Reviews of Five Hypnosis Books You Can Buy for Kindle (+ Douche-O-Meter)

(slang note for Italian friends: "douche" is short for "douchebag", so maybe: douche-o-meter = gradazioni di stronzo)
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I had some lovely hypnosis in Milan recently, so this hasn't been an entirely dry spell, but until the overload of awesomeness that is the New England Erotic Hypnosis Unconference, and great events happening soon in Milan and London soon, for the most part my education only continues in the form of reading. I'm so grateful for my e-book reader, since all english-language e-books are just as easy to access here as in American, and so I've been catching up on what's out there.

I'm afraid there seems to be a big drop-off in interest from the three books specifically about erotic hypnosis, and Erickson's Hypnotic Realities, to everything else. I'm wary of both doorstop clinical textbooks and $1 sleazy self-published e-books, so I checked out five non-academic but properly published books. It was often rough going. There's a hell of an ego on some of these folks!

Based on this sample, a lot of hypnosis books are built around what I call the "hero psychiatrist" narrative - which I bet we have Freud to thank for. These are anecdotes told by the therapist that always follow the same structure:

a) the patient comes to them with an life-ruining affliction that no one has been able to help,
b) the psychologist makes a brilliant intuitive leap, and prescribes or administers a wildly unconventional treatment,
c) The patient is instantly cured forever.

The implicit message these authors send - besides "I'm amazing!" - is that curing psychological problems with hypnosis is easy and fun. And, by the way, makes you feel like a cross between Sherlock Holmes and Jesus!

This message bugs me a lot. Especially outside of a professional setting, I think wanting to be someone's therapist is a creepier and more destructive power fantasy than wanting to be their Master.

In writing reviews of these books, I was hearing myself complain a lot. Which was a drag. So I switched over to writing in a consumer-guide style, with a special section just for complaining. I give and explain the author's rating on a "douche-o-meter", where 5 is super douchey. This has actually helped me separate out the personality factor, and thereby see the value of each book. As well as helping me not to absorb those bad habits and attitudes along with the learning.

Of course the rating is just based on how the writing is coming across to me, and I know how hard it is to actually sound like yourself when you write. I'd probably like them a lot more in person. Or maybe not. But I hope this can be taken in a lighthearted manner, and not as intended to diminish their real contributions. 

I can't wait until the next generation of erotic hypnosis books - by Lee Allure, D.J. Pynchon, Professor X, MrDream, ChewToy, and who knows who else - since they're just as lovely and consent-oriented as Wiseguy (the author of my favourite hypnosis book, Mind Play). In the meantime, you might do just as well reading blogs, like the ones on my sidebar (not to mention YouTube), rather than books. Something to remember is that just because something is set forth as a system, as books often do, doesn't mean it's scientific, or even remotely helpful, as in the case of the many discredited hypnotic depth scales. At the stage of knowledge we're at with hypnosis, scattershot accounts of firsthand experiences may be the more valid approach.

But I still enjoy the book perspective, and now I'm looking for recommendations for more.

My Voice Will Go With You: The Teaching Tales of Milton H. Erickson - Edited and with Commentary by Sidney Rosen

Tone: Folksy, paternalistic anecdotes and worshipful commentary

Valuable for:

• Another dose of Erickson and his powerful approach to the unconscious mind, although little that can't be found in a better form in Hypnotic Realities.
• Some nice stuff if looked at purely as folksy life wisdom: "When dealing with a problem of difficulty make an interesting design out of it. Then you can concentrate on the interesting design and ignore the back-breaking labor involved."
• Many examples of Erickson's conversational, storytelling method of therapy, where the patient's unconscious absorbs the point of sometimes apparently pointless stories (there's some good examples of confusion and boredom being used).

Douche-o-meter (1-5): 4.  I have a hard time with Erickson's quite explicitly paternalistic orientation. Richard Bandler writes, "He only had five goals for people to get well: get out of the hospital, get a job, get married, have children, and send him presents. That was his definition of a cure." It's nice to believe in all-wise gurus, who will forcibly steer your life for your own good, but with statements like "acne can be cured by removing all mirrors" and that he got someone to win an olympic gold medal by telling them "It would be all right,” to do so, he was at least partly full of shit. And that's in an account from inside the cult! One from outside (reported by Bandler): "Virginia [Satir] had met Milton and thought he was creepy and didn’t want anything to do with him." More than a couple of the stories he tells involve a woman getting her breasts out during the session - and he makes sure to remark on the attractiveness level of almost every single female patient. 

I could only find one story Erickson tells where he did not effect a miracle cure: a woman who came to him about weight loss.

In the case of the woman who was not motivated, this was also easily determined when she would not follow the simple suggestion of climbing Squaw Peak. Erickson had already guessed that she was lazy and self-indulgent when he saw her general demeanor, which included the ostentatious, artificial fingernails.
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After she had left, the group was interested in why Erickson had asked her to climb Squaw Peak. Did he want her to “get in touch with her own feelings”? Did he want her to accomplish a task successfully? His answer, surprisingly, was “So she would obey me.” 

Since the book uses his own words, I could at least get a hint of his calm mastery and charisma. But as his transcriber writes, "Erickson was really quite comfortable with power."

Hypnotic language example: “Did you know that every blade of grass is a different shade of green?”

The bottom line: Good reading when you've run out of other Erickson books, and have braced yourself for the plunge into the cult of personality.

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Richard Bandler's Guide to Trance-formation

Tone: Half university lecture, half ego-tastic rant.

Valuable for: 

•  Step by step therapeutic devices, e.g. "Changing Feelings by Dissociation", usually in the form of a series of visualizations. I doubt that they all work as powerfully as advertised, but they're set out in good detail so you could try for yourself.
• A nice glossary/manual of Ericksonian techniques at the back (which you can get from Hypnotic Realities, but not as organized - very much unlike Erickson, he is a systematizer)
• Lots of powerful hypnosis advice. "the truth is, you speak in a monotone if you’re going to speak incongruently. If you speak congruently and slowly and inflect your voice downward where you give commands, people will respond much more intensely."
• Bandler is the source (loudest if not the first) for a number of ideas we now teach as fact, like about the unconscious not processing negations.

Douche-o-meter (1-5): 5. I was put in mind of L. Ron Hubbard for the level of dubious self-aggrandizement: he describes himself as a mathematician and computer scientist as well as a psychologist, and he brags about curing allergies, schizophrenia, and holocaust trauma. Having tasted blood with NLP, he introduces his freshly trademarked Design Human Engineering (DHE) and Neuro-Hypnotic Repatterning (NHR). He's extraordinarily bitchy to Erickson, who Bandler asserts never did the handshake induction correctly: "Since he was paralyzed, he couldn’t have carried out the movements as smoothly and as rapidly as is required. But I do credit him with giving me the idea."

Hypnotic language example: “You’re sitting back in the chair, your feet are on the ground, your hands in your lap . . . and you can start to feel more relaxed.”

The bottom line: Something of a greatest hits collection from a master, who it seems is second only to Erickson in constructing the foundation for modern hypnosis - and yet before reviewing my notes, I mostly remembered the bad impression.

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Monsters and Magical Sticks: There is no such thing as hypnosis? - Stephen Heller and Terry Steele

Tone: Bragging and hectoring.

Valuable for:

• The message that hypnosis permeates daily life and interaction - at least by their definition of hypnosis as "any transaction and communication that causes an individual to go into their own experiences and call upon their own imagination in order to respond". They write:

 hypnosis is a form of education. Ideas, beliefs, possibilities, fantasies, and much more, may be “suggested” and, if accepted, and acted upon several times, they may become a conditioned part of your behavior.

The authors argue that we spend most of our lives reacting in an unconscious way. To be more functional we have to learn to detect these patterns, and when necessary, break them. 

• A lot of interesting material about people's different modalities (e.g. visual, auditory), and the idea that therapeutic ends can be reached by moving people between modalities. This is one of a number of specific technical procedures that are described, as in Bandler's book.

Douch-o-meter (1-5): 5. Full of hero psychiatrist stories, more dubious than the other books. There are soberly presented anecdotes about parental mistreatment causing someone to become a homosexual (when, after playing doctor with a girl, a boy is beaten, he learns "It is bad to do this with girls, but it is OK to do it with boys.") or a slut (when a girl told her mother "no", her mother said, "Don’t you ever say ‘No’!" so now she can't say no to men) And this from a book published in 1987! And these authors may be the two unfunniest people in the world: "I am now going to go out on a limb. I hope that you will refrain from sawing it off while I am perched upon it." Finally, I consider their attempts to use to use dumb NLP devices on the reader extremely tacky. ("You may wish...now...to utilize the above example..." etc)

Hypnotic language example: "Can you remember a time you took a ride by yourself and really enjoyed the scenery or a time you were working on your hobby and felt pleased. That's a nice feeling isn't it."

The bottom line: Read to me like a photocopy of a photocopy of Erickson, except nearly illiterate (a chapter title is "Reality...Really???"), but with something to say about the unconscious.

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The Complete Idiots Guide to Hypnosis - Roberta Temes

Tone: Basic, and reassuring.

Valuable for: 

• A lot of basic information that checks out with everything else I've read and experienced. It's a curious book for how it specifically tells you not to hypnotize people (not without a degree of some kind), and yet provides step-by-step instructions that would help to do it. But ostensibly the focus is on self-hypnosis, and on preparing you for a visit to a hypnotherapist (and incidentally promoting hypnotherapy). So there's much that is useful for pre-talk.
• There's a lot of nice imagery and language for guiding someone in a positive way, and more accessible Erickson than maybe can be found anywhere else. There's definitely an emphasis on writing and word choice, since her approach involves constructing a script alongside the client and then just reading it to them in trance. While I have doubts whether simply giving someone a list of suggestions like this could really change their longterm behaviour, I like how this collaboration process emphasizes trust and consent.
• I like that unlike every other hypnosis book I've read, the author mentions scientific experiments to support certain points - of course this is of limited value without citations. (in some cases she provides a name and affiliation, which would usually be enough to look up the study)
• Since the theme of the book is, "hypnosis can help with a lot of things", there's material about how to approach bad habits, work patterns, medical procedures, parenting, social anxiety, and more, that I haven't found anywhere else.

Doucho-o-meter (1-5): 2. Only a little - there's a part at the end of the book where, after scaring her readers away from amateur and stage hypnotists throughout, she gives a list of her hypnotherapist friends, including their office phone numbers. But in general it's warm and helpful. There are chapters on very questionable topics, like past life regression, but she adds an appropriate amount of disclaimers. She does tell a few "hero psychiatrist" tales - I wish one of these books would talk about problem solving with a client, where the first thing doesn't necessarily work. Even with as much hypnosis as I've done I know she's leaving out a lot.

Hypnotic language example: Have you noticed how tranquil the ocean is today?

The bottom line: Not a bad first book about hypnosis, both for hypnotists and people who want to be hypnotized. For more advanced practitioners, if you can look past the title, the dumb cartoons, and all the other busy affectations of the "Complete Idiot's" editorial style, there are some fresh perspectives.

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The Easy Way to Stop Smoking - Allen Carr

Tone: Happy fast-talking 1950s salesman, with something actually helpful to sell.

Valuable for:

• A wonderful case study in suggestive language, creating expectations, and reframing, all employed in the "shotgun" approach also described by Erickson. Carr didn't know what approach would stick with a given reader, so he fires off all of them, so many ways of hitting his core messages:  quitting is easy; you don't like cigarettes since they're gross, you're just addicted to nicotine; and you will love being a non-smoker. Personal stories, powerful sensory images, semi-scientific facts, and straight up commands.
• He uses many devices us students of hypnosis will recognize. The biggest one is his instruction to keep smoking while reading it, and not stop smoking before you reach the end. Which of course is an implicit suggestion that you will stop smoking when you finish the book.

Douche-o-meter (1-5): 2. Although this book is full of promotions for other products of his, and disses of other approaches to quitting smoking, Carr is so full of genuine joy and enthusiasm that it's infectious (which is kind of how the book works). He literally encourages you to say to yourself, "YIPPEE! I’M A NON-SMOKER!" I also enjoyed his old timey language, as in "All smokers know in their heart of hearts that they are mugs."

Hypnotic language example: "Go to a party, and rejoice in the fact that you do not have to smoke. It will quickly prove to you the beautiful truth that life is so much better without cigarettes."

The bottom line: Well worth a look - especially if you're trying to quit smoking.