Authorised hypnotherapists whose work is recognised by Israel’s Health Ministry have been banned from exploring their patients’ past lives. The Advisory Committee on the Law on Hypnosis has made the ruling following complaints that some clients had suffered serious emotional damage through reincarnation hypnosis sessions.
The ban does not affect unauthorised hypnotists, in line with the Health Ministry’s decision to allow various alternative treatments that are not recognised as therapeutic by modern medicine.
Commenting on the restriction, which was announced in Israel’s oldest newspaper, Haaretz (24 July, 2009), Dr Alex Aviv of the Abarbanel Mental Health Centre in Bat Yam, who heads the advisory committee, argued that hypnosis and reincarnation had nothing to do with one another.
“This is a mystical practice for people who believe in reincarnation,” he explained. “We’ve seen a number of cases where practitioners tried to perform this on patients and things went bad.”
He did not say whether the committee examined any cases where patients had a positive outcome from hypnotic regression to an apparent past life.
The newspaper said discussion on past-life regression therapy began two years ago within the ministry and ended with “an explicit ban on offering the practice, or for hypnotists to present themselves as experts in the field.”
One of the cases cited involved a 23-year-old man who suffered depression after breaking up with his girlfriend. The psychologist treating him suggested that an event in a past life might now be making it difficult for him to let go of his partner and offered to hypnotise him.
The regression session went wrong when the man became emotionally stuck in an experience which made him feel he was enclosed in a coffin, leaving him suffering repeated panic attacks and respiratory problems after he returned to a normal conscious state.
Haaretz did, however, quote a supporter of regression therapy, Dr Lianna Sofer, who said that correcting problems which began in a previous life could be beneficial in this life. She had, for example, cured a woman from chronic neck pains after “discovering she had been decapitated in a previous life”.
Hypnosis, in inexperienced hands, can be dangerous and Israel was the first country to introduce legislation to control its use. Dr Aviv Alex, the advisory committee’s head, was one of four authors of a paper which appeared in The International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis in 2008: “Examining hypnosis legislation: a survey of the practice in Israel”.
Its findings were based on responses to a questionnaire sent to “470 licensed hypnotists and 1250 unlicensed professionals”. Practically all of the first group (94.4 per cent) reported using hypnosis in their clinical work, and 45 per cent of the second group did so. The authors suggested steps to increase the efficiency of the law as part of a regulatory system and the new ban is clearly a result of that recommendation.
The news will certainly come as a surprise to Adrian Finkelstein, MD, who was born in Romania but emigrated to Israel with his family in 1960. It was while studying at the Hebrew University Hadassah Medical School that he was first exposed to hypnosis.
He qualified as a doctor in 1968 and went on to study psychiatry. Now based in the United States, he has been performing past life regressions for almost 30 years and has written extensively about his work and the benefits it brings to his pupils.
His book Marilyn Monroe Returns: the Healing of a Soul tells the story of singer Sherrie Lea Laird and explores her memories, under hypnosis, of her previous life in which she believes she was the famous movie star.
I’m sceptical about the value of hypnotic regession in providing evidence for reincarnation, but in the right hands it does seem to be a powerful therapeutic tool.
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