LATE-HOUR LIBRARY FACT
Religion and the Sexual Life – Dr Walter P Clayton, with Stephan Gregory
So if you’ve been following this blog, you will know that I very occasionally troll Amy with hilarious pseudo-serious hypnosis books that she feels compelled to read.
Well, dear reader, she’s only gone and trolled me back.
Some months ago she reviewed Hypnosis and the Sexual Life, which recounted the supposedly factual hypnotherapy encounters of Dr Clayton.
Imagine her joy when she secretly bought me the follow-up book – Religion and the Sexual Life. And this one features not only sex, but also religion!
The first thing that strikes me is the almost phallic cross on the cover; the second, and more amusing, is the text at the top of the front cover – “A Late-Hour Library Fact Book / Adult Reading” (emphasis theirs).
This book may be many things, but let’s not kid ourselves – it’s about as likely to be factual as the letters page in a gentleman’s magazine. It’s not necessarily that the stories are so outlandish; it’s more the way in which they are written.
Each chapter represents a case study, with the final chapter made up of a medley of far shorter accounts. Supposedly, these were all transcribed from tape recordings made by Dr Clayton – is he really a doctor? How many hypnotherapists actually are? And is he a medical doctor or a PhD? These are the real questions… But yes, these are claimed to be factual accounts (see the cover for PROOF), transcribed by Clayton and Gregory.
So let’s look at the content: a psychic masturbator, a transgendered woman trapped in a man’s body with a long history of female past lives, various sex/religion cults, aliens, ghosts, incest, erotic descriptions – oh, and orgasms of course. The accounts read like somewhere between soft porn, erotica and accounts of amateur hypnosis, blogged hastily onto the internet (ahem).
But it isn’t this that makes me doubt its factual plausibility. No, it’s the open manner with which Clayton regularly states that he doesn’t know what he’s going to do, or whether he can help, or whether he indeed has helped, the numerous people coming to his clinic. Never in the history of hypnotherapy has a hypnotherapist ever accepted failure, let alone expressed their doubts over whether their techniques would work! That’s how we know it’s fake – he’s just too damn honest!
Whether you’re looking for hypnosis techniques or therapy methods, you’re not going to learn anything from this book, but it might amuse and, who knows, maybe turn you on, in a 1960s Austin-Powers-meets-Lady-Chatterly-while-debating-religion-on-a-spaceship sex-cult kind of way.
Given that it’s secondhand, I now feel the need to wash my own hands, and not because I think it might have Covid lurking between the pages.
If hypnosis fiction is your thing, then it’s probably very cheaply purchased; but you might as well go and get False Memory by Dean Koontz instead. But, as erotica, it probably does read much better than all of those straight-to-Kindle books on Amazon.
