In the mid-1960s, if you wanted to see a hypnotherapist in Melbourne, you didn’t have many options. According to the Australian Society of Clinical Hypnotherapists, there were only a dozen or so practising in the whole city.
Within a few years, in Victoria, most of them would no longer be allowed to practise at all. Not because of a hypnosis scandal, but because of an inquiry into something else entirely.
The inquiry
In 1963, the Victorian government set up a Board of Inquiry into Scientology, the movement founded by American science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, which was growing in Melbourne. The inquiry was conducted by a single lawyer, Kevin Anderson QC. He heard evidence for more than a year, in the theatrette of the National Herbarium of Victoria, from February 1964 to April 1965.
His report, published in 1965, was ferocious. It called Scientology “a delusional belief system, based on fiction and fallacies and propagated by falsehood and deception.”
But the report did more than condemn one movement. In examining Scientology’s practices, including its “auditing” sessions and the electronic E-meter, the inquiry also looked at hypnosis. The way it was understood at the time, hypnosis seemed to share some features of what Scientology was doing: one person guiding another into an altered, suggestible state. Expert witnesses warned of its dangers, and the ASCH’s account suggests their presentations alarmed the inquiry.
The law
Victoria responded quickly. The Psychological Practices Act banned the practice of Scientology for fee or reward and the use of the E-meter. It also set up a new Psychological Council to oversee psychological practice in the state.
And it went further. Building on the inquiry’s concerns, and on a recommendation from a medical panel of the National Health and Medical Research Council that hypnosis be restricted to the medical and psychology professions, the law limited who could practise hypnosis. In practice, that meant registered doctors, dentists and psychologists. For lay hypnotherapists, the handful practising in Melbourne, it effectively closed the door.
Western Australia and South Australia passed their own laws aimed at Scientology in 1968. But New South Wales, the Northern Territory and the ACT never restricted hypnosis at all. For two decades, whether you could legally see a hypnotherapist depended on which side of the Murray River you lived on.
Two decades of unease
Over time, the Victorian law became controversial. Scientology itself found a way around it: once it was recognised as a religious denomination, its ministers were effectively exempt from the Act. Meanwhile, hypnosis was being used more and more widely across healthcare, in dentistry, pain management, childbirth and psychology.
When a Victorian parliamentary committee later reviewed the law, it faced a practical problem. Hypnosis was now a part of treatment offered by many health practitioners, which made restricting it almost impossible to enforce.
The committee recommended that the restrictions be removed. The old Act was repealed by the Psychologists Registration Act 1987, with a two-year grandfather clause. Lay practice of hypnosis became legal again in Victoria two years after the new law took effect.
What it means today
The Victorian episode is a reminder that how we regulate hypnosis has often depended less on evidence about hypnosis itself than on the fears of the moment. A technique that was restricted in Melbourne was freely practised in Sydney, by the same kinds of practitioners, with no evidence that one city’s residents were in greater danger.
It also left a legacy that still matters. Today, hypnotherapy in Australia is largely self-regulated. There’s no single government register of hypnotherapists, so professional associations, training standards and insurance are what separate the qualified from the unqualified. If you’re choosing a hypnotherapist, that’s worth knowing.
The pattern is a familiar one, from Meiji Japan’s 1908 police law to Victoria’s 1965 Act: hypnosis attracts excitement, then fear, then rules. What changes from country to country is mostly which of those three gets the last word.
Further reading
- Australian Society of Clinical Hypnotherapists. “History of the ASCH.” https://www.asch.com.au/asch-history/
- “Anderson Report.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anderson_Report
- “Scientology in Australia.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology_in_Australia
- State of Victoria. Report of the Board of Inquiry into Scientology (Anderson Report). Melbourne, 1965.