International Handbook of Clinical Hypnosis - E-Lib FK UWKS

MEMORY AND HYPNOSIS 57
technical and clinical concerns. As argued elsewhere see McConkey & Sheehan,
1995), this is often a matter of professional judgement and such a judgement must
be guided by familiarity with relevant ethcial principles and the application of
professional competency.
Consider, for a moment, two speci®c instances, one in the clinical setting and
one in the forensic setting, where the issue of memory accuracy is often of
paramount importance.
In clinical practice, hypnosis typically relates to a range of applications which
can involve major issues for practitioners when hypnosis is used in a therapeutic
way. Factors requiring attention relate to the perceived association between emotion
and recall in hypnosis, the implication of falsi®cations occurring in hypnosis, the
possibility that con®rmation or suggestions of abuse may be inadvertently communicated
to the client, and interpretations of the `evidence' of a session being drawn
which could be inconsistent with scienti®c data. Clinical concern can be wider than
the pursuit of client `improvement.'
In other settings, such as the forensic one, similar factors are involved. They
primarily relate to the choice of the person to be hypnotized, the role of emotion in
recall again), the possibility of deception, and the civil rights of the person being
hypnotized. Each of these factors is relevant to both settings but takes on a
particular appearance in different social contexts. The role of emotion is distinctly
important in the forensic setting, for instance, where the welfare of a client the
person being hypnotized) can be threatened by the forensic procedures the practitioner
adopts. A person who is severely distressed at the point of retrieving
possibly) relevant information, for instance, raises the problem of whether further
stress is justi®ed to retrieve more information that may or may not have a useful
legal purpose.
These general professional considerations are nearly always relevant, but have
particular relevance to some cases. Legitimate questions can often be raised as to
whether the use of hypnosis has a timely investigative purpose and where the
balance of technical versus clinical concerns is critical. Decisions to proceed to
explore the association between hypnosis and memory can often be quite dif®cult,
and if hypnosis is used clear support for moving ahead must be reliably evident or
forthcoming.
Where the association between memory and hypnosis is concerned, a special
consideration both technically and clinically) is the reliability of the memory
reporting. In a technical sense, there are speci®c procedures which can aim to
determine whether reporting is reliable independent checking of memory events
reported in hypnosis, for example), but clinical and professional factors are also
relevant. Where personal reputations can be damaged, for instance, by a recovered
recollection of sexual abuse the practitioner must make every effort to ensure that
the memory retrieved is accurate. The future welfare of the client concerned and
that of others accused of the act of abusing, for example, depends on the strict
enforcement of ethical guidelines for recovering the memory in question. For