arm, and not restricting the artery would cause him to bleed to death. Erickson, using hypnosis, was able to stop the bleeding enough to get him to the hospital without a tourniquet.

In more ordinary circumstances, hypnosis is often effective in resolving PTSD and anxiety, and can be effective with weight loss and to help stop smoking. There are a number of cases on record where people who were legally blind without glasses were able, after several months' treatment, to see close to normally without glasses.

More recently, Carl Simonton, MD did a lot of work in the 1980s with guided imagery (a close cousin of clinical hypnosis) in the treatment of cancer patients. His work, which has been widely replicated by others, showed that hypnosis is often more effective than anti-nausea drugs in eliminating nausea caused by chemotherapy, dramatically increases immune response, and in a number of cases, has, by itself caused tumor regression.

What's interesting is how little we really know about how the unconscious mind works, and how much control it appears to have over things we don't think of as in our control... such as blood pressure, immune response, tumor regression, and so forth.

There's some experimental work going on looking at using hypnosis to enhance muscle growth, and there are even a handful of (not-so-rigorous, but still interesting) studies indicating that hypnosis might be effective with things like erectile dysfunction, breast enlargement, and so forth. When you look at Simonton's work with enhancing white blood cell count, enhancing growth of other cells and tissues doesn't seem so farfetched.

Of course... any of this, for it to work well, requires a high degree of skill, empathy, and ability to carefully read what's going on with the client, so really good hypnosis technique is something that takes a long time to develop and a lot of practice. There seem to be a lot of people that practice the simplified and non-Ericksonian forms of hypnosis, but not many that are real masters of the art. That, in turn, makes it more difficult to study in a structured and properly scientifically rigorous way because of the high level of dependency on the skill of the practitioner doing the work.

 

Psychiatrists are, generally speaking, not trained in hypnosis unless they've gone and gotten the training as a specialty postgraduate training. You're more likely to find a clinical psychologist or social worker with training in hypnosis.

Look for someone with either an MSW or masters or doctorate in psychology, and ask specifically if their training is in Ericksonian hypnosis. (there's Ericksonian, NLP, and general/classic hypnosis. Ericksonian, when done correctly, has the best track record. The most dedicated hypnotherapists will be members of ASCH, the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis.

Anybody with a pulse can get an NLP or hypnosis certification because there are a lot of bogus or substandard schools out there who have no prerequisites and don't teach the clinical psychological background necessary to properly use hypnosis. So while the psychology degree neither guarantees competence nor is required for a hypnotherapist to be competent, generally speaking, someone who is also a licensed therapist is more likely to have the proper training and actually know what s/he is doing.

 

That's totally correct when we're talking about classical hypnosis, and one of the reasons is that in classical hypnosis, the induction process is similar for everyone... which is why you could do a large class at one time.

Ericksonian, on the other hand, tends to have a very high success rate; there are few people who won't respond to Ericksonian hypnosis because the inductions are a lot more subtle and varied, and the skilled Ericsonian therapist understands how to work with resistant clients (there are actually seminars specifically on this.) Some people are definitely easier than others, but done properly, the work can be effective on probably 90% of the population. Erickson himself was close to 100%.