Solution Focused Therapy
The form of hypnotherapy practiced by most Victorian hypnotists, including James Braid and Hippolyte Bernheim, mainly employed direct suggestion of symptom removal, with some use of therapeutic relaxation and occassionally aversion to alcohol, drugs, etc. This simple form of treatment employed relatively direct methods and few theoretical constructs, but has continued to influence most subsequent forms of hypnotherapy. These days this kind of therapy is know as solution focused work and is the back bone of the work we carry out at the West London Hypnotherapy Clinic.
Hypnoanalysis
In 1895 Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer published a seminal clinical text entitled Studies in Hysteria (1895) which promoted a new approach to psychotherapy. Freud and Breuer used hypnosis to regress clients to an earlier age in order to help them remember and abreact supposedly repressed traumatic memories. Although Freud gradually abandoned hypnotherapy in favour of his developing method of psychoanalysis, his early work continued to influence many subsequent hypnotherapists. However, as Freud later conceded, his French rival Pierre Janet had already published a case study describing the use of age regression in hypnotic psychotherapy, a few years earlier.
Subsequent regression hypnotherapy was sometimes known as “hypnoanalysis”, “analytic hypnotherapy”, or “psychodynamic hypnotherapy.” Many practitioners worked in ways that bore only faint resemblance to Freud’s original approach, although others continued to be influenced by later psychoanalytic theory and practice.
Hypnoananalysis found support in both world wars where it was used by military psychiatrists as a rapid alternative to psychoanalysis in the treatment of shellshock, now known as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Considerable controversy developed regarding the use of regression to uncover allegedly repressed memories in the 1990s as the result of several high-profile legal cases, where clients sued their therapists over claims of false memory syndrome.
Ericksonian hypnotherapy
Milton H. Erickson was one of the most influential hypnotists of the 20th century. From around the 1950s onward, Erickson developed a radically different approach to hypnotism, which has subsequently become known as “Ericksonian hypnotherapy” or “Neo-Ericksonian hypnotherapy.” Erickson made use of a more informal conversational approach with many clients and complex language patterns, and therapeutic strategies. However, this very divergence from tradition led some of his colleagues, most notably Andre Weitzenhoffer, to dispute whether Erickson was right to label his approach “hypnosis” at all. Nevertheless, Erickson’s work continues to be one of the most influential forces in modern hypnotherapy.
The founders of Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP), a methodology similar in some regards to hypnotism, claimed that they had modelled the work of Erickson extensively and assimilated it into their approach. However, other experts have disputed whether NLP bears any genuine resemblance to Erickson’s work.
Cognitive/behavioral hypnotherapy
From the 1980s onward a growing number of clinical textbooks written by contemporary researchers such as Steven Jay Lynn, Irving Kirsch, E. Thomas Dowd, William Golden, Assen Alladin, and others, began to appear. These combined hypnotherapy with elements of cognitive and behaviour therapy. In 1974, Theodore Barber and his colleagues published an influential review of the research which argued, following the earlier social psychology of Theodore R. Sarbin, that hypnotism was better understood not as a “special state” but as the result of normal psychological variables, such as active imagination, expectation, appropriate attitudes, and motivation. Barber introduced the term “cognitive-behavioral” to describe the nonstate theory of hypnotism, and discussed its application to behavior therapy.
The growing application of cognitive and behavioural psychological theories and concepts to the explanation of hypnosis paved the way for a closer integration of hypnotherapy with various cognitive and behavioural therapies. However, many cognitive and behavioural therapies were themselves originally influenced by older hypnotherapy techniques, e.g., the systematic desensitisation of Joseph Wolpe, the cardinal technique of early behavior therapy, was originally called “hypnotic desensitisation” and derived from the Medical Hypnotism (1948) of Lewis Wolberg. The traditional style of hypnotherapy can be seen as a precursor of cognitive-behavioral therapy insofar as both place emphasis upon “common sense” theoretical explanations and the use of relaxation, and rehearsal of positive ideas and imagery in therapy. Modern cognitive therapy primarily differs from previous hypnotherapy approaches by placing much greater emphasis upon the direct Socratic disputation of negative beliefs. However, cognitive-behavioural hypnotherapists, like those mentioned in this section, have assimilated this technique alongside their use of hypnosis.
