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reality. That is, even if the imagery yields clinically meaningful material, the material may not be factually accurate. Just as we generally accept a dream as a metaphor—not as a journalistic account of the client’s life—so, too, any client’s report, hypnotically-induced or other- wise, may be psychologically meaningful, even if it may not be an accurate account of an event. For example, a female client may present with symptoms of depression and interpersonal difficulties, including avoidance of sexual contact. These symptoms are consistent with (though not unique to) a history of sexual abuse. Suppose that the clinical intervention includes either ordinary suggestion or hypnotic suggestion—initially, perhaps, merely to promote a more comfortable, trusting relationship with the counselor. Or perhaps this method is used to facilitate the development of primary process material if she seems unable to generate such material on his or her own. Suppose, further, she now begins to report images that increasingly seem to the counselor to indicate that the client has experienced physical or sexual trauma. As the client reports these images, she is also likely to experience increasingly disturbed affect in response. As the we witness this affect-laden report, we naturally find it quite compelling. How, though, does the competent counselor interpret this experience? Is there independent reason to believe that these images, thoughts and feelings are an historically accurate reflection of events in the client’s life? Symptoms of depression and avoidance of intimacy are often associated with abusive histories. But there are other etiologies [causes] for such symptoms, as well, and these reports may or may not represent memories of actual trauma. Faced with a client’s emotional drama, however, the counselor may feel confirmed in his or her hypothe- sis of abuse. Frankel’s review of reports of of or review of of reports childhood events in the multiple personal- ity literature clearly suggests the rarity with which a client’s self-reported history, including claim of abuse, is ever indepen- dently documented. While this is usually inevitable given the practical and clinical difficulties in attempting to document an adult’s childhood history, the fact should also give us pause, for two reasons: 1. Troubled people are seeking a solution to their unhappiness when they seek counseling. Even if they had no prior memory of childhood abuse, nor reason to suspect abuse, the current widespread cultural emphasis on childhood abuse as a primary etiology of adult unhappiness provokes at least the question in many people’s minds about their own childhood histories. In addition to the ubiquity of child- hood abuse stories in the media, a clinical specialty has developed to assess and treat this problem. Certain books in the popular press, despite the absence of supporting evidence, assert that child- hood abuse is the primary source of most neurotic symptomatology. It is only natural, then, that some naive readers will be encouraged by such assertions to search for memories of such abuse in order to explain their problems. 2. Although anyone is _ potentially susceptible to suggestion from such an affect-charged cultural environment, some people’s suggestibility is unusually high. Clients with a diagnosis of Dissocia- tive Identity Disorder, for example, tend also to be remarkably responsive to suggestion; but many other clients whose disorders are far less severe are similarly suggestible. Especially within the current cultural focus on trauma and abuse, it is quite possible for an unhappy person, especially if he or she has boundary confusion, pondering the source of his or her unhappiness, to unconsciously generate images, feelings, and thoughts which he or she then begins to interpret as recall of actual experiences—even though the source for the images, feelings It 61