Essentials of Hypnosis

This book is not a "how to" manual, but rather a concise overview of many different aspects of hypnosis. It indeed deals with the "essentials" that any practicing hypnotist should know. Even though these are "essentials", they are not covered in any traditional hypnosis training, so anyone attending hypnosis training may benefit from this information. The information in this book has a wide scope, but it is offered in a concise form - a like a review of essential points. Some of the areas covered are misconceptions of hypnosis, contexts of hypnosis, human suggestibility, conscious and unconscious processing, susceptibility to hypnosis, physiological and psychological characteristics of hypnotic state, physical and environmental variables for doing hypnosis, structuring suggestions, patterns of hypnotic communication, suggestibility tests, formal hypnotic inductions, naturalistic hypnotic inductions, hypnotic phenomena, self-hypnosis, therapeutic utilization of hypnosis, sample trance scripts, ethical guidelines and much more.

This book has "smatterings" of everything - the history of the field, theory, application, and so forth. One could, with this book alone, learn to induce hypnotic trance and apply basic suggestions. (There is *no* one book that will turn somebody into a hypnotherapist.) Dr. Yapko is a leading researcher in the field and his book is at the perfect level for an intelligent, fairly well-educated reader who wishes to learn about this fascinating subject - it's informative without being paternalistic or "talking down."

This was the first book I've read on hypnosis. I found it to be very informative as I had not heard of the new contemperary methods of induction. The book is written well and there are a lot of helpful references to relevent work. I liked this book as it was tied together professionally and wasn't just a collection of trance-scripts.Since I've read this book I have sucessfully hypnotized 3 of 4 attempts. The only thing missing was a pointer to a book that one could use for further self-learing about hypnosis.

A very scietific view of hypnosis, but, to me, the author didn't really want to prove that hypnosis was real. Still it was informative and entertaining.