The Dave Elman Shorties

Title: The Dave Elman Shorties

Author: Dave Elman Hypnosis Institute

Format: Two CD Set (plus bonus CD)

Source: http://www.daveelmanhypnosisinstitute.com/

Price: $40

Rating: Mixed

Have you ever wished you could go back in time and take a lesson from Dave Elman?

In an earlier post, I commented that watching an interview with Colonel Larry Elman was the closest we could get to going back in time and actually attending one of Dave Elman's classes.

I was wrong. There's an even better way.

Even better than a lecture, have you ever wished you could go back in time and have Dave Elman hypnotize you?

Now you can—with The Dave Elman Shorties from the Dave Elman Hypnosis Institute.

The DEHI represents the work of H. Larry Elman to preserve, honor, and continue his father's legacy as a hypnosis innovator and teacher. According to a pamphlet from the DEHI, it's now been 100 years since Dave Elman first devised his famous induction, which many vocational hypnotists still consider the gold standard for getting clients into somnambulism quickly.

This two-CD set presents rare excerpts of Dave Elman's studio recordings made between 1956 and 1959—originally 33 and 78 rpm records that Elman would sell only to doctors or those with prescriptions—along with commentary from the famous hypnotist's son, H. Larry Elman.

The vintage recordings are delightful—very clear, from both an auditory and a content perspective. Dave Elman and his wife, Pauline, roleplay interactions between doctors and patients, perfectly teaching by modeling; they both sound like 1940s radio stars, which in fact Dave Elman was.

The teaching in the old records is also golden: instructions and advice to doctor hypnotists, variants of well-known inductions, advice on working with children, and lessons in "medical relaxation"—Elman's own attempt to get around the H-word. It's all very engaging, particularly Elman's method for dealing with a "brat" in the doctor's office.

One particularly intriguing short is "The Magic Fairy," an example of Dave Elman combining his hypnotic knowledge and performance background to tell a fairy tale written to teach hypno-anesthesia to children. It's brilliant—and a curious artifact in that it employs a number of methods many hypnotists would label "Ericksonian" today, such as the My Friend John technique.

Indeed, I think that even my readers who aren't crazy about the Elman Induction and despise regression-to-cause—you know who you are—will find a lot of appealing material in Dave Elman's recordings, information that goes beyond Elman's two most famous hallmarks.

Dave Elman was a great performer and engaging speaker, having forged a career as a stage hypnotist, vaudeville trouper, and radio show host. Unfortunately, that flaire for entertainment either didn't get passed down to his son Larry, or years of serving our country in the United States Air Force drained it out of the younger Elman.

It pains me to say this, because I deeply admire the colonel for his knowledge, wisdom, dedication, kindness, integrity, and generosity—but the commentary on the Shorties is dry and dully academic, lacking the production values we've grown to expect from other products the DEHI sells (such as Sean Michael Andrews' videos). At times it drones past the point of being interesting even to a history geek like me. The recording quality of the 2011 commentary—I'm guessing produced at home using Audacity, based on some of the poorly executed noise reduction artifacts—sadly fails to hold up next to 1950s studio recordings. (That is one irony of modern life—anyone can make a recording now, but really doing it well is still something limited to the few who have access to professional studios.)

It is perhaps unfortunate that the younger Elman's dryest delivery comes in the first words of each disc, which contain a stern and forbidding warning about copyright. While I sympathize with his concerns over piracy, a hypnotist of any Elman's stature should know the value of first building rapport before making a suggestion.

Still, from a historical and academic viewpoint, Larry Elman's comments hold a number of brilliant insights. Unlike many hypnotists today who parrot Dave Elman's words as though they were magic spells, Larry Elman engages his critical mind, analyzing every detail of his father's work. This is necessary, as times have changed. What was appropriate and useful for a doctor in the 1950s is often inappropriate and detrimental to a vocational hypnosis practitioner in the twenty-first century. The commentary even discusses innovations and changes in hypnotic practice between the 1950s and now.

I particularly enjoyed Larry Elman's loving discussion of his mother's contributions to Elman hypnosis. He recounts that in addition to playing the role of the patient on all the recordings, Pauline R. Elman attended all of Dave Elman's classes, serving as a teaching assistant, coaching doctors on their form. Indeed, one of the doctors claimed that Pauline was a better teacher than Dave! Her son heartwarmingly recognizes her as a brilliant hypnotist and gives her credit for inventing the "Dave Elman" method of getting clients into the Esdaile state.

Listening to Dave Elman role-play a physician fills me with wistfulness for a simpler time, when general practitioners had enough time to teach self-hypnosis to their patients, the AMA was recommending that doctors learn hypnosis, and prescriptions for "medical relaxation" recordings kept young Larry Elman busy putting records in the mail.

At the beginning of this review, I asked if you'd ever wished you could experience what it would be like for Dave Elman to hypnotize you. Well, I found myself listening to the master's voice, drifting into a nice relaxed state, and then locking my eyelids shut. I had for a moment stepped out of time, and a famous hypnotist's voice had gone with me.

If for nothing else, that's worth the $40 ticket to ride.

Full Disclosure: H. Larry Elman provided a copy of the Shorties and his centennial of the DEI pamplet to me for review. He also generously sent me an inscribed copy of his father's famous book Hypnotherapy to help me rebuild after my office burned down.