International Handbook of Clinical Hypnosis - E-Lib FK UWKS

56 INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOK OF CLINICAL HYPNOSIS
Proper Professional Practice
Guidelines are now in place relating to the reporting of recovered memories. They
have been accepted by the Australian Psychological Society and have been used in
the conduct of actual cases that have come to a conclusion.
Essentially, in summary of them, it is important to: obtain informed consent
regarding the therapeutic procedures; record intact memories at the beginning of
therapy; be familiar with research in memory and hypnosis, if used); clarify that
the client is responsible for the reported accuracy of memories and not the
therapist; and be aware of possible biases regarding the accuracy of recovered
memories of traumatic events.
Conclusion
Special concluding comment is needed on the complexity of what one is addressing
here in the light of the comments that have been made. The level of that complexity
can be prodigious.
Consider, for a moment, a man who remembers in therapy that he was abused
sexually and recovers that recollection in therapy. His memory may be genuinely
very dif®cult to retrieve. The events themselves, however, may have taken place in a
state of normal or dissociated consciousness. Events that were encoded in an altered
state of consciousness may be especially dif®cult to retrieve. If they are not, there are
enormously strong motivations that exist for that person not to want to recall them.
Intervening between the original trauma and therapy is often a lifespan of experiences
and other recollections that return to this chapter's opening comments on memory.
The person has been exposed to a myriad of events, suggestions and experiences
which have the potential to reshape and later correct recollections of what has, in fact,
previously occurred. In therapy there may be a grain of truth, as it were, in what is
eventually remembered, but the facts could well be distorted, reshaped, embellished or
confabulated. What occurs makes eventual reporting far from the absolute truth.
Into the act of retrieval comes a therapist, years later, who in the task of
interrogating albeit supportively) is unwittingly in¯uential in altering further
recollections of those past events. Those events are then explored in a context
where there are implicit or explicit cues about what should be remembered. That
suggestion will occur is incontrovertible. And it is for this reason that guidelines
for proper professional practice must be adopted, understood and practised.
SOME GENERAL CLINICAL CONSIDERATIONS RELATING
TO MEMORY
In the application of hypnosis, there are general considerations that must be
respected and these relate primarily to locating the correct balance between