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Research Paper On Hypnotherapy

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When you think of hypnosis you often think back to a magic show where you watched people go up on stage and do an act of commands without even realizing. For many Americans hypnosis may be more of a magic show than a means for therapy or forensic investigation. Recently hypnosis has been relied on to get answers, whether it be for getting over a fear or remembering memories for a court case. In both fields the subject of hypnotherapy is controversial. Hypnotherapy may lead to pseudomemories that are misleading or simply false. Hypnotherapy is a great therapeutic technique because it helps grieving people cope with a loss of a loved one, it rids patients of phobias, and can be used to recover traumatic memories that can be problematic towards …show more content…

One setback is that hypnotherapy might not right for a person who has psychotic symptoms, such as hallucinations and delusions or for someone who s using drugs or alcohol (Mental). In order to be entirely cured of certain phobias you need to tend multiple sessions which can start to add up quickly. The cost of one session can range from $55 to $95 for every hour (Mental). “There is also no scientific evidence to explain how or why it works. As of yet it is not certain if the results of hypnotherapy are anything more than the result of the placebo effect”(Watson). One of the most argued sides is that it is unreliable when it is used to resurface suppressed memories .When a hypnotized person receives the prompt to think back to a time in childhood in which they were abused, they often create pseudomemories where they believe that the suggestion is a real memory. When the patient awakes they are often convinced that the memory is vividly real. “In Jean-Roch Laurence and Campbell Perry’s study on pseudomemories, they found that almost half of highly hypnotizable subjects created pseudomemories when given a suggestion (such as that they heard a loud noise the night before during sleep) by the hypnotist during hypnosis. Even after they were told by the hypnotist that the memory had only been a suggestion, the subjects still believed that the memory was real” (

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