ABSTRACT

When she was 27, Alice, a successful businesswoman, embarked upon a course of hypnotherapy to help her overcome an eating disorder. The hypnotherapist told her, ‘you will start to remember things – things that you won't want to remember but they still come flooding back’. After six or seven sessions of hypnotherapy, Alice indeed began to recover memories of being sexually abused by her uncle sixteen years previously. Whilst Alice claimed to have always been aware that something was not right in her life, she also claimed that, prior to the hypnotherapy, she had had no memory of any episodes of abuse (Ost 2000).