A brief history of hypnotherapy

These days, hypnotherapy courses can be taken to help with a plethora of fears, insecurities and issues. Be it smoking cessation, body image, fear of heights or even for labour pains, hypnotherapy has healed vast numbers of people. Yet it’s nothing new.

Hypnotherapy has been around for thousands of years, though perhaps not quite in the way we might recognise today. It is likely that ancient medicine men found ways to “suspend their consciousness,” entering a trance-like state. They did this to try and find answers to their inner-most questions by listening to their own intuition.

Moving forward, the Egyptians began to employ hypnosis-esque sleep known as ‘incubation’ and the Hebrews also used self-hypnosis, known as ‘kavanah’ in their meditation and chanting rituals.

Towards 500 BC, it was common for priests to put individuals into deep sleeps in order to interpret their dreams, using the power of suggestion; the tool which is still in use by trained hypnotherapists today.

Jumping ahead to the 18th Century, one encounters Franz Mesmer, the medical doctor who ‘mesmerised’ his patients and was at first credited with the official discovery of hypnotism as we know it. However, this was later disproved and his methods put down to nothing more than “illusionary” owing to the combination of verbal suggestion and “nervous fatigue” of the patients.

It was a surgeon called James Braid who, in 1843, first “proposed the theory of hypnotism as a radical alternative, in opposition to Mesmerism.” This was a theory that did not make use of superfluous or sensational agents which were employed by the Mesmerists.

Braid believed a hypnotic state could be induced without the need of Mesmer’s tools but did agree, as did the British Medical Association (BMA), about the “genuineness of the hypnotic state.”

Dr Milton Erickson was another notable pioneer in the hypnotherapy and suggestion sphere, contributing “massively” to the field.

While there are/have been many different forms of hypnosis: the traditional approach, hypnoanalysis favoured by Freud, cognitive behavioural therapy, neurolinguistic programming and Ericksonian hypnotherapy to mention but a few, it is no longer a technique used to simply interpret dreams.

It is a medically recognised (endorsed by the BMA in 1955) and credible practice which tackles a range of problems, helping people live their lives to the full.