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Hypnosis and Memory: A Hazardous Connection [Journal of Mental Health Counseling October 1997] It has been claimed that repressed memories can be recovered by hypnotic suggestion and other interventions. This claim has great relevance to mental health counselors faced with distressed clients been unverified report, we risk harm to our client by facilitating a misguided search for a mythic truth. It who attribute their symptomatology to repressed early life trauma. However, the scientific evidence does not support the claim. This paper evaluates this issue and suggests ways clinicians might produc- tively confront the attendant clinical dilemmas. Recently, the mental health profession has become polarized by views about the nature of memory in general and of repressed memory in particular. This polarization is characterized by two dis- parate, often stridently expressed views: (1) Repressed memory is a myth and no method can reliably uncover forgotten memories. (2) Repressed memories can be recovered and the apparently recov- ered memories are essentially reliable. I will review the state of knowledge concerning the recovery of memories with the use of hypnotic methods and illustrate the clinical significance of the problem of attempting to recover memories. Finally, I will offer suggestions for the consideration of clinicians who encounter clients who believe that they are troubled by repressed traumatic memories and also believe that their troubles can be relieved by hypnotically uncovering the memories. Let me begin with my own view of the problem: Without independent verification, no one—not even the most talented clinician—has a reliable means for determining the accuracy of a client’s report. Even the use of sodium am ytal—the so-called truth serum —does not yield reliable reports. Further, if, despite this evidence, we nonetheless believe in the reliability of an otherwise Hypnosis is a condition in which a person’s imagination creates vivid reality from suggestions offered either by someone else, by suggestions inferred from ambient social cues, or by sugges- tions initiated by the person himself or herself. In this circumstance, the person is unusually able to alter perception, ~ wee nee A A td ee to memory and physiological processes not ordinarily susceptible to conscious control. In this condition, reality fades into the background of awareness, replaced in the foreground by a believed-in blend of fantasy and reality. There is greater receptivity to the clinician’s point of view and greater dissociation of the observing ego from the experiencing ego. In general, there is enhanced awareness of unconscious mental processes. Transfer- ence is also accelerated and intensified and becomes what Shot described as archaic involvement. All of these characteristics render the hypnotized client unusually suggestible to his or her own imagination and to that of the clinician. to are Three of these characteristics are especially pertinent to the issue of recovering forgotten memory: 1) the capacity to create vivid reality from suggestions, 2) the capacity to alter memory, and 3) the tendency to regress to an archaic relationship. The capacity to systematically create amnesia through hypnotic methods has led to the investigation of the possibility of recalling material that is not ordinarily available to the memory process. Although there are intriguing anecdotal to 58 Joseph Barber THE HYPNOTIC EXPERIENCE