I kid you not. A television network in Taiwan has been fined for broadcasting a guy hypnotized to talk to sperm. It wasn’t even his own sperm.
A soldier died last year and his fiancee asked that his sperm be preserved so she could undergo artificial insemination. The boy’s family asked that the sperm samples be destroyed after three months. So, the "news" channel broadcast footage of a hypnotist Tseng Yaotseng hypnotizing a guy unrelated to the case at all so he could "speak with the sperm" and see if the sperm wanted to undergo in virto fertilization and if it "wanted to become a human being."
Yes, you read that right. They presented it as a news story and so the Government Information Office slapped them with a fine for presenting superstition, nonsense, or hocus pocus as factual information. The TV studio appealed the ruling on the grounds that they hadn’t had a chance to review the footage before air time but the courts have thrown out the appeal.
While I am normally an advocate for using hypnosis for many things, hypnotizing folks so you can speak with sperm just doesn’t seem to have any value beyond superstition or self-promotion, especially as there doesn’t seem to be any therapeutic value to it as the folks involved were not actually related to the family or the case.
Now, I do teach Metaphysical Hypnosis (go to my webpage and sign up for the upcmoming course now) so it’s not like I am a completely close-minded individual. However, I teach Metaphysical Hypnosis with a critical perspective, an evidence-based approach rather than one set in circular reasoning (when I teach Bible and Literature at the university, I use the same critical perspective).
I suppose speaking to sperm might make an entertaining stage gimmick . . . but this was not an entertainment context and if it had been it would have been in exrtreme poor taste given the circumstances and the grief the folks involved in the case were going through without having this sort of crap thrown in their faces.
I can imagine a funny approach to this or even a therapeutic one . . . but this particular case doesn’t seem to have any trappings of entertainment, recreation, or therapy . . . it seems to have just been a bad idea, I suspect they weren’t intentionally being in bad taste, but that’s what the whole thing sounds like . . . very bad taste.
All the best,
Brian
Brian David Phillips, PhD, CH [phillips@nccu.edu.tw]Certified Hypnotherapist
President, Society of Experiential Trance
Associate Professor, NCCU, Taipei, Taiwan
http://www.BrianDavidPhillips.com
