Health Listings

Hypnotherapy and hypnosis listings

Hypnosis is a practice that has been used for many thousands of years, and so it is very hard to trace its exact origins. Shamans, witch doctors and medicine men were really using hypnosis when they employed a technique to suspend consciousness - what we would call trance. In ancient Egypt, a healing method known as incubation or temple sleep was being used.

One of the earliest figures in the more recent history of hypnosis and hypnotherapy was Franz Mesmer, from whom came the terms mesmerism and mesmerised, which described the influence of his famously penetrating stares. Originally a medical doctor, he came to believe in the use of devices such as magnets, to cure people, although he did stress that magnets didn’t have to be used, and that other substances would do, such as - wood, glass, or even water. 

The person that first coined the word hypnotism, was James Braid, a Scottish surgeon of very high repute. He first witnessed hypnotism in 1841 and the form of hypnotherapy they practised as did most of the hypnotists of the day, employed direct suggestion of symptom removal, with some use of therapeutic relaxation and occasionally aversion to alcohol, drugs etc.. This was a simple form of treatment with few theoretical constructs and yet it has continued to influence most subsequent forms of hypnotherapy. Another famous person from the history of hypnosis, was James Esdaile. He successfully used hypnosis in numerous operations in two hospitals in India, around the 1840’s. By the time he left India, he had carried out thousands of painless operations and 300 of these were major ones, 19 were amputations.

Modern day hypnotherapy has very strong connections not only with the science of hypnosis, but also with the worlds of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. Hypnotherapy itself, was endorsed by the British Medical Association in 1955. Hypnotherapy is therapy that is undertaken with a client in hypnosis. From the Greek hypnos, meaning sleep, the word hypnosis is an abbreviation of James Braid’s 1843 term neuro-hypnotism, meaning sleep of the nervous system.

Hypnotherapy in the form developed by James Braid is often described today as Traditional Hypnotherapy, and over the years a number of other branches have evolved, through the work of other practitioners such as Milton Erickson. The listings below are of independent practitioners.