Special Issue

Hypnosis in Psychotherapy and Medicine: The Therapist, the Patient, and the Hypnotic Process

Submission Deadline: November 30, 2027 (Open) Submit Now

Guest Editor

Joseph Meyerson, PhD

HypnoClinic, State Approved Institute for Hypnosis Education, Tel Aviv, Israel

Website1 | Website2 | E-Mail

Research Interests: Strategic psychotherapy; hypnotic psychotherapy; hypnosis; hypnotherapy; dissociation; association: relational psychoanalysis, psychosomatics

About This Topic

Clinical hypnosis occupies a unique position at the intersection of psychotherapy, medicine, and mind–body care. It may be used as a focused intervention for pain, anxiety, procedural distress, functional symptoms, and other clinical conditions, or integrated into broader psychological and medical treatments. The therapeutic effects of hypnosis cannot be understood solely through hypnotic techniques, induction procedures, or individual hypnotic responsiveness. They emerge from the dynamic interaction among three central dimensions: the therapist, the patient, and the evolving hypnotic process.

The therapist contributes clinical judgment, relational sensitivity, and the capacity to adapt interventions to the patient’s needs and moment-to-moment responses. The patient is not a passive recipient of suggestion, but an active participant whose expectations, meanings, capacities, preferences, and personal history shape the hypnotic experience. The hypnotic process may facilitate focused attention, absorption, imaginative involvement, changes in bodily perception, emotional regulation, dissociation, association, and the development of new experiential possibilities.

This Special Issue invites theoretical, empirical, and clinical contributions examining how hypnosis may promote therapeutic processes in psychotherapy and medicine. Areas of interest include the role of the therapist and therapeutic relationship, patient experiences and individual differences, mechanisms of hypnotic change, integration with psychological and medical treatments, psychosomatic symptoms, pain, trauma, procedural care, and innovative applications of hypnosis in healthcare.

The central aim is to move beyond the question of whether hypnosis is effective and to examine how, for whom, under what conditions, and through which relational and experiential processes it may contribute to psychological and medical care.

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted through the LIDSEN Submission System. Detailed information on manuscript preparation and submission is available in the Instructions for Authors. All submitted articles will be thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process and will be processed following the Editorial Process and Quality Control policy. Upon acceptance, the article will be immediately published in a regular issue of the journal and will be listed together on the special issue website, with a label that the article belongs to the Special Issue. LIDSEN distributes articles under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) License in an open-access model. The authors own the copyright to the article, and the article can be free to access, distribute, and reuse provided that the original work is correctly cited.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). Research articles and review articles are highly invited. Authors are encouraged to send the tentative title and abstract of the planned paper to the Editorial Office (icm@lidsen.com) for record. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact the Editorial Office.

Welcome your submission!