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An up-to-date (and regularly updated) account of what laboratory research tells us about the nature of hypnosis.
Mainly about what happens when hypnosis enters the legal arena and thereby provides us with a convincing case that there are no limits to human absurdity. (A lot of people who have read the article don’t seem to have realised that this is what it is about.)
Dr H.B. Gibson (‘Tony’) was a psychologist who specialised in and wrote about a range of subjects, hypnosis being one of them. He was also a sceptic and notoriously outspoken: he never suffered fools gladly and had a keen sense of the absurd. His article describes his unlikely encounter with a man who (famously as it happens) believed he had once been taken onto an alien spaceship and whom he was asked to hypnotise, with hilarious consequences. Preceding his paper is an obituary I wrote when Tony died in 2001. His face was once one of the most famous in Britain. But why?
Yet more on human absurdity
There is no such thing as the unconscious mind; there is brain activity that is not represented in consciousness or only partially so. This account is based on lectures I have given on this theme and includes directions on the accompanying choreography.
Can we repress memories of quite extensive traumatic experiences and later have them ‘recovered’ during psychotherapy? In this article I ruminate on my own professional experiences
Despite all the glossy books on the symbolic content of dreams they are usually pretty meaningless. I describe a technique that in some cases will allow you to understand the significance of your dream.
This article presents my musings on the differences and similarities between the beliefs of people with mental health problems and beliefs in unusual phenomena held by people generally.
Human absurdity is one bridge that links scepticism and humour.
Scientists our powerful but they are ultimately accountable. Many people who are opposed by sceptics crave power without accountability
This article provides a template for devising your own system of complementary medicine, setting up as a practitioner, and earning a lot of money.
The purpose of any therapy is to authenticate the therapist. Much else follows from this, including reasons for the prevalence and persistence of treatments that have no value beyond placebo including, but not exclusively, alternative or complementary medicine.
This article follows on from the above and concerns the relentless trend to 'pathologise' or 'medicalise' everyday difficulties and misfortunes and the 'colonising' of these areas of life by presumed experts from the healing industries. I suggest that this is inevitable, given the greater expectations that people have for a long and carefree life that comes with increasing affluence.
This brief commentary is linked to the above two papers. In it I suggest that the two phenomena in the title are an inevitable consequences of increasing affluence and greater expectations about the quality of our lives.
How professionals (in this case those in the mental health services) use language to protect their perceived authenticity when it is under threat.
A sceptical take on a newspaper article reporting Dr Rupert Sheldrake’s study of a supposedly psychic dog.
This is based on my professional experience of over 400 people pursuing claims for compensation after being involved as a driver or passenger in a road traffic accident. Incidentally I am looking for a good statistician to help me analyse my data and co-author a paper on this topic.