Recommendations
Hypnosis Practice
These are the better books on how to hypnotize that puts the subject first, rather than teaching a grabbag of techniques without context.
Therapeutic Inductions
This book is a straightforward and honest discussion of hypnosis and inductions that provides a good overview of sources and different theories. The author goes into why different inductions work for different people, and even whether inductions are truly needed. The advice is good, and doesn’t get too into the weeds.
Hypnosis with the Hard to Hypnotise
Much of this guide would not exist or would have been very different without this book; it changed my thinking and prompted me to go back and revisit assumptions I had made. In particular, the point it makes that Erickson defines confusion as an "uncertainty about reality" led to more emphasis on perception in the suggestions section. This book discusses the trope of "analytical subjects" and discusses the history and background of hypnosis that led to this classification. There is an extensive discussion on the idea of resistance, the hypnotist’s desire to be seen as an expert and "in control" and the importance of co-operation and collaboration. It is also one of the few books to explicitly recognize autism and how autistic people look at the world.
Also see Vreahli’s book notes.
Handbook of Clinical Hypnosis, Second Edition
This is just a really solid and well rounded treatment of clinical hypnosis, with good contributors. You’ve got Capafons on Waking Hypnosis. You’ve got Wark on Training Issues. You’ve got Heap on Hypnosis and Memory, you’ve got Gorassini on Enhancing Hypnotizability, you’ve got Gibbons on Hypnotic Inductions. You can’t go wrong with this.
Essentials of Clinical Hypnosis
This book goes more into the treatment of various disorders with clinical hypnosis than the Handbook does. I like the academic approach, but some people prefer Cognitive Hypnotherapy over this book. Trancework is also very popular.
Hypnosis Theory
Academic books and papers that I really like.
Hypnosis and Conscious States
This book covers hypnosis from a cognitive neuroscience perspective. It is a groundbreaking book. There’s four sections: functional brain networks, dissociation, states of consciousness, and the psychobiology of trance. The section on states of consciousness effectively demolishes the concept of hypnosis as a state, and the section on psychobiology contains the cold control theory of hypnosis paper.
Also see Vreahli’s book notes.
Clinical Hypnosis and Self-Regulation
This book has a number of important papers. It has the Carleton Skills Training Program in Chapter 6, and Gorassini’s Self Deception paper in Chapter 3. It criticizes the hypnosis scales, takes apart Hilgard’s neodissociation theory, and discusses clinical hypnosis as a non-deceptive placebo.
Also see Vreahli’s book notes.
Hypnosis: Theories, Research and Applications
This book is notable for having multiple papers on alert inductions: it has "Valencia Model of Waking Hypnosis" paper with illustrations and another paper on using alert inductions in emergency situations.
Theories of Hypnosis: Current Models and Perspectives
This book came out in 1991, and while it hasn’t aged well, it’s a very important book with just about every notable figure piled in at once. The odds are that if you’ve heard of a theory, it was in this book. It has Hilgard’s neodissociation model, Edmonston’s relaxation model, Barber’s locksmith model, Spanos taking a sociocognitive view of hypnosis, Kirsch talking about social learning… all at once!
How Hypnotic Suggestions Work — A Systematic Review of Prominent Theories of Hypnosis
This paper goes over every single theory of hypnosis and how they all lack something in explaining the evidence.
In recent decades, hypnosis has increasingly moved into the mainstream of scientific inquiry and today is the subject of concerted study on an international basis. Hypnotic and posthypnotic suggestions are frequently and successfully implemented in behavioral, neurocognitive, and clinical investigations and interventions. Despite abundant reports about the effectiveness of suggestions in altering behavior, perception, cognition, and subjective sense of agency (SoA), no consensus exists regarding the mechanisms driving these changes. This article reviews competing theoretical accounts that address questions regarding the genesis of subjective, behavioral, and neurophysiological responses to hypnotic suggestions. We systematically analyze the broad landscape of influential and promising hypnosis theories that best represent our estimation of the current status and future avenues of scientific thinking about hypnosis. We start with procedural descriptions of hypnosis, suggestions, and hypnotizability, followed by a systematic analysis of selected theories of hypnosis. Considering that prominent theoretical perspectives emphasize different aspects of hypnosis, our review reveals that each perspective possesses salient strengths, limitations, and heuristic values. We highlight both the necessity of revisiting extant theories of hypnosis to refine and enhance their adequacy and fertility and the value of formulating novel evidence-based accounts of hypnosis.
Taxometric evidence for a dimensional latent structure of hypnotic suggestibility
This paper digs into how some hypnotees are good at some suggestions but bad at others, and discusses how this complicates the simple model of "highs" and "lows" used by suggestibility scales. Also see A Critical Review of Standardized Measures of Hypnotic Suggestibility.
Hypnotic suggestibility denotes a capacity to respond to direct verbal suggestions in an involuntary manner. Most research on responsiveness to hypnotic suggestions has focused on highly suggestible individuals but it remains unclear whether these individuals constitute a discrete subgroup (taxon) characterized by a distinct mode of responding from the remainder of the population or whether hypnotic suggestibility is better modelled as a dimensional ability. In this study, we applied taxometric analysis, a method for distinguishing between dimensional and categorical models of a psychological ability, to behavioural and involuntariness subscale scores of the Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale: Form A (HGSHS:A) in a non-clinical sample (N = 584). Analyses of HGSHS:A subscale scores with different a priori taxon base rates yielded consistent evidence for a dimensional structure. These results suggest that hypnotic suggestibility is dimensional and have implications for current understanding of individual differences in responsiveness to direct verbal suggestions.
Hypnosis and top-down regulation of consciousness
This paper goes into the cognitive neuroscience of hypnosis. Terhune is just a great writer.
Hypnosis is a unique form of top-down regulation in which verbal suggestions are capable of eliciting pronounced changes in a multitude of psychological phenomena. Hypnotic suggestion has been widely used both as a technique for studying basic science questions regarding human consciousness but also as a method for targeting a range of symptoms within a therapeutic context. Here we provide a synthesis of current knowledge regarding the characteristics and neurocognitive mechanisms of hypnosis. We review evidence from cognitive neuroscience, experimental psychopathology, and clinical psychology regarding the utility of hypnosis as an experimental method for modulating consciousness, as a model for studying healthy and pathological cognition, and as a therapeutic vehicle. We also highlight the relations between hypnosis and other psychological phenomena, including the broader domain of suggestion and suggestibility, and conclude by identifying the most salient challenges confronting the nascent cognitive neuroscience of hypnosis and outlining future directions for research on hypnosis and suggestion.
Conscious intelligence is overrated: The normative unconscious and hypnosis
This is more of a takedown of older hypnosis theories, but it explicitly goes after the idea of an "unconscious mind."
Hypnosis has been mysterious and controversial for hundreds of years. The legacy of this history is still with us. The philosophy of Ryle and of Dennett argue that the usual emphasis placed on states of consciousness and privileged access is misplaced. Cognitive neuroscience supports this by showing that unconscious processes explain much of our functioning and that what we call consciousness and privileged access is illusory. Attribution theory can largely account for the subjective states that have been seen as characteristic of and unique to hypnosis. Current models of hypnosis are reviewed and shown to have maintained classic and outdated views of dissociation and/or disconnected executive systems. Normative unconscious processes can account for much of hypnotic phenomena thereby showing hypnosis to be a normative phenomenon. An unconscious need to be absorbed into or become part of something beyond the self may underlie some of the individual differences in hypnotizability.
Perception Theory
These are relatively new books that focus on how the brain constructs reality through perception.
The Experience Machine
This is a popular science book on predictive processing and how it works in perception and cogition. The science is solid, and it does a good job at discussing the sensory processing pipeline. It does not go into cognitive schema and learning as much as I would like.
How Emotions Are Made
This is a popular science book on emotional processing through interoception. The science is good, but in an attempt to make it more understandable it refers to allostasis as body budgeting — more confusing than helpful.
The Psychological Construction of Emotion
This is the academic version of How Emotions are Made. It’s a collection of papers on psychological constructionism applied to emotion. Much more satisfying, also more challenging.
Active Inference
This book explains the active inference model of decision making, and walks through the free energy principle and bayesian brains. It’s dense.
The Interoceptive Mind
This book is an academic textbook that has a series of papers on interoception, allostasis, and ties it together with predictive processing and some shots at how cognition works. It made allostasis into a first class concept and how the mind can and must affect the body and how in turn internal body state affects the mind.
Rethinking Consciousness
This book describe the attention schema theory which is a compliment to body schema and interoceptive schema. It describes our perception of our own thoughts and beliefs as a simplified model, the same way we perceive the position of our bodies or our internal state as vague impressions. This is a neat definition that prefers the term "awareness" over consciousness, and also implies that our perception of our own thoughts can be modified or mistaken, which dovetails neatly into hypnosis.
Storytelling
These are books that about storytelling and performance that are important for engagement.
The Storytelling Animal
This is a popular science book that provides context and background science for why humans find storytelling so compelling. The answer is trouble: human beings are wired to pay attention to trouble and signs of trouble, and storytelling exploits that impulse. The book is a short and focused read, and there are some great tips here for engagement. One caveat: it is inconsistent about citing sources and they tend to be magazine articles and social analysis.
Impro for Storytellers
This book has good exercises for engagement. Some of the discussion on male/female interactions are a little dated.