SPANOS, OH WHERE ART THOU?
Hypnosis and Imagination – Edited by Robert G Kunzendorf, Nicholas P Spanos, and Benjamin Wallace
There are tragedies, and then there are tragedies. Nicholas Spanos died on June 6, 1994, when his aeroplane crashed shortly after take-off from his home on Martha’s Vineyard, while heading back to Carleton University. He was not just another hypnosis researcher, in the way that Ayrton Senna was not just another racing driver, or John Lennon was not just another musician. I suspect the living best-of-the-best would claim he was the Greatest Of All Time.
Nick Spanos can be seen at his best, and appreciated for his humour, intellect, surgical precision, and brash confidence, in the film Hypnosis: The Big Sleep, aired after his death, and shown at the 2022 UK Hypnosis Convention. (Yes, fact finders, we did sponsor the film’s showing and are huge advocates for watching it – contact Open Media if you want to try to purchase a copy.) He distills his knowledge from well over 100 academic studies in the field of hypnosis, into pithy facts and soundbites. He is literally a joy to watch.
Before his death he started work on Hypnosis and Imagination, that year’s compendium of academic writing (albeit from a social-cognitive perspective), which explained the status quo of knowledge and thinking on hypnosis. The book opens with tributes to Nick and is dedicated to him. It is one of the absolute best academic books you could acquire, up there with Clinical Hypnosis and Self-Regulation. And you can still buy a Kindle version or a next-day-delivery (not second hand) version from Amazon for around £32 in the UK (and I imagine similar elsewhere).
So why’s it so good? Well, beyond the fact that I think imagination is a key component to phenomenological control (the mechanism behind hypnotic suggestion, for those not in the know), it is a who’s who of the hypnosis research world at that time. You’ve got Sheehan, Wagstaff, Council, Kirsch, Lynn, Green, Rhue, Coe, Gorassini, Crawford, and, of course, Spanos himself.
Kirsch and Council discuss expectancy. Lynn, Green and Rhue talk fantasy and daydreaming. Coe breaks posthypnotic amnesia. Gorassini (in my favourite chapter) explains how a five-minute brief training (a script that can be read to a participant, and/or that they can read themselves) markedly increases the capacity for phenomenological control; that is, turns those who have low response to suggestion into those who have a high response – in my opinion, one of the Holy Grail concepts in hypnosis. Crawford talks about brain imagery (well, okay, but is this not just a statistical trick with expensive machinery?). And Spanos himself talks about hypnotic and non-hypnotic responsiveness, and also about negative hallucinations.
Whatever your interest in hypnosis, whether therapy, performance, research, hobby, or just for fun, this book has something for everyone. And not only in the sense that it covers a broad range of topics, but also that it is the actual state-of-the-art of the Real Science from Real University Professors from Real Universities. Here at Cosmic Pancakes! we read so much drivel So You Don’t Have To that, when we come across a fantastic book, we really have to make it obvious.
If you need any further recommendation, Anthony Jacquin recently told me that this is his favourite hypnosis book, hands down. He said it opened his eyes to so many ideas and concepts that he’s read it cover-to-cover many times over. I personally bought it for the Spanos connection, fell in love with the Gorassini chapter, and have basked in the breadth and depth of all the other chapters. It truly is fantastic.
