High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! For over a century hypnosis has been a popular theme in fiction and music; it features in film from almost their inception and more recently has been depicted in television and online media. As Harvard hypnotherapist Deirdre Barrett points out in `Hypnosis in Popular Media,`, the vast majority of these depictions are negative stereotypes of either control for criminal profit and murder or as a method of seduction. Others depict hypnosis as all-powerful or even a path to supernatural powers; only a handful have been at all realistic.