Experimental Hypnosis versus Clinical Hypnosis
Written on July 17, 2026
In this post, I am continuing to explore the lack of enthusiasm of mainstream medical professionals about the use of hypnosis in their work. (Here I am referring to suggestive, symptom-oriented approaches rather than the analytical, which are, or should be, the domain of psychiatrists, psychologists and psychotherapists.)
One reason may be that hypnotic procedures are so different from how medical treatment is normally practised, notably the prescribing and administering medicine or performing physical interventions such as injections or surgery. Lengthy verbal communications in the form of formal or (more commonly these days) informal scripts to bring about desired changes in feelings thoughts and behaviour may seem too much like incantations used by ancient practitioners, or even prayers! They're not what medical doctors are expected to be doing! And perhaps this is what the patient is thinking as well!
But there is another, deeper problem relating to context. In earlier posts, I have described how experimentalists have focused much of their attention on understanding the defining properties of hypnosis, namely why susceptible participants respond to suggestion in a manner that seems to them so realistic and effortless. Great strides have made in proposing quite sophisticated neurocognitive models, based on current scientific knowledge, that may underpin these effects and do not allude to some kind of signature trance state. These models can be tested in the laboratory and thus accepted, rejected or refined accordingly, sometimes with the aid of brain-scanning techniques. Much of this work has been undertaken on highly susceptible participants, but differences between high, low and medium susceptible individuals have also been of great interest and over many years reliable scales for measuring suggestibility have been developed and researched.
It is not uncommon for clinic practitioners of hypnosis to cite the achievements of their academic colleagues as providing a sound, evidence-based rationale for their clinical and therapeutic application of hypnotic procedures. In my opinion, this is unwarranted. In the laboratory, the experimenter is concerned with observing and measuring specific responses and experiences of a transient nature targeted by the suggestions under investigation. Most often, prior to the experiment, the participant's level of suggestibility will have been carefully identified using one or more standard scales, and a group of high scorers will be selected for the experiment. Thus, the investigator can be more confident that the participants are likely to respond positively to the suggestions administered, saving much time and effort.
In the clinic, the practitioner's concern is to use hypnosis to facilitate a positive outcome for their ministrations, one defined by an improvement in the patient's physical condition or profound and enduring changes in how they meet the challenges of everyday life. Scores on standard suggestibility scales are, at best, only weakly related to outcome (they are somewhat higher for pain management and control. This applies both to procedures that rely on suggestion and those that are described as 'analytic', which assume that hypnosis facilitates access to unconscious memories, conflicts, desires, and anxieties, and their resolution. A further difference between the experimental and clinical contexts is that whereas it does not seem that the quality of the relationship that develops between the hypnotist and the participant in the laboratory has much bearing on outcome, the nature of the relationship in the clinic is of fundamental importance to therapeutic outcome.
I conclude this post with this assertion. Over the years, it has become clear to me that hypnosis as investigated in the laboratory and hypnosis as practised in the clinic as a therapeutic medium have grown so far apart that now there remains only a small area of overlap. This overlap may be, for example, where clinical hypnosis is used in a single session to assist a patient cope with the pain and anxiety of some medical or dental procedure, rather than in multi-sessional applications of hypnotherapy.
So where do we go from here?
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