Is Hypnosis Reliable in Retrieving Lost Memories?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ivan Seeking
  • Start date Start date
  • Tags Tags
    Memories
Join the discussion
Ask a follow-up here, or get your own question answered by working scientists, mathematicians and engineers — people, not an autocomplete.
Real named experts · corrections over time · the nuance an AI answer skips
Sign up Log in
7 replies · 9K views
Ivan Seeking
Staff Emeritus
Science Advisor
Gold Member
Messages
8,252
Reaction score
2,666
Hypnosis is used to retrieve "lost memories" in cases of alleged [so called] alien abduction. In fact, I believe that this is how nearly all claims of abduction come to light. Typically, before the hypnosis session start, the person claims to have recurring dreams or other problems that led to therapy.

In the popular media, this practice is blasted by critics as being unrealiable and completely useless. Now, I try to stay away from the alien abduction issue, but something in the news caught my ear.

Police turn to hypnosis to help determine man's identity

DENVER -- Police on Friday said they've turned to hypnosis to help identify a man found wandering the streets of Denver last month with $8 in his pocket, a lighter, a "Brasil" baseball cap and no idea of who he is.

The 5-foot-7-inch, 170-pound man, possibly 35 to 40 years old, may be from the New York area, based on psychiatric sessions that included hypnosis and a sedative. [continued]
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/w...ct20,0,1735159.story?coll=ny-region-apnewyork

It seems from this and other sources of late that hypnosis can be useful in retrieving lost memoriies. Apparently it is really a matter of technique and certainty, and not that the practice is absolute nonsense, as is usually suggested.
 
Last edited:
Biology news on Phys.org
The problem with hypnosis is that the subject is very vulnerable to suggestions by the therapist. A great many people that were hypnotised got false memories.
 
Ivan Seeking said:
No doubt. However, that doesn't suggest that all therapists "lead" all patients.


How can the experimenter or therapist determine whether a given statement by the subject was a real recovered memory or a false one from "leading" or from other irreducible uncertainties in the method?

Recall the "Jung effect", described by the great psychologist in a footnote in the book he wrote together with the great physicist Wolfgang Pauli: investigators, no matter how determined to be objective, will make subconscious errors that preponderate in the direction of their biases.
 
Last edited:
selfAdjoint said:
How can the experimenter or therapist determine whether a given statement by the subject was a real recovered memory or a false one from "leading" or from other irreducible uncertainties in the method?

Recall the "Jung effect", described by the great psychologist in a footnote in the book he wrote together with the great physicist Wolfgang Pauli: investigators, no matter how determined to be objective, will make subconscious errors that preponderate in the direction of their biases.
From the Skeptic Dictionary
hypnosis: the good, the bad and the ugly

The godfather of the repression, Freud, wisely gave up using hypnosis in therapy. Unfortunately, however, hypnosis continues to be used in a wide variety of contexts, not all of which are beneficial. Using hypnosis to help people quit smoking or stick to a diet may be useful, and even if it fails it is probably not harmful. Using hypnosis to help people remember license plate numbers of cars used in crimes may be useful, and even if it fails it is probably not harmful. Using hypnosis to help victims or witnesses of crimes remember what happened may be useful, but it can also be dangerous because of the ease with which the subject can be manipulated by suggestions from the hypnotist. Overzealous police hypnotists may put conviction of those they think are guilty above honest conviction by honest evidence presented to a jury. Hypnosis is also dangerous in the police setting, because of the tendency of too many police officers to believe in truth serums, lie detectors, and other magical and easy ways to get to the truth.
 
It seems to me that hypnosis is usefull as a desperation move to try to get some clues as to an event that a person cannot recall consciously.

For example, if this person had remembered being in NYC, and had a specific recollection of eating at someplace called "Pete's Pizzaria", it would be a simple enough matter to look in the NYC Yellow pages and see if such a place exists. If it doesn't, the memory was false, if it does exist, go there and show the regulars a photo of the individual in question.

I believe (and the general psychiatric community will back me up on this)
that hypnosis is an unreliable means of retrieving lost memories. That's why it is normally only used in cases where the memories retrieved can be investigated and verified.
 
Using it to recover an identity would be more reliable, because once you have a target identity it's easy to check if it's correct. So even if the technique doesn't work, they won't be misled.
 
Alkatran said:
Using it to recover an identity would be more reliable, because once you have a target identity it's easy to check if it's correct. So even if the technique doesn't work, they won't be misled.
I agree. The problem is that if it does not work, the hypnotist may be tempted to dig deeper and inadvertently implant a false memory.
For instance, the subject may be conduced to think that he was abducted by aliens, who did him a brainwashing.
For the therapist this has a double advantage: it explains the insuccess in recovering the identity and corroborates the effectiveness of hypnotism.
For the woo-woos it is a new 'evidence' for aliens abduction.