Stage Hypnosis vs Clinical Hypnotherapy: What Is Actually Different

Ask most people in Ireland where they first saw hypnosis and the answer is a stage. A volunteer convinced they are a chicken, a row of people unable to stand up, a hall in stitches. For an older generation, the name that comes up is Paul Goldin.

That picture is the reason many people who might benefit from hypnotherapy never try it, and the reason others arrive at a first session braced for something that is not going to happen. The two share a name. They have much less in common than that suggests.

The Paul Goldin era

Paul Goldin was born in France and came to Ireland as a touring stage hypnotist. According to the Dictionary of Irish Biography, from 1950 he played packed ballrooms, cinemas and parish halls in market towns across the country as part of a travelling variety show. For decades his was the best known name in Irish hypnosis.

What is less remembered is that he also ran a therapeutic practice in Dún Laoghaire, alongside the performing. He died in 2008.

John A O'Connor met him as a seven year old, and traces his own interest in the mind back to that meeting. It is a common enough story in this field: a stage show as the first encounter, followed much later by the discovery that the same underlying phenomenon can be used for something quite different.

What is actually happening on stage

Stage hypnosis is not fake, but it is carefully curated. Several things are going on at once.

Selection. People respond to hypnotic suggestion to different degrees. A stage hypnotist typically runs quick suggestibility tests on the audience early in the show, then invites up the people who responded most strongly. The dramatic results you see are from the most responsive fraction of the room, not a random sample.

Willing volunteers. Everyone on stage chose to go up, in front of friends, at an event whose whole purpose is to be entertaining. They know what kind of evening it is.

Social momentum. An audience, lights, and a performer who expects compliance all make it easier to go along with a suggestion than to refuse it. That is part of the effect, and the performer knows it.

None of this means the volunteers are pretending. It means the setting has been built to produce a show.

What happens in a clinic instead

Clinical hypnotherapy uses the same basic capacity for focused attention and heightened response to suggestion, and puts it to a completely different use.

• There is no audience. It is private and confidential.
• The goal is yours. You decide what you want to work on, whether that is anxiety, a habit, sleep, or something else, and the session is built around it.
• Nobody is selected. You do not need to be highly suggestible for hypnotherapy to be useful, because the aim is change in your own life rather than a visible spectacle.
• It is collaborative. Suggestions are agreed in advance and aligned with what you want.

The American Psychological Association's hypnosis division describes hypnosis as a state of focused attention and reduced peripheral awareness, with an enhanced capacity to respond to suggestion. Nothing in that description involves losing control. Most people find it closer to being absorbed in a book or a film than to anything on a stage.

A practitioner's view of the stage

Clinical hypnotherapists are not all hostile to stage shows. Speaking on the EAPH's Professional Hypnotherapists Podcast, John described stage hypnosis as a shop window for what the modality can do. It shows, vividly, that suggestion can change what a person experiences.

His point in the same conversation cuts the other way too. Hypnosis is not something that can simply be done to you. The person has to take part. He compares the therapist's role to that of a tour guide: pointing out what is worth seeing, while the person decides what to make of it.

That is the real difference. On stage, the performer is the centre of attention. In a clinic, the client is.

The myths the stage leaves behind

"I will lose control"

You remain aware throughout and can open your eyes and stop whenever you like. You will not do or say anything you would object to.

"I could get stuck"

There is no state to get stuck in. At worst, someone left alone in hypnosis would drift into ordinary sleep or simply open their eyes.

"I will reveal secrets"

You choose what you talk about. Hypnosis does not function as a truth drug.

"Only weak-minded people can be hypnotised"

Responsiveness to hypnosis is not linked to weakness or gullibility. The ability to concentrate and become absorbed tends to help rather than hinder.

"If I would not go up on stage, it will not work on me"

Not wanting to perform for an audience says nothing about whether focused, private work on something that matters to you will be useful.

Frequently asked questions