by Roy Stemman
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,
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