Hypnosis, Regression and False Memories: What the Research Shows

Hypnotic regression is the practice of using hypnosis to take a person “back” to an earlier memory, a childhood scene or, in its most ambitious form, a past life. Memory researchers have tested it for decades, and the finding is consistent: hypnosis makes people recall more and feel surer, without making them more accurate. Some hypnotists say so themselves. The trainer Teppo Holmqvist describes regression, in effect, as a false memory that the client happens to find useful.

The gap between how real a memory feels and how accurate it is runs through everything below. We explain the research; we don’t teach regression or any other memory technique.

Can hypnosis recover lost memories?

The hope is old and understandable. If something is forgotten, maybe a relaxed, focused state can unlock it. Police, therapists and stage performers all tried.

The controlled studies didn’t support it. In 1983 Jane Dywan and Kenneth Bowers asked people to recall a set of pictures over a week, then hypnotised some of them and asked them to try again. The hypnotised group reported more new items than the others, and far more of those new items were wrong. The same year, Jean-Roch Laurence and Campbell Perry hypnotised highly responsive volunteers, took them back to a night earlier that week and suggested they had heard loud noises. About half later reported the noises as real memories. Some held to it even after the study was explained.

Age regression has a similar record. When Michael Nash reviewed the research in 1987, he found that adults “regressed” to childhood did not think, draw or perceive like children. They behaved like adults acting out their idea of being a child. Regression produces a performance that can feel like a return to the past, and the person giving it may believe it was one.

The confidence problem is what makes this dangerous. A review by Steven Jay Lynn, Elizabeth Loftus and colleagues in 2003 concluded that hypnosis raises confidence more than accuracy. A false memory that feels certain does more damage than a vague one, because nobody thinks to check it.

How do false memories form?

To see why hypnosis goes wrong, you need one idea from memory science. The psychologist Frederic Bartlett showed in 1932 that people retelling a story bend it towards what makes sense to them, and each retelling drifts further. Modern research says memory is rebuilt every time it’s recalled, and the rebuilding can take in new material.

The studies that made this famous:

• Misinformation. In 1974 Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer showed that the verb in a question (“smashed” or “hit”) changed people’s estimates of a car’s speed and made some remember broken glass that wasn’t there.
• Whole events. In the “lost in the mall” study (Loftus and Pickrell, 1995), about a quarter of participants came to remember, fully or partly, a childhood event their families had never reported. In a 2002 study by Kimberley Wade and colleagues, half of participants shown a doctored photo of themselves in a hot-air balloon remembered at least part of the ride.
• The overall rate. A 2017 analysis by Alan Scoboria and colleagues pooled eight implantation studies and found that about 30 per cent of participants formed a false memory of the suggested event.
• Imagination alone. Maryanne Garry, Elizabeth Loftus and colleagues found in 1996 that imagining a childhood event made people more confident it had happened. Giuliana Mazzoni and Amina Memon found in 2003 that imagining a medical procedure created more false memories of it than reading about it did.

Hypnosis brings together everything those studies use: vivid imagery, a trusted guide, repeated suggestion and a person who expects a memory to appear. The research on imagination and the nervous system says the brain usually keeps imagined and perceived experience apart. Under these conditions, that separation breaks down.

What do hypnotists say about regression?

The most striking evidence comes from the people who teach it. Holmqvist’s two books, Hypnotic Influence (2015) and Hypnosis, are frank on the point.

He says a partial regression can produce a completely invented memory, especially of early childhood. He says the person isn’t returning to the past; the unconscious acts the event out as best it can. He blames the recovered-memory abuse cases on therapists who kept suggesting abuse until clients produced it. In his self-hypnosis chapter he tells readers they can use any process in the book on themselves except full regression. And he describes why many of his processes end with a suggestion to remember the experience in vivid detail: it makes the mind fill in what the imagined scene lacked, so it later feels as real as any other memory. That is a description of confabulation used on purpose.

He also gives one account of harm. He says a memory-rewriting process, taught badly at a seminar, left him and others with problems that took him years to undo.

The hypnotist Anthony Jacquin makes a related concession in Reality Is Plastic (2016): hypnotised people can lie, and they can hold a false memory they fully believe, which he gives as the reason courts don’t accept hypnotic testimony.

These books also describe techniques that use distress, shock or an induced childlike state to lower a person’s resistance. We don’t describe them here. They are the clearest consent problem in the hypnosis literature, and the authors’ own warnings are the best reason to stay away from them.

Is past-life regression real?

Past-life regression is the same process pointed further back. A hypnotist suggests the person go back before their birth, and many people describe another life in detail.

Nicholas Spanos and colleagues tested this in a set of studies published in 1991. The past lives people produced matched what they believed about reincarnation and what the hypnotist had told them beforehand. Told that past lives often belong to another culture or another sex, or that children in past centuries were often abused, people produced lives to match. Historical details tended to be vague or wrong when checked.

The best-known case shows a second mechanism. In the 1950s a Colorado woman under hypnosis described a life as an Irishwoman named Bridey Murphy, and the book about it became a bestseller. Newspaper investigators later traced many details to her own childhood in Chicago, including a neighbour named Bridie Murphy Corkell. Psychologists call this cryptomnesia: forgotten information returning without its source, so it feels like discovery.

Holmqvist himself says belief in past lives makes them more likely to appear in a session and that suggestion can create them.

What happened in the recovered-memory cases?

In the 1980s and 1990s, some therapists in North America and Britain used hypnosis, guided imagery and repeated questioning to “recover” memories of childhood abuse. Some clients came to remember abuse, sometimes extreme and ritualised, that investigation never corroborated. Families broke apart, and prosecutors charged some of the accused.

The research response was led by Loftus (1993), Stephen Lindsay and Don Read (1994), and Stephen Ceci and Maggie Bruck, whose work showed that repeated, leading interviews could make young children report events that never happened. The McMartin preschool case in California, one of the longest criminal trials in US history, ended without a single conviction. In 1998 a Royal College of Psychiatrists working group advised psychiatrists in the UK to avoid memory-recovery techniques altogether.

None of this means abuse memories are usually false. Child abuse is common, and most survivors remember it all too well. Elke Geraerts and colleagues found in 2007 that memories which returned on their own, outside therapy, were corroborated about as often as memories people had always had. Memories that emerged during suggestive therapy were not corroborated at all. So the risk sits with the method used to find a memory. A memory that surfaces on its own may be accurate.

Can changing the meaning of a memory still help?

There is a version of memory work with good evidence, and the difference is instructive. In imagery rescripting, a licensed therapist helps a client imagine a painful memory going differently, for example with an adult arriving to protect the child. A 2017 meta-analysis by Nexhmedin Morina, Jaap Lancee and Arnoud Arntz found it helped across several conditions.

Everyone involved knows the new scene is imagined. Nobody claims it reveals what happened. It changes how the memory feels while leaving the record of the past alone. Regression often blurs that line, presenting what the client imagines as something recovered. Research on memory reconsolidation (Karim Nader and colleagues, 2000) suggests why both can change how a memory feels: a recalled memory is briefly open to change before it’s stored again.

Neville Goddard’s practice of revision, imagining a day’s events as you wished they had gone, belongs on the labelled side of that line when it’s used honestly. The imagination-inflation research is the reason to keep it labelled.

What the research says

Claim	What the research shows
Hypnosis unlocks memories the waking mind can’t reach	Not supported. It increases what people report, and errors rise faster than accurate details (Dywan and Bowers, 1983)
A memory recovered in hypnosis is more trustworthy because it’s vivid	The reverse. Hypnosis raises confidence more than accuracy (Lynn and colleagues, 2003)
Age regression returns you to how you were as a child	Not supported. Regressed adults behave like adults playing a child (Nash, 1987)
Past-life regression reaches real past lives	No good evidence. Reports follow belief and the hypnotist’s cues (Spanos and colleagues, 1991); some trace to forgotten sources
Suggestion can’t create a whole false memory	Contradicted. About 30 per cent of people in implantation studies form one (Scoboria and colleagues, 2017)
All recovered memories are false	Also wrong. Memories that return outside suggestive therapy are corroborated about as often as continuous ones (Geraerts and colleagues, 2007)
Changing how a memory feels requires uncovering what really happened	Not needed. Imagery rescripting works with openly imagined scenes (Morina and colleagues, 2017)

The hypnosis pillar sets out the uses where hypnosis does have support, such as pain and irritable bowel syndrome. Memory recovery isn’t one of them. How strongly any one person responds also varies, which is the subject of suggestibility.

Who should take care

• Anyone with memories, or suspected memories, of abuse or trauma should work with a licensed trauma therapist, not a hypnotist, and shouldn’t use hypnosis or regression to look for what happened. Our page on emotional scars covers why we point people to licensed professionals.
• Anyone who might be a witness in a legal case should speak to the lawyer or police officer involved before any hypnosis. In many places, including much of the US and Canada, courts may refuse testimony given after hypnosis.
• People with dissociative conditions, psychosis or active trauma symptoms shouldn’t take part in regression. The broader risks are covered on is hypnosis dangerous.
• Anyone offered past-life or “inner child” regression for weight loss, phobias or relationships should know the memories it produces are likely to be constructions, however vivid. If a practitioner tells you what you will find before you look, leave.
• Anyone in crisis should contact a doctor or a crisis line. In Canada and the US, call or text 988.

What memory research teaches about identity

Memory research leaves you with a strange freedom. The past you remember isn’t a fixed recording. You rebuild it each time, under the influence of who you are now and what you expect. That is why regression misleads people, and it’s also why the story you carry about yourself is more open than it feels.

The honest way to use that is the opposite of regression. Don’t go looking for a hidden truth to explain your limits. Notice which story about yourself you keep rebuilding, ask whether it still deserves your belief, and choose the identity you want to act from with your eyes open. If you want help doing that work in practice, that’s what our coaching is for.

Frequently asked questions

Can hypnosis recover repressed memories?

No reliable evidence shows it can. In controlled studies, hypnosis increases how much people report and how confident they feel, but much of the extra material is wrong, and suggested events can become memories that feel real.

Can hypnosis create false memories?

Yes. In a 1983 study by Jean-Roch Laurence and Campbell Perry, about half of a group of highly hypnotisable people went on to report a noise that had only been suggested to them under hypnosis, and some insisted it was real after being told how the study worked.

Is past-life regression real?

There is no good evidence that it reaches real past lives. Nicholas Spanos and colleagues found in 1991 that the past lives people described under hypnosis tracked what they believed and what the hypnotist had told them beforehand.

Is testimony from hypnosis allowed in court?

Often not. The American Medical Association judged hypnotically refreshed memories unreliable in 1985, many US states restrict such testimony, and the Supreme Court of Canada held in R v Trochym (2007) that post-hypnosis evidence is presumptively inadmissible.

Is age regression under hypnosis safe?

It carries real risks: it can produce vivid, confident memories of events that never happened, and it can stir up distress the session is not equipped to handle. Anyone working with memories of abuse or trauma should see a licensed trauma therapist instead.

This article is educational and is not medical, psychological or financial advice. Talk to a qualified professional before making major changes, especially if you live with a mental health condition. Read the full disclaimer.