It appears from the volume of recent publications in professional journals, and even in popular magazines, that the current attitudes toward hypnosis include a fundamental acceptance of the phenomenon itself as a datum to be investigated by rational scientific methods. However, it has seemed to us that this acceptance is accompanied by a great deal of confusion on every aspect of the problem, and in particular on the role of hypnosis in a rational psychotherapy.

Our discussion will present in the first chapter a brief review of the development of hypnotherapy; in this historical section, we shall attempt to show that the therapeutic applications of hypnosis have usually reflected an implied or a stated psychopathology. In the second chapter we shall summarize the specific methods used to induce hypnosis; this will be a detailed presentation constructed with the aim of providing an outline of procedure for those who might be interested in trying to use some form of hypnotherapy. The third chapter will consist of a short discussion of the factors involved in hypnotic susceptibility, and the techniques which have been used to increase it. In the fourth chapter the most important types of hypnotherapy will be presented and illustrated; this chapter includes the various therapeutic approaches, types of cases treated, indications and contra indications for each, and a discussion of the supposed dangers of hypnotherapy. A fifth chapter on current theories of hypnosis will follow, and we shall conclude with a brief evaluation of the present status of hypnotherapy.

This review will be devoted largely to a discussion of the work done in hypnotherapy during the last 50 years. The investigations before that have been amply summarized by others (3) (28). Although we do not believe that our survey exhausts the recent literature on hypnotherapy, we have tried to select from over 1,200 titles those which seemed to contribute most to the problem. The bibliography has been selected with an eye not only to pertinence but also to availability.