HE WANTS TO BELIEVE
Essentials of Hypnosis – Michael D Yapko, PhD
For some reason, in the 20-plus years I’ve been at this, I hadn’t got around to reading anything by Michael Yapko, PhD, yet he is pretty prolific and appears to straddle the academic world (check out that PhD on the front cover) as well as the lay hypnotherapy world (his books are often recommended, maybe because of that PhD?). His bio circa 1995 (when this was published) tells us that he is director of the Milton H Erickson Institute of San Diego, but Wikipedia tells us that today he is retired. I guess when I was learning hypnosis, I was trying to find non-clinical books as my interests were focused elsewhere, and then later, after reading some of the science of hypnosis, his book title, Trancework, kind of put me off him – because “trance” didn’t sound very scientific.
This book was derived from Trancework so I should have been prepared, but the actual experience of reading it was quite different to what I expected. On the face of it, Yapko (PhD) does a good job of sitting on the fence, appraising all the perspectives, and citing papers to justify his statements. Yet… something felt a little ‘off’. Of course, we have to accept that a mid-90s book is only ever going to represent the evidence and culture of the time leading up to the mid-90s – we wouldn’t be expecting discussions about metacognition or phenomenological control in here. But, even so, this read wasn’t a good one, and the devil is in the details.
The chapters are incredibly short. This isn’t necessarily a problem (especially given how many there are), but it often seems that the content is too concise and summarised to be of much real value. It all feels very light, as if there is much more that he would like to say but for some reason chose not to. But looking at the chapter on theory, it does appear to cover most of the extant theories of the day, but each in so little detail as to make it almost pointless. For example, the first theory presented is “Hypnosis as dissociation”, but there’s no mention of Janet’s theory from the early 20th Century, on which neodissociation, to which he’s actually referring, was redeveloped. There’s also no mention of the extensive raft of experiments that made neodissociation untenable – that the hidden observer is the result of suggestion; that suggestions are just as effective without an induction; that suggestions can be breached when the context indicates. So this isn’t really a scientific round-up of theories with their supportive and contradicting evidence, but rather an “i-Spy” book of theories to look out for. He certainly doesn’t nail his colours to any one of them and, in fairness, does give credence to the social theories (eg, Barber, Coe, Spanos, Kirsch, Wagstaff).
But, and this is the big BUT, the rest of the book then chats away as if a hypnotic state is a real thing, and is essential for “formal hypnosis”. The bias here is evident throughout and most noticeable in the “Name Index” at the end, which has no entry for Nicholas Spanos, possibly the most prolific hypnosis researcher at the time Yapko wrote this book. I can only guess, but seeing all the references to the Spiegels, Rossi and Erickson, it appears that he’d wished that Spanos didn’t exist and his research didn’t contradict most of what he had written.
It’s like an exercise in cognitive dissonance – he knows the science exists and that it is far more important than just his own opinions (he heavily cites throughout), but he also wants to talk about and write about “trance” and what he believes to be a “hypnotic state”, even though there is no evidence to support those notions. And don’t just take my word for it, he himself reports that there is no evidence for a “hypnotic state”, yet happily carries on talking about it like it is real!
He comes across as the Mulder of the situation, where I wanted Scully. He really, Really, REALLY wants to believe in the MAGIC. I imagine that he thought that his studies would have provided a scientific basis on which to place his beliefs, only to find that there wasn’t one. So instead, he paid lip service to the science and stuck to his imaginary guns. And he does that by playing fast and loose with his citations. Through those early chapters he’s citing Barber and Kirsch (real academics, published in real peer-reviewed journals), but later on he’s citing Bandler & Grinder (and Grinder & Bandler) where he’s simply referring to something said in a transcript of a seminar – not peer reviewed, not fact-checked, not even something where B&G were referring to an academic publication. Just absolute, opinion-based nonsense (as is most of NLP).
And this is a problem because if the reader is impressed (and likely intimidated) by the vast citing of academic publications in the early chapters, it would be easy to assume that all the citations throughout the book are of equal merit, but they simply are not. Before long he’s justifying statements by citing Erickson, who could be considered anti-science when it came to studies (in stark contrast to Erickson’s academic supervisor, Clark Hull). He’ll cite an entire chapter of a book even though it is not obvious which part of that chapter would support the statement he’d just made – perhaps the reader could do with some sign-posting? He’ll also cite himself and forget to include the full reference to his own paper!
Worse, and this is just by way of example of what you’ll have to deal with if you choose to read this, he contradicts himself within the book and between the book and his own papers. He states early on that memories recovered with hypnosis are liable to be flawed – he even wrote a paper to that end. And much later on he discusses again the problems of hypnotically recovered memories (from a Loftus perspective). But in between the two, he happily wrote that “age regression” – whether revivification or hypermnesia – allows people to “reexperience [a memory] as if it were happening in the here-and-now”, “remember the experience as intensely as possible”, “reliving it exactly as the memory was incorporated at the time it actually happened” and “provides the opportunity to go back in time… in order to recover forgotten or repressed memories of significant events”. Which he, himself, knows is complete bollocks, as evidenced by what he wrote elsewhere in the same book and in the papers he cites from the same book.
I’ll leave it there because I think this gives the picture without having to trudge through multiple examples of similar treatments. I’m glad I finally read some Yapko (PhD). I’m glad you won’t have to.
