– Customer review on 10/09/2011

Allen collates both his previous volumes of collected Scripts and Strategies in Hypnotherapy together in this work. Many inductions are included and a few deepeners. Rightly, most of the work is concerned with the business of therapy itself. Many situation-specific ego-strengtheners are included, as well as sections on common issues such as pain management and anxiety. The ever-popular smoking-cessation, fear-management and weight-control receive large chapters of their own which I have found invaluable in my Central-Manchester, Wilmslow and Romiley clinics.

Previous reviews of the two separate volumes have always touted the scripts as off-the-peg verbatim scripts and frameworks around which to base a bespoke item for the client. However some of the scripts come over as a little too specific for undiluted use, causing me to go through with a pencil making notes.

Part eleven is entitled Therapy Strategies and includes tips for dealing with abreaction, age progression, re-framing, anchors etc. and each of these tactics is dealt with very well. However that is what they are; tactics (or gambits), not strategies. Therapeutic strategy involves various decisions such as "when is it useful to switch from a behaviouristic approach to a classic-dynamic one?" or "should I address the symptom or the cause (or both) in this particular case?" or "how can I most usefully model the direction(s) of causation between the different aspects of this complaint? " etc.

The majority of the scripts, allude to and reflect various strategies as, necessarily so, each script must be based on some paradigm or another. The only exception being the smoking cessation pages where the strategy and paradigm are discussed specifically, (e.g. Aversion vs. Coercion?)

Due to the name of the book, I expected to see some alternative potential conceptions of the nature of each presentation along with their respective interventions, but that's not what the book is all about. The formatting decisions of choosing a large font, and starting each new script on a new page, strongly hint at the book's ultimate purpose. It looks clean and is easily read allowing easy, quick access in the consulting room. After a short introduction to hypnosis it's just cover to cover useful scripts. An index would be welcome, as would be a more complete synopsis of each script, but ultimately the complete re-formatting of the two volumes of `Scripts and Tactics in Hypnotherapy' has made it much more convenient and better value. Now offering twice as many scripts per pound (or Dollar)!