THE H-FILES
Handbook of Hypnosis – Harvey Day
Handbook of Hypnosis is a 1967 book written by Harvey Day, a prolific author – and, notably, not a hypnotist – whose works span topics such as yoga, curries, nutrition and New Age stuff.
Given he’s writing for a series called ‘Health and Harmony’, with a strapline promising “better physical and mental health”, you could be forgiven for expecting this nifty little book to cover tangible, practical, credible basics for the everyman reader to apply to their life.
No. Instead, this is more like the hypnotic equivalent of The X-Files – a compilation of some of the silliest and most far-fetched stories of ‘hypnotic’ feats that I’ve come across, attached to some seriously misleading chapter titles.
These chapters are: ‘Hypnotism in Europe’; ‘Hypnotism in Asia and Africa’; ‘How Hypnosis Can Help’; ‘The Power of Suggestion’; ‘Hypnotherapy’; and ‘How Hypnosis Can Help You’.
Key themes across these chapters include: a bias for spurious stories of African voodoo; a beef against conventional medicine and medical professionals; and an abundance of anecdotes about people getting ‘stuck’ in ‘trances’.
The book contains zero information as to what hypnosis actually is and how the reader might apply it or seek it. In ‘How Hypnosis Can Help’, Harvey helpfully informs us that lessons are available for as little as £2 10s – but that’s it.
‘Hypnotherapy’ opens with a short paragraph of nonsense, and then illustrates the field with… the story of a Swiss stage hypnotist who could (obviously not really) repeatedly stab himself with a sword but not die, thanks to hypnosis! As if surviving a violent, self-inflicted death is top of the wish-list of the average person’s self-help concerns.
Similarly, ‘How Hypnosis Can Help You’ provides no help, or basic hierarchy of information. We careen from terrible yet rare skin conditions and colds being ‘all in the mind’ (yes, Harv is one of those yogis…) to mass mind control and, erm, banishing warts.
Harv strikes kind of a grouchy tone – sub-headers such as ‘Fat People Need Hypnosis’ suggest his low-level annoyance that not everyone is a mung-bean eating yogi. Plus there are mentions of the challenges of marriage – peppered with some casual sexism (full make-up and mani-pedi with hypno-surgery for ladies who like to look their best – hurrah!) and a reference or two to his own wife – all of which make me wonder if things were harmonious at home with The Days…
This grouchiness is a shame because a lot of the content is a hoot. Hypnotising chickens… God using hypnosis on Adam to extract the rib with which to make Eve: FACT… Racist and colonialist tales galore… An occultist solving a hypno-murder… Speculations about hypno-prison-breaks… Mass hypnosis conducted from a plane and underwater… A hypnotist who was drafted in to extract secrets from a Nazi captive during World War II… Cloud bursting...
I know diddly-squat about hypnosis as a result of reading this book – about the same as Harvey when he set about writing it, presumably.
