AN ABSOLUTE BOMBSHELL
Clinical Hypnosis and Self-Regulation – Irving Kirsch, Antonio Capafons, Etzel Cardeña-Buelna and Salvador Amigó
While my first review was the serious Student Psychologist’s Handbook, this second one is about a book that will blow your mind.
Forget hypnotic water pistols, this is a metaphoric nuclear bomb the size of Brighton!
Hidden away in secondhand bookshops for the not-inconsiderate price of £75+, this weapon of mass destruction will totally destroy all of your out-dated ideas and beliefs!
(Terms and conditions apply, your mileage may vary, your investment may go down as well as up…)
Written in 1999, this book is a collection of chapters discussing and extolling the virtues of the social-cognitive approach to understanding hypnosis.
If your tuition and knowledge comes from Erickson, Elman and Estabrooks, or from the pages of historic or rehashed NLP books, and you still think there’s a hypnotic state or trance, then prepare to be shocked and awed.
Shocked because it will shake the foundations on which your hypnotic beliefs are built.
Awed because these authors not only have the theories, but they have the stats and studies to back them up.
With contributors including Barber, Sarbin, Kirsch, Lynn, Spanos, Gorassini, Wagstaff, and Chaves, there is far too much golden content to cover in a single blog post, so I’ll revisit specific chapters at a point in the future.
Instead I’ll concentrate on a few reasons why this book should be on your bookshelf and in your head…
Kirsch and Lynn reprint their seminal paper ‘Hypnotic Involuntariness and the Automaticity of Everyday Life’. Many amateur hypnotists find this too challenging of an idea, and simply refuse to engage with it, but you definitely should.
In a nutshell, they take the notion of a deterministic world – that is, a world in which physics simply applies everywhere; where all events, actions and happenings are the logical and causal effects of others events, actions and happenings; where all of us are ultimately biological robots and everything happens automatically – and they use that to suggest that hypnosis simply exposes the illusion that we usually live within: the illusion that we have voluntary free will. BOOM! Take that Dave Elman – didn’t see that coming, did you?
Spanos and Gorassini describe how you can train people unresponsive to hypnosis to become fantastic subjects. Originally in 75 minutes, Gorassini reprints the full text of the four-minute training that makes poor hypnotees into those who can hallucinate and experience amnesia. BANG! What do you think of that George Estabrooks?
In a separate chapter, Gorassini explains hypnosis as an act of self-deception, complete with descriptions of training hypnotees in this particular approach, again making poor responders into great ones. And of course, as if it needs saying, with studies and statistics to back up his claims. CRASH! Where’s your trance now Milton Erickson?
And if that isn’t enough, Kirsch discusses the ‘Nondeceptive Placebo’, Wagstaff talks ‘Forensic Psychology’, and Chaves and Green show how to apply the social cognitive approach to pain management, smoking cessation and weight loss.
It’s almost as if you didn’t need those empty, old-fashioned ideas at all, and everything is here in this one book. Except it isn’t a book, it’s a nuclear bomb. And if you let it drop on you, it will blow everything else out of the water.
Be warned – hypnotic casualties will ensue.
