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Dave Elman…… ‘All Hypnosis Is Self Hypnosis by Christopher J Harrison

Dave Elman was born in the USA in 1900 and became interested in hypnosis at a very early age due to the influence of his father who was a student of hypnosis and the consequent witnessing of demonstrations of his father’s hypnotic capabilities.

His interest in hypnosis grew into his teenage years and then took somewhat of a back seat when he found out that a girlfriend’s father forbade him from associating with his daughter for fear of any ‘seductive powers’ he may have over her.

He returned to the subject as he approached adulthood and during this period he resolved to maintain an open minded attitude to experimentation and indeed would not accept any ‘old theories’ without personal proof or evidence.

His young adult life took him into radio broadcasting where he became successful as a
writer/broadcaster/producer, and it was during this period whilst producing a programme that contained a ‘live’ hypnotist act that he realised that his knowledge on the subject was indeed greater than others and so he began to perform hypnotic demonstrations, mainly for charity.

It was during one of these very successful demonstrations that he was approached by a group of doctors who were in the audience and had been taught hypnosis, but were not having much success with it in their practices. He subsequently attended one of their lectures on the subject and whilst he did not doubt the sincerity of their teacher, he was alarmed at the amount of misinformation that was offered to these medical professionals. Elman decided at that point in his life to draw up a course on hypnosis for him to personally teach to members of the medical profession.

His style of induction was derived from that of a stage hypnotist’s in that it was a rapid style and he figured that this was necessary for doctors as they were always time constrained and he taught his students that they should be able to complete this phase in one minute.

Elman taught his students two basic beliefs which revolved around the following statements……..
Firstly, that any person can be hypnotised, provide that they are willing, and no fear is present and that there is the correct communication between the operator and the subject.
Secondly, hypnosis is a state of mind in which the critical faculty is bypassed and selective thinking is established.

In practice, his system was to get his client to simply close their eyes and to ‘pretend’ that they could not open them…and to concentrate hard on this pretence.
This suspense of judgement was the entering wedge into hypnosis and the next stage, after a few rounds of fractionation, was to get the client to start counting backwards, (out loud) from 100, with the instruction that were to let the numbers drop out of their mind and within only a few numbers they will disappear completely.

Over the course of the next 17 years, up until his death in1967, Elman taught probably thousands of medical professionals but always kept his teaching on a personal level. By that I mean that it is not apparent that he taught anyone else how to teach his methods. He only ever wrote one book that was originally titled….. ‘Findings in Hypnosis’ and later re-named ‘ Explorations in Hypnosis’ and finally re-named simply ‘Hypnosis’.
The only other memento of his teaching is a set of six original tape recordings of his work and this, like his book, is still available.

As I mentioned, throughout his life Elman would only teach medical professionals, but after writing his book he surely would have realised that it would have been read by thousands of non-medical people. It is also apparent that in the latter stages of his life he was invited to give a lecture to an audience of non-medical personnel and he surprisingly accepted this offer.
I wonder if he was latterly of the opinion that there was a new breed of non-medical hypnotherapists and they deserved to be taken seriously!

‘All hypnosis is self hypnosis’ is a basic statement that all books and teachers of hypnotherapy seem to agree on ……but not everyone knows that this statement was first attributed to the late…. Dave Elman.

 

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Author's details:

Article author, Christopher J Harrison BA (Hons).
Clinical Hypnotherapist
www.newdawnhypnotherapy.co.uk

© Copyright 2009 Christopher J Harrison, all rights reserved

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