Regression Therapy

Hypnosis and the exploration of memory in France

Historical accounts place the clinical use of hypnosis to explore memory in late nineteenth-century France. A review in European Neurology describes Jean-Martin Charcot's thirty years at the Salpêtrière hospital and his collaboration with Pierre Janet (1859-1947), who used hypnosis as a method of exploring the causes of hysteria and built a theory in which mental content could become dissociated. A separate paper on Janet's therapy reports that he treated what he called fixed ideas by liquidating them through hypnosis and suggestion.

A history of hysteria treatment states that psychotherapy, psychoanalysis and persuasion were established around the turn of the twentieth century by Janet, Sigmund Freud and Joseph Babinski respectively, and it lists hypnosis and suggestion among the moral therapies of the period. The sources reviewed do not trace hypnotic age regression as a named technique to one originator, so this page does not date its first use.

Freud and the split from hypnosis

Richard Kluft's 2018 historical article states that Freud's rejection of hypnosis opened a rift between clinical hypnosis and psychoanalysis that has lasted more than a century. Kluft argues that some of Freud's reasons reflected what Freud saw as advances, while others appear shaped by his promotion of psychoanalysis over hypnosis. The abstract does not mention Josef Breuer, Hippolyte Bernheim or regression, and the sources reviewed for this page do not describe their work.

Twentieth-century hypnosis and the recovered memory period

Ernest Hilgard's 1993 history of hypnosis in the United States describes research at Harvard under William McDougall, at Wisconsin and Yale, and the clinical work of Milton Erickson, followed by a resurgence of interest after World War II tied to the treatment of war casualties. A companion account dates the founding of the Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis to the years 1949 to 1956.

In the 1980s and 1990s, hypnosis and other memory-recovery methods became central to a dispute over recovered memory therapy for childhood sexual abuse. Loftus and Davis described the issue in 2006 as one of the greatest controversies in the mental health professions of the twentieth century. The positions taken by professional bodies and reviewers are set out under Research and Evidence and Safety and Suitability.

Age regression and related labels

In hypnosis research, hypnotic age regression refers to suggestions that a person will experience or behave as if at an earlier age. Kihlstrom's 1997 review describes the experience as one that can be subjectively compelling. Regression therapy, as the term is used on this page, is the wider practice of using such suggestions, usually with hypnosis, to revisit childhood, birth or other earlier events in the present life. Recovered memory therapy is the label used by Brandon and colleagues and by Stocks for therapies aimed at recovering memories of childhood sexual abuse.

Past-life regression, in which sessions are framed as recalling previous lives, is a separate practice with its own Machipedia page, Past Life Regression, and is not covered here. Spiritual Regression Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy for Inner Child Healing are also described on their own pages. This page covers regression to earlier points in the present life, including childhood and birth.

Induction, suggestion and hypnotizability

Kirsch, Mazzoni and Montgomery reviewed 75 years of studies and concluded that phenomena produced by suggestion in hypnosis can also be produced by suggestion without a hypnotic induction, and that an induction produces a relatively small increase in responsiveness. A response to a regression suggestion therefore cannot be credited to the induction alone. Hypnotizability, a person's capacity to respond to such suggestions, differs between people and is only weakly related to other forms of suggestibility, according to Kihlstrom.

What research reports describe

The sources reviewed do not contain a standard description of commercial regression sessions. In the research reports opened, participants received suggestions for age regression, and in one set of studies the experimenters then added suggestions for a hidden observer, a part of the self said to be aware of material outside conscious awareness. How often facilitators use each framing in practice is not reported in these sources.

A 2024 trial protocol for people with acquired brain injury describes four weekly one-hour sessions with a hypnotic induction, in which suggestions include using age regression to bring pre-injury working memory capacity into the present. Participants are assessed at baseline, after the sessions and at six months. This is a research design and not a description of what commercial facilitators offer, and the abstract reports no results.

What a participant may experience

Kihlstrom reports that suggested age regression can be subjectively compelling but does not remove adult memory, restore childlike modes of mental functioning, or revive the memory of earlier events. A person may therefore feel like a child while keeping adult knowledge, and what is reported can combine memory, inference and imagination. Without independent corroboration, no reliable test separates memories based on perception from those based on imagination.

Relation to other hypnosis-based practices

Regression therapy is a member of the family described on the Machipedia page Hypnotherapy, which this page does not duplicate. Clinical Hypnosis covers hypnosis delivered within healthcare, Hypnoanalysis covers hypnosis combined with psychoanalytic interpretation, and Parts Therapy Hypnosis covers work with described parts of the self. Psychotherapy is covered on its own page. Where regression is combined with any of these approaches, the combined practice should be read on its page, and findings here should not be carried over to it.

Uses described by clinicians

A 2017 article in the International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis states that many clinicians were trained for years to use hypnosis to explore the past, and that there is a rich literature documenting hypnosis as a tool to induce age regression and uncover traumatic memories. The author goes on to propose a future-focused alternative. This describes clinical custom as the author sees it and is not evidence that the approach helps.

Lynn and colleagues presented case studies of a trauma client and a forensic client in 1994 to illustrate what they called the clinical potential of hidden-observer suggestions given after age regression. Brandon and colleagues describe recovered memory therapy as directed at past sexual abuse. These are clinical aims reported in the literature, and neither source reports a controlled test of benefit.

Proposed research uses

The brain-injury protocol proposes age regression as one component of a hypnotic intervention aimed at working memory. It is a registered trial design with 90 planned participants. Its authors cite earlier exploratory research on hypnotic suggestion, not specifically on age regression, and say replication is needed, so this use is a hypothesis under test and not a finding.

Popular claims that regression releases stored trauma, resolves present symptoms by locating their origin, or reveals objective childhood events were not supported by any source reviewed for therapeutic effect. Memory research relevant to the last of these claims is set out in the next section.

Hypnosis and memory accuracy

Orne and colleagues analyzed two laboratory experiments on recall of pictures seen one week earlier. Hypnosis did not improve correct recall for high or low hypnotizable participants beyond the gains from repeated retrieval attempts, highly hypnotizable participants made many confident errors whether or not hypnosis was used, and low hypnotizable participants made more errors under hypnosis than in a waking condition.

Erdelyi reviewed experiments over a decade and found that repeated retrieval effort, not hypnosis, produced hypermnesia, since repeated testing without hypnosis yielded as much. Kihlstrom concluded that hypermnesia suggestions increase false recollection and confidence in both true and false memories, and he discouraged using hypermnesia and age regression to enhance memory in patients.

The AMA Council on Scientific Affairs found in 1985 that recollections obtained during hypnosis can involve confabulations and pseudomemories and appear less reliable than nonhypnotic recall. Karlin's two case reports argue that procedural guidelines cannot prevent distortion, although two cases cannot show how often it occurs.

Recovered memory reviews and disagreement

Reviewers disagree on how much of the concern applies to real-world memory recovery. Brewin and Andrews found that the data did not allow any of four explanations for reported forgetting of trauma to be rejected, and that they strongly supported the likelihood that some recovered memories correspond to actual experiences. Dalenberg and colleagues found no support for the prediction that recovered memories are less accurate in people with dissociation.

Brandon and colleagues, reporting for a Royal College of Psychiatrists working group, found a vast literature but little acceptable research, and concluded that memories recovered after long amnesia by extraordinary means have a high probability of being false. Stocks concluded that true and false memories can both be recovered with no reliable way to tell them apart. Smeets and colleagues argue that many false memory experiments measure confidence or belief and not memory, which limits how far they can be generalized.

Evidence of therapeutic effect

No randomized trial of hypnotic age regression or regression therapy as a treatment was found. PubMed searches for age regression, hypnosis and memory returned 20 records, and a search for age regression, hypnosis and childhood limited to 1960 to 2000 returned 2, mostly case reports and laboratory studies. Trial registries were not searched and the searches were not exhaustive. The brain-injury protocol is the only trial design located, and it reports no results.

NCCIH lists conditions for which hypnosis in general has been studied, including irritable bowel syndrome, pain, procedural anxiety, smoking cessation and menopausal hot flashes, and states that evidence for some of these is conclusive only to a limited degree. The page does not discuss age regression, so findings for those uses cannot be carried over to regression therapy.

False memories and misplaced confidence

The main harm described in the sources is the creation or strengthening of memories that do not match events. The AMA Council, the Royal College of Psychiatrists working group and Kihlstrom each cautioned against using hypnosis or age regression to recover memories. Fourie's case report describes hypnotic age regression used on the assumption that it reveals historical truth, in a case the author argues produced a socially constructed false memory.

Kaplan and Manicavasagar presented three case reports of therapy-induced false memories of abuse and proposed that the issue be studied further. False memory syndrome is not an established diagnosis, and three cases cannot show how common such outcomes are. Because recovered memories can be accurate or inaccurate, a vivid image in a session cannot be taken as evidence that an event occurred, or that it did not.

Distress and care boundaries

The sources reviewed give no incidence data for distress, abreaction (intense emotional release) or worsening of symptoms during regression sessions. A systematic review of hypnosis for sleep problems found a low incidence of adverse events in its included studies, but those studies did not test age regression and the review noted small samples and low quality. Stocks suggests, from his review of outcome research, that recovered memory therapy may be harmful to clients.

This page is educational and is not a substitute for assessment or treatment. Regression sessions should not delay or replace necessary medical or mental health care, particularly for people with trauma histories or psychiatric conditions, for whom the sources reviewed provide no specific guidance on regression.

Training and professional positions

The professional-body statements located for this page are the AMA Council report of 1985 and the report of a Royal College of Psychiatrists working group in 1998. Both address memory-recovery methods generally. The British Psychological Society reviewed its earlier recovered memory guidelines and published a draft revision in The Psychologist in 1999, but the recommendations were not seen. A statement from the American Psychological Association was not located in an openly accessible form.

No training standard or professional register specific to regression therapy was found in the sources reviewed. Family-level discussion of hypnotherapy training is on the Hypnotherapy page. A reader can ask a practitioner about the underlying licensed profession, supervision and how the practitioner handles memory, and requirements differ by country and region.