Mastering Erotic Hypnosis by James Gordon and Rebecca Doll (2019)
Tone: Opinionated clinical handbook
Valuable for:
- A framework for approaching hypnotizing first time subjects. They explicitly set out to let the reader "design your own inductions, tools, and presentation, tailored to your situation and needs", in fact to "make your own recipes". Along the way, they throw interesting shade on hypnotists in the community, "Often they work with only partners who are already highly suggestible and do not understand themselves what they are doing." One big component is dividing people up into "direct suggestibles" and "inferential suggestibles", who need different techniques for getting into trance and receiving suggestions. They also talk a lot about creating a "hypnotic modality", meaning something like a readiness to accept suggestions due to strong rapport and expectation. Whether you agree with individual bits of theory, it could be a useful starting point, and rather than scripts the book is packed with building blocks like signs of trance, lists of vocabulary, etc.
- Grounding in history and scientific research of hypnosis. There is a large amount of useful history - often in the form of side bars on different figures, but also integrated into discussions of consent and technique. And scientific studies are discussed at appropriate moments. This is the only erotic hypnosis book that's remotely scholarly - the only one with end notes.
- A lot of content on hypnotic orgasms (26 pages!) and edgy topics such as ageplay, death play, and drug play that I either can't find in any other books, or at much less depth. If you're on the fence about committing to the book, I would at least recommend paging through these juicy sections in the last third.
- Nuanced and thoughtful discussion on consent in hypnosis. The book begins with 30 pages of discussion of this, including some forceful statements I agree with such as "if you feel like you have to invoke the 'you must have really wanted to,' card, you're definitely violating consent, and depending on what things happened, you may be, both ethically and legally, a rapist." There's a long chapter about the difference between doing therapy and doing BDSM that ends up with therapeutic benefits. There is more than one negotiation checklist, with blank spaces.
They often wear a rhetorical cloak of authority, very much borrowed from the doorstop tomes of clinical psychology. The authors have as much of a claim to knowledge as anyone, having many hours of clinical training and practice, and convincing exposure to the history and science of hypnosis. Or as they put it, "These techniques are not ours. They come from more than two hundred years of scientific study, and include techniques and principles ranging from those developed by James Braid, Jean-Martin Charcot, Gilles de la Tourette, Pierre Janet, Milton Erickson, Virginia Satir, and John Kappas." The latter is a hypnotherapist known for, among other things, treating and then marrying Florence Henderson from the Brady Bunch, and the founder of the Hypnosis Motivational Institute, now run by his son. It's an actual office on the outskirts of Los Angeles, offering $3000 online courses in hypnotherapy as well as in-person classes and treatment. That is Gordon's training, which explains why Kappas is lavishly referenced in the book.
So there is a halo of authority, but I found many strong assertions that were not strongly backed up: "We feel talk inductions are weak." "We very seriously doubt that hypnosis can cause car crashes" "Based on observation we strongly suspect that orgasm induced by hypnosis may involve greater prolactin release than masturbation, but far less than intercourse." "The typical physical component is a light touch to the forehead" "The typical deepening technique at this point is a slow countdown." There's a type of rhetoric here that tries to dress up "I tried this and it worked!" or "This is how we usually do it" as something more. @khatsha wrote about "competence posing" in hypnosis and how it has the potential to stifle innovation and participation by traditionally underrepresented groups. The book is pompously subtitled "A Comprehensive Manual for Erotic Play, Fetish, and Kink" (vol 1 of the "Comprehensive Mastery" series!), and this also strikes me as wildly premature - I think it's like writing a "Comprehensive History of Digital Computers" in 1960. They have advice about "establishing authority" with your partner: "[you should say] you have had training in that art because you have read a book which explained hypnosis in a scientific way. Eventually, you may wish to add other classes and certifications to increase both your authority and your perceived understanding of the paradigm." Later they say, "You won't succeed at hypnosis without carrying an attitude of infallibility into each session." I feel like they took this advice too often in writing this book itself.
That said, sometimes a human, playful voice pokes through that made me feel that they really do this and enjoy it ("Eventually Hot Pockets, too, are eroticized"). And in many places they express appropriate uncertainty or skepticism.
The musty mid-century psychiatrist tone comes out in some troubling sections about problem subjects, including one literally called "Working with hysterical subjects", advising tops to ask themselves is this person "prone to creating drama and disaster?" with an "attitude of martyrdom", warning they may find "an element of opposition and defiance towards the hypnotist". They also speculate intrusively on why people are the way they are: inferentials "were often raised in an inconsistent environment", intellectual suggestibles have "extremely robust ego-defenses", maybe masochists like pain because the first time they had sex it hurt. To their credit, though, they avoid "hero psychiatrist" stories.
The biggest obstacle for the average hypnokinkster reader would be the pages of cautions, side notes and nuances that become exhausting - maybe it's appropriate to touch on the unlikelihood of dying from hypnosis, but does it need 11 paragraphs? But a persistent annoyance for people in the community will be the clashing specialized jargon. They use "in state" to mean "in trance", "conversion" to mean falling into trance (and then later define "conversion" in a distinct technical sense), "challenge" for "convincer" and "reaction" for "fractionation". Who knows why we've settled on the words we actually use in hypnokink, and one set of pseudoscientific jargon is no better than the other, but I found it tiring.
Hypnotic language example: "I want you to think about the weight of your head on your shoulders."
The bottom line: Absolutely a sufficient introduction to erotic hypnosis from a kinky perspective, with unique coverage of hard core play, and it should be on every erotic hypnotist's shelf, if not with all its 400 pages read.
If you found that useful, here are five more hypnosis book reviews.
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