This book seeks to dispel the myths and misunderstandings surrounding hypnosis and to present a broad overview of its applications, dangers, techniques, and theories.
The author is a professor of Psychology who has extensive experience in using hypnosis for therapy, as well as scientific research into the psychological phenomena of hypnosis. What we have in this book is a well-informed and reliable account of hypnosis that answers most questions that are likely to be asked by by someone who is interested in this topic.
The general impression that we get from reading this book is that hypnosis is a lot less mysterious than it is often portrayed as being in the media, with a lot of valid and established uses in medicine, dentistry, and psychoanalysis. However, despite its applications, uses, limitations, and dangers being fairly well-understood, there remains a lot of research to be done before it is understood on a neuro-science level. That is, we don't yet have a unified theory of hypnosis and how exactly it works in the brain in the same way that we understand the mechanisms of evolution or diabetes for example.
This book is very easy to read, concise, and comprehensive. Even if we strip away all the sensationalising that surrounds hypnosis in the public conception of it (one of the successful aims of this book), what is left behind remains a very interesting topic that has a genuine scientific basis, yet much that remains to be discovered. I would particularly recommend this to those who have an interest in psychology, the brain, and interesting scientific phenomena in general. ( )