What we assume about the procedures is important

"Da" wrote:

"With my personal knowledge and research into hypnosis and suggestibility I have no trouble accepting that someone can come to believe something terrible happened to them when in reality it did not happen. I can also fairly easily see someone being led to believe, and thus act in accordance to their belief, that they have DID. What is your take on this controversy? If you agree with me, then isnt it time we accept that hypnosis and other trance techniques does have some danger to it when done by someone less than completely skilled?"

My response:

Various forensic and clinical tools traditionally used in trying to reconstruct mostly forgotten events have been successfully criticized, and less invasive alternatives are becoming more popular. For example, Amytal interviews and such are not considered by any professional organization even marginally acceptable as far as I know.

In many places, testimony based on hypnotic recollection has been considered invalid for legal purposes.

To me, "hypnosis" becomes problematic not for any magic properties that trances are supposed to possess but because it traditionally is done in an environment where relaxation, fantasy, and compliance are encouraged, and clients are made to feel they can freely daydream. It doesn't exactly lead to reliable recollection in all cases, particularly if the therapist is not experienced enough to know that hypnotic fantasies can be particularly vivid, emotional, and realistic, regardless of the veridicality of the events they might be assumed to be replaying.

The problem isn't so much that the procedure causes problems as that the clinician's assumptions about it cause problems. Pseudomemories happen more often to highly hypnotizable people, but it happens to them both in and out of hypnosis.

Legislating hypnosis as a forensic tool serves the useful purpose of making clinicians careful and cognizant of what sorts of procedures they use, and how they use them, but the problem seems to me to be the *assumptions* that people make about what the procedures are doing, even more than the *effects* of the procedures.

The _assumption_ that multiple personalities had no relation to the course of therapy might in theory foster a mindset where DID could be more easily simulated or produced in the course of therapy, because the clinician wouldn't recognize the risk of iatrogenic illness and so wouldn't take steps to prevent it.

"Pseudomemories" certainly happen, both in and out of hypnosis, both with and without traumatic memories. One thing that people on both sides of the controversy often agree on is that human beings have a deep need to make sense of their experience by "writing and rewriting" their life story for themselves over time in a subtle way. The significance we come later to attribute to a touch, a slap, a dimly recollected hour of confusion and fear in the distant past, can be reconstructed into something completely different later. The issue is not so much that memory is unreliable, it is that it serves so many roles psychologically other than just reproducing veridical playback for incriminating the guilty.

Without corroborating evidence, we rely on heuristics about what conditions lead to reliable memory and what conditions lead to distortion, and in the case of terrible events in the distant past, we have to guess which lines of evidence are most salient: (1) the laboratory research on the malleability of memory and its reconstruction, or (2) the clinical and animal model data on how extreme conditions (trauma) leave their traces in the body.

Replies:

Re:What we assume about the procedures is important, by smokey, 04/24/03

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