Hypnotherapists and guided imagery therapists help people learn methods to take
advantage of the mind/body/spirit connection through the medium of relaxation
and imagination. The basic difference between meditation and hypnosis, or guided
imagery, is that in meditation you empty your mind of images, while in hypnosis or
guided imagery, you create vivid mental images.What Is Hypnotherapy?
Around the world, shamans and traditional healers have used the power of sug-
gested mental images for thousands of years. Hypnotic trances were used in a vari-
ety of healing practices and religious rituals such as holding sweat lodge ceremonies,
drumming, and chanting. Inducing trance states and using therapeutic suggestion
were central practices of the early Greek healing temples. People in the 14th century
thought illness was related to evil spirits, and evil spirits were often treated with
imagery and hypnotic techniques. During the Renaissance (14th–16th centuries), it
was believed that dysfunctional imagination was the root of all pathology. It was
even believed that the mother’s imaginings during pregnancy could alter the growth
and development of her child.
Hypnotherapy began in the late 18th century in Europe with an Austrian physician,
Franz Anton Mesmer, who is considered the father of hypnosis. He is remembered for
the term mesmerize, which described a process of inducing trance through a series of
passes he made with his hands and/or magnets over people. He worked with psychic
and electromagnetic energies that he called animal magnetism. The medical com-
munity eventually discredited him despite his considerable success treating a variety
of ailments. In the mid-19th century, James Braid, an English physician, successfully
used hypnosis in pain control and as an anesthetic in surgery. Even after witnessing
live demonstrations of a patient undergoing painless surgery, his colleagues dis-
missed him as a fake. Not long afterward, the discovery of chloroform led to the
near abandonment of hypnotic anesthesia.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Emile Coue, a French physician, formu-
lated the Laws of Suggestion, discussed later in this chapter and used to this day by
hypnotherapists. He also discovered that giving positive suggestions when prescrib-
ing medication proved to be a more effective cure than prescribing medication
alone. Sigmund Freud at first found hypnosis extremely effective in treating hysteria,
and then, troubled by the sudden emergence of powerful emotions in his patients,
he abandoned it in favor of psychoanalysis. Carl Jung did not actively use hypnosis,
but he encouraged his patients to use active imagination to change old memories.
He often used the concept of the inner guide in his healing work. Milton Erickson,
an American psychologist and psychiatrist, is considered the father of modern hyp-
notherapy. He demonstrated how traumatic amnesia and psychosomatic symptoms216 ABSOLUTE BEGINNER’S GUIDE TOALTERNATIVE MEDICINE