GETTING SERIOUS
The Student Psychologist’s Handbook – Theodore R Sarbin and William C Coe
If you’ve read this blog from the start, or you’ve at least browsed the entries up to now, you may be thinking three things:
Amy is the only one reading hypnosis books.
The majority of the books aren’t academic, or even credible. And
We really enjoy taking the piss out of the terrible hypnosis books.
I won’t lie – we really do enjoy terrible hypnosis books. Whenever I feel like I haven’t bought anything exciting for a while, I trawl through Ebay, Amazon and AbeBooks, looking for treasures. As you may have read, I like to troll Amy with the weirdest and most wonderful hypnosis books I can find, knowing that if the title or cover is good enough, she won’t be able to resist reading it and blogging about it.
But in the meantime, I also search for, and buy, as many credible – by which I mean academic – books on hypnosis I can find.
Having run the contents of our bookshelf past Professors Irving Kirsch and Zoltan Dienes recently, I thought we had a full set, but then I realised we didn’t have anything by the social cognitive theorist, Theodore Sarbin, known as ‘Mr Role Theory’ according to Wikipedia.
A quick (by which I mean an afternoon) search and I had several on their way to us, including this one, The Student Psychologist’s Handbook, which he co-wrote with his hypnotic collaborator, William Coe.
In amongst the collection of books Amy has read, this might look a little dry and serious. And, while no one wants to be dry (mine’s a Kentucky bourbon, cheers), if we want to properly understand hypnotism, suggestion and hypnosis, then we do need to get a little serious. I don’t mean we need a waistcoat, bowtie and a pair of specs – I mean we need to delve into psychology proper, and this book from 1969 is a fine place to start.
Psychology, for those who don’t know, is the application of advanced statistics to the nuances of things that nobody cares about. I know Hollywood makes it look glamorous, and university prospectuses talk of understanding people and what makes them human, but really it is all about numbers. Oh, and studies. Lots of studies.
Sarbin and Coe have done a fantastic job of making the topic sound as dry and serious as possible, with chapters such as ‘Values in Writing a Research Paper’ and ‘Using the Library’; while still slipping in tales of hypnosis and LSD to keep you awake.
Their gallop through statistics touches on the same topics you’d find in Professor Andy Field’s An Adventure in Statistics, although with far fewer aliens (you’ve got to read it to believe it). The fact that Sarbin and Coe’s contents list gets the page number for the statistics chapter wrong has to be one of their many colossal but subtle jokes that they litter throughout.
While a lot of the content on journals might be out of date, the majority of their 100-page book is bang on, with no wasted words and no filler. Of course there are lots of modern alternative handbooks for budding psychologists, but if your interest is hypnosis, then this is both cheap and quaint at the same time. It might even be exciting enough to make you read another academic text, so look out for more reviews as time permits.
In the meantime, Amy will be sure to write some more about misogynistic mesmerists and hard-done hypnotists.
