Clinical vs. Lay Hypnosis: A Hopeless Battle?
An Editorial by Steve K.D. Eichel, Ph.D.
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protect practitioners (as opposed to consumers) in an era of shrinking health dollars? If the latter is the case, do we want our resources to be used in the pursuit of the professional equivalent of the Vietnam War?

Side note: A primary issue here involves two terms whose presence in a licensing law are central to the health professional's right to independent (i.e., medically unsupervised) practice: diagnosis and treatment. Since treatment (we have been taught) ensues from diagnosis, to be independent a professional must be legally authorized to perform both.

Hypnosis as Technology--Although many questions about the nature of hypnosis remain, one characteristic all experts seem to agree on is that hypnosis involves a specialized form of rapport, which is, as we know, the core ingredient of all therapeutic conversations. Therefore, hypnosis can be described as a specialized form of therapeutic conversation. One argument used to combat the false memory syndrome proponents is that a body of research indicates that hypnosis is no better (and no worse) than other forms of therapeutic conversation at persuasion (e.g., iatrogenic distortion of memory).

Here I find that the clinical hypnosis community engages in some double-talk. On the one hand, we state that clinical hypnosis is no more dangerous than any other form of therapeutic conversation; on the other hand, we say it is too dangerous to allow individuals without graduate-level training to learn and utilize it. Yet logically, if hypnosis is no more dangerous than other forms of therapeutic conversation, then we should be able and willing to teach it to the same populations we teach counseling to including, for example, addictions counselors, B.A.-level mental health workers, and peer counselors--in other words, "lay" people. There was a time when the "technology" of psychotherapy (e.g., techniques for establishing and maintaining empathy and rapport) was considered too difficult to learn outside formal graduate-level training programs. Many psychologists were suspicious of programs that involved training peer or "lay" counselors. As peer counseling programs like Women in Transition and Women Organized Against Rape proliferated in the 1960s and 1970s, however, a body of research began to allay fears: With supervision, and when generally limited to problem-focused and/or time-limited approaches (e.g., short-term support groups), well-trained lay counselors were found to be at least as effective as professionals with a broad range of problems, including serious psychological disturbances. I am unaware of any research indicating that lay counselors pose a greater threat to client well being than professional therapists. Therefore, I wonder: What really is the harm in teaching the "technology" of hypnosis to lay people, especially if the content of their education were regulated, the practice of hypnotechnology" were supervised, by professionals?

Side note: Many qualified clinical hypnotists have, at one time or another, trained with lay hypnotists. In fact, while I was attending APA in Toronto this past summer, one prominent member of Division 30 confided to me that, prior to entering graduate school, he earned part of his living as a stage hypnotist Next