Hypnosis and Memory

There's a plot element that crops up from time to time in movies and TV dramas: the important memory that is hidden or revealed through hypnosis. What exactly did the witness see on the night of the crime? Where did the spy hide the secret device? Why can't the patient remember who she is? Hypnosis to the rescue! But is that for real?

I've had friends and relatives tell me about amazing experiences they have had with non-medical hypnotists, who helped them find lost objects or meaningful connections with past lives. I think that's great.

However, we know that memories "recovered" during hypnosis are unreliable – and that they are particularly susceptible to suggestions made, even unintentionally, by the hypnotist. For that reason, memories that are recalled with the use of hypnosis are usually not permissible as legal evidence. They are just not reliable enough.

Sometimes, a patient or family will want to use hypnosis to uncover the origin of a medical symptom. For instance, they may wonder if there was some kind of traumatic event that set the pain or dysfunction in motion. However, from a medical standpoint, I don't find these kinds of explorations to be useful.

For one thing, an uncorroborated memory of being hurt or frightened by another person may be false, leading to unwarranted feelings of resentment or guilt. For another, by the time a person has developed chronic symptoms, addressing the initial trigger may not actually help them to feel better. By now, the symptom has taken on a life of its own. The pain (or other problem) and associated anxiety, sadness, or disability might have turned into a self-perpetuating cycle, completely separate from any incident or injury that set it off in the first place.

There are certainly times when it is useful to call up memories during hypnosis – not so much because the memories were hidden but because they can be helpful. For instance, remembering what it was like to move freely without pain can help a person recreate that same experience in the present. When using memory for this purpose, the precise details of what happened before – the "who, what, when, where" of it – are much less important than the "how." How did it feel? How were you able to do it? How can you feel those same things again?

Hypnosis is a very cloudy lens through which to see the past. It is much better as a tool to reframe the present and, even more importantly, to shape the future.