This is a clinical text aimed at mental health practitioners, so would be of little use to anyone approaching this subject from the field of entertainment or stage hypnosis. It doesn’t show you how to induce a state of trance, applying the indirect safeguard of legitimacy that you should have already been taught that in professional study. It isn’t about a hypnotist clicking their fingers and then issuing Svengali-style commands either. Instead it concerns implanting subconscious suggestions that stay with the subject and conform to their treatment (or self-treatment) programme. However, beyond the world of clinically induced trance, the form of words you use in life can make all the difference to a conscious audience’s immersion in books, scripts, debates, courts of law or even calming people down from an argument, so this resource has wider applications.

Metaphor (a creative writing skill) is a pretty obvious tool to use in hypnosis because it’s a good way to avoid red flag words that the patient might object to or sense danger from, which could break the trance. Speaking at one remove and then connecting ideas later is so much easier for the listener to go along with. For example, tell them about a metaphor which has an obvious connection to a solution. Then, having established a pattern as true, introduce a connection to their personal issue (preferably they make the connection themselves); and that subconsciously plants the suggestion that to resolve situation A, you need to take action B. The metaphor technique isn’t just used by practitioners trying to help – you’ll see it in sales and advertising too, when they suggest subconsciously that luxury lifestyle, commitment and true happiness (B) derive from buying some overpriced, eye-watering moisturiser (A). It isn’t true but that subtle suggestion makes you part with your cash because you feel good about the product next time you see it, even if you can’t remember why. It’s like voting for happiness, or seeing cash as happiness tokens.

This book outlines the strategy that a metaphor can be accepted more readily if the hypnotist uses the yes-set method invented by Socrates. The best example of this is Humphrey Appleby’s speech in Yes Minister, where he asks his junior questions to which you can only answer yes (truisms), then elicits the answer yes to a final proposal at the end of the string of yesses. Then he asks his junior a different set of questions that you can only answer yes to, then elicits the answer yes to exactly the opposite conclusion. In other words, if you use truisms, statements which are obviously true and no one would disagree with, after a series of these people are so used to saying yes and nodding their heads, following a pattern, that they automatically agree with any conclusion you want to implant. This is a political speech writer’s trick, although it has been in use for two thousand years. Sophism was founded on it. Interestingly, this book also includes the reference to a successful lawyer who said his career had been built on developing an emotional attachment so the jury would hope the defendant would be alright, then he’d give them a technicality that they could use as an excuse to decide in the defendant’s favour.

This handbook also discusses the use of tell-tales, like lifting a finger, which show the level of trance that the patient is experiencing. The form of words is the essential aspect, so avoid asking “your hand is heavy” because they can say it isn’t. Instead ask “which hand is heavier?”, suggesting we’ve already accepted the truth that one of them is heavier, then there’s an answer left or right, after which the practitioner has established acknowledgement that the phenomena is happening and can follow up with “can you feel the heaviness as it spreads…” etc. The patient believes it is real and you’ve led them into that, avoiding any opportunities for contradiction.

This is a reference book that you are supposed to dip into, rather than reading the whole thing in linear order. Therefore, like an encyclopaedia, a search can be made for the section on anxiety, then sub section fear of flying and then you drill down to a script that helps to build the practitioner’s stockpile of metaphors to suggest links. There are also pitfalls that those new to these methods should avoid, like rushing through or giving orders. Apparently, the most revered clinical hypnotists may go twenty minutes before placing the first therapeutic suggestion. It isn’t comprehensive, for instance there’s no needle phobia (adjust the anxiety advice), nothing to address disassociation after sexual assault (adjust the historic child molestation script) and I think there should be multiple metaphor suggestions for each issue in case the first idea doesn’t embed and the client comes back to try again.

I used to be quite inquisitive about past life regression, i.e. what might explain it, but this book dismisses it authoritatively, nailing it as a fantasy constructed from current life experiences, adding that the claims that subjects have spoken a different language under trance have all been debunked by language specialists.

This book is a good resource for any practitioner but it would have been better to offer multiple metaphors and scripts for precise disorders (all of them, not some of the main ones). As the author says, mass-produced commercial self-hypnosis recordings are not very effective because they do not use a script tailored to one person’s individual needs. He then does much the same thing himself by not supplying specific scripts for more than just the main individual types of phobia or trauma. Many of the headline ones are covered well, but I see gaps in areas that interest me. In tailoring treatment, I also see no discussion of the differentiation between verbal thinkers and picture thinkers, as metaphors will be accepted much more efficiently if you suggest memorable words or memorable images, designed to serve best according to the client’s existing dominant side. ( )