Charles Tebbetts

Charles Tebbetts (1905–1992) was an American hypnotherapist and master teacher best remembered for developing parts therapy into a client-centered method for resolving inner conflict.

He came to hypnosis as a young jazz saxophonist who, in 1927, memorized a touring stage hypnotist’s act and stepped in to perform it himself; clinical work followed when a family-friend physician recruited him to work with patients.

With his wife he later settled in Edmonds, Washington, founding a hypnosis training institute and a state chapter of the American Council of Hypnotist Examiners. His book Miracles on Demand, written in the early 1980s, paired a summary of his training course with transcripts of actual sessions.

He was inducted into the International Hypnosis Hall of Fame for lifetime achievement, and died in 1992 shortly after collapsing at a National Guild of Hypnotists convention. Tebbetts matters to the mind-power lineage as the figure who turned the ego-state idea into a practical, teachable hypnotic technique.

Borrowing the notion of subconscious “parts” from Paul Federn, he developed parts therapy: under hypnosis the practitioner identifies the conflicting parts of a person — for example the part that wants to quit smoking and the part that resists — and mediates a resolution between them.

This reframes the subconscious not as a single obedient servant but as a council of sub-selves that can be negotiated with, an influential model for inner-conflict work that his student Roy Hunter carried forward.