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Dr. Roy Udolf, the author of the Handbook of Hypnosis for Professionals, gives, in his preface, “as a major goal of this book, the bringing together in one source a variety of material and ideas that the professional needs to be familiar with prior to gaining professional experience in hypnosis.” Thus, the book is a good basic work on hypnosis and hypnotic phenomena; it is not a book on hypnotherapy.
You may wonder why you find a book review on hypnosis in a psychoanalytic journal. I had three reasons for reviewing this book. First, hypnosis is one of the roots of psychoanalysis. Second, there are not only many interesting aspects of the phenomenon of hypnosis that lend thesmelves to analytic interpretations, but there are also applications of hypnosis that still share a common goal with our analytic work. Third, by describing, in an uncommonly clear way, different aspects of hypnosis, such as applications, misuses, and legal and philosophical questions, Dr. Udolf has succeeded in giving the professional a basic education in a field with which he or she needs to be at least somewhat familiar. At the same time, the book makes interesting reading.
Among the many different aspects in which hypnosis and psychoanalytic theory touch each other, I would like to mention only one question: Could it be that an easily hypnotizable patient would also be a prognostically more successful psychoanalytic patient? What type of patient, as described in Horney's terms, would be likely to be a “good” subject for hypnotherapy and vice versa? The evidence suggests better hypnotizability of Horney's dependent, self-effacing, and narcissistic personality types. However, experience has taught us that the prognosis for these personality types is no better, as a group, than any of the other types described by Horney.
An interesting parallel to psychoanalytic work is a statement about the subject-hypnotist relationship by Barber : “It is a well-documented phenomenon that some people are good subj