Kay Thompson has been called one of the great hypnotherapists of the 20th century and one of Milton H. Erickson's most gifted proteges. She was a trainer of international renown and a brilliant hypnotherapist whose artistry with language patterns amazed her pupils and colleagues. The Art of Therapeutic Communication chronicles the professional life of Kay Thompson through her papers and presentations, transcripts of her seminars, commentary on her life and work, and tributes paid to her by contemporaries. The CD that accompanies the book records ten of Thompson's "live" presentations.

Thompson's collected works cover a wide breadth of topics, including Erickson's approach to hypnosis, hypnotic language patterns, the nature of trance, pain management, hypnosis in dentistry, metaphor, utilization, and ethics. This book preserves her legacy to hypnotherapists everywhere, so that her work continues to enrich and touch the lives of many.

Who Was Kay F. Thompson?
Kay Thompson began her career as a dentist, following in her father's footsteps. In fact, she was the first female dentist to practice in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. She wanted to study hypnotherapy to help her patients manage pain and anxiety. She met Dr. Milton H. Erickson in 1953 and became one of his most adept pupils and one of his closest friends. She went on to become an internationally recognized trainer, speaker, and practitioner in the field of medical hypnotherapy. She was widely regarded as a master teacher and clinician.

She served on the Board of Trustees of the American Dental Association and the American Board of Hypnosis in Dentistry. In 1972, she was the first female president of the American Society for Clinical Hypnosis. She participated in meetings of the Erickson Foundation as a lecturer, workshop leader, and panel member. Colleagues admired her linguistic skills, integrity, ethics, and spirituality. She spoke and taught on the power of imagination, motivation, and belief as essential elements in the practice of psychotherapy.

Thompson's Life and Work
Hypnotherapy was Thompson's lifelong passion. She developed an unusual style of delivering suggestions that became her trademark. Her "word play" was engaging, trance-inducing, and confusing all at the same time, yet somehow always to the point, speaking to the mind via several levels of meaning. She employed puns, double-entendres, rhyme, and alliteration in spell-binding ways. Here is an example of how she addressed "knowing and not knowing."

You really don't know everything that you know that you know, but it's all right if you don't know everything that you know that you know, as long as your know that you don't know everything that you know that your know, and if you know that you don't know everything that you know, but you know that if you need to know it, you'll be able to use it, then you can go right ahead knowing that you don't know everything that you know that you need to know. (p. 109)

If your head isn't spinning yet, here is another example on "accessing trance."

So many natural everyday kinds of things are really very trance-enhancing. Trances start a trend of transferring the tendency to trance out temporarily by tempering the tenor and the tempo of the time, tempting us to theoretically take this trip together. And you seem to be seen to transcend the mundane into the magic of a mosaic of many memories. When you store that mosaic of memories in your mind you discover that it's there to pulled out, whenever it's appropriate for you and whenever it's something that you believe is going to help your client. (p. 113)

Thompson was a big believer in Erickson's concept of "utilization." She advised her students to use the client's own metaphors as the starting point for creative, yet therapeutic communication. Her demonstrations show how she wove "teaching tales" around a volunteer's hobby or occupation. She saw common, every-day occurrences as backdrops for suggestions about problem-solving and personal growth. She also recommended that hypnotherapists maintain a collection of general-purpose metaphors on subjects such as curiosity, learning, remembering, and reframing.

Her take on relaxation was that it is not always appropriate or necessary for inducing trance. She debunked the common expectation that hypnosis requires relaxation, suggesting instead that hypnotherapists give clients the latitude to experience trance idiosyncratically. Her premise was that the client reaches the level of trance appropriate to satisfy his or her needs and motivations. Thompson reminded her audiences to see the client's point of view and guide the client to tap into his or her own potential to solve a problem.

Pain management was one of Thompson's specialties. The text features many of her methods and demonstrations for minimizing and alleviating pain and facilitating healing. Her transcripts describe how she helped clients prepare for surgery by teaching them to control anxiety, pain, and even bleeding. Thompson spoke on how hypnotic pain management can help cancer patients and the terminally ill. More dramatically, Thompson described her own experiences in controlling pain during and after rhinoplasty, dermabrasion, twelve root canals, and an auto accident in which she had broken bones.

The book presents her demonstrations of self-hypnosis methods and the dual induction. You can read her discussions on amnesia, time distortion and post-hypnotic suggestion. There are several papers on hypnosis in dentistry, in which Thompson explains the relationships among psychology, hypnotherapy and dentistry. She was an expert in approaches to bulimia, tongue thrust, gagging reflex, bruxism, hemophilia, root canals, dry sockets, and temporal mandibular jaw dysfunction.

Conclusion
Saralee Kane and Karen Olness poured devotion and painstaking effort into The Art of Therapeutic Communication. They located and examined numerous articles and papers, and transcribed hours of tape-recorded interviews, panel discussions, and seminars. They assembled an array of prestigious hypnotherapists to provide commentary and memoirs. The list includes Betty Alice Erickson, Roxanne Erickson Klein, Sidney Rosen, and Ron Havens, to name a few.

The profession of hypnotherapy owes a debt of gratitude to Kane and Olness and to Crown House Publishing for bringing Kay Thompson's work to a larger audience. I am delighted with the opportunity to become acquainted with Kay Thompson's teaching and philosophy.

I enjoyed this book, consuming it like a smorgasbord of ideas. I imagined myself a student, sitting in on Thompson's seminars"as though she were giving me advice about my own skills in hypnotherapy. Questions came to my mind that found answers in the pages. With a notebook at my side, I madly scribbled notes to myself about how I could adapt some of Thompson's methods in my own work. I transcribed bits of her language patterns so I could practice them.

In my home library, I have a special shelf reserved for my favorite books about hypnotherapy and NLP. This book will go on that shelf. I know I will turn to it again and again, seeking Thompson's advice when I encounter difficult cases, or when my own skills as a hypnotherapist seem inadequate to the task. Through The Art of Therapeutic Communication, Kay Thompson continues to teach, to heal, to motivate, and to inspire.

This volume of the collected works of Kay F. Thompson is a treasure chest of superbly crafted combinations of words by a master of language. As I read through it, and studied Thompson's statements, inductions, suggestions, and words of encouragement, I was overwhelmed by her artistry. I had heard her say at one of her workshops that she goes into an altered state of time when she lectures, so that she consciously considers what she is going to say next, and has sufficient time to pick the most appropriate words. The audience never notices this, and the words come out like a completed symphony, with all of the parts connected and harmonized. Reading this volume is the closest thing I know to a private session with Thompson, her warmth and passion and sincerity bubble through. She states congruently, "I firmly feel that motivation is the most critical factor in the utilization of hypnosis." and "I have an obligation to go in believing that everyone can go into trance.

She loved to play with words and the potential variations of their meanings. In a workshop she would ask the audience to suggest some words, and then build an induction or a metaphor with just playing with that one word. Certainly, her variations on the word "know" with knew and new and known and no, and her mesmerizing variations on "forgetting to remember" and "remembering to forget" are masterpieces that can be studied endlessly. This book is chock full of such examples, and an inspiration for the reader.

Perhaps Thompson's work with pain control is her major contribution to the field. She writes that two sentences describe her philosophy, and they reverberate throughout the sections on working with patients in pain: "Pain is a danger or warning signal, period. When everything that can be done and should be done, has been done, there is no longer any reason to have that pain." Thompson not only helped others with pain control, but was an exemplar in using it for herself.

The personal vignettes and stories incorporated at the end of the book add many dimensions to what I knew about Thompson. They are a tribute to her.

HYPNOTHERAPIST and dentist Kay Thompson, one of the renowned Milton Erickson's foremost students, clearly inspired much admiration, affection and awe from the many she mentored in her turn, as is shown in the fulsome tributes interlaced in this first print version of the teachings she delivered at lectures and workshops.

Thompson, who became the first female president of the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis in 1972, first met Erickson when, as a dentist, she wanted to find better ways to help anxious patients. She went on to use her considerable therapeutic skills in many settings, always working to extend the boundaries of possibility (which she did in her personal life too, as an enthusiastic mountain climber and canoeist). Although she was always pleased when some of her clinical experiences became verified by scientific research, lack of verifiable evidence never held her back in what she believed was possible. A story of Thompson's that one of the editors, Saralee Kane, recalls elegantly makes that point. Thompson told how a young female dental student who had been acting as patient during student practice of a dental procedure suffered an unintended mechanical exposure of the nerve with the drill. While the girl was in trance, Thompson told her to deposit secondary dentin around the opening into the nerve, to keep it from becoming infected, telling the girl she knew she could do it. "Six weeks later we took an X-ray of that particular tooth and the calcification had taken place over that exposed nerve. You can't do that, but you see she didn't know you couldn't do that, and she did it, and they didn't need to do a root canal in that tooth." However out of reach such an intervention might seem to most of us, what Thompson teaches is in fact highly attainable - with practice and commitment. The 500-plus pages of this book, distilled from her life's work, are filled with case stories, examples of practical techniques, demonstrations, explanations and teaching metaphors that show how to make the best therapeutic use of hypnosis.

All hypnosis is autohypnosis, she believes: "In my opinion, when the patient is learning to induce hypnosis, the doctor should explain to him that hypnosis is a normal, natural human capacity, that learning it is a process that is curious and interesting, and can even be fun, so that while an individual is in trance, he can do all the things he normally does, but that he gains certain controls over himself. The patient's active participation must be acknowledged."

This is, in effect, a practitioner's handbook but one that also conveys power and passion. There are discussions and examples of the use of word play, of which Thompson was an acknowledged master ("Pay attention to the tension", "That private time in that secret place ... will suffice to let you get the rest the rest of the time that you have arrested yourself from getting"), language to effect change, conversational and other kinds of hypnotic induction, clinical post-hypnotic suggestion, strategies of hypnotic utilisation, pain control and healing enhancement, and lots more. Also included at the back of the book is a CD containing recordings of some of her most memorable teaching sessions.)

Thompson acknowledges her huge debt to Milton Erickson but also demythologises him: he did not come up with a new story for every patient and what seemed effortless was often the result of painstaking prior preparation. Slavishly trying to follow his techniques is not the way to emulate him: "We can only do what Erickson did if we do it in our own way".

She certainly does it in her own way. What particularly interested her was the power of motivation and the therapeutic use - and delivery - of language: "When I put on my wide-eyed sincere look, it says that what I am saying is eminently reasonable. As the authority figure, I expect that my patient is going to do it. When I do that, it usually involves telling my patient to stop bleeding or to turn off pain. For me, that is eminently reasonable. My expression says that they will do it."

Those who want to know more about the craft and potential of hypnosis as a therapeutic tool, and enjoy the process of learning it, should definitely buy this book.

Occasionally, I receive books to review on ISOC. I received the above book recently and was intrigued by its title. I had not heard of Kay Thompson. The person sending me the book wrote that Kay Thompson was a dentist in the Pittsburgh area. She said Kay Thompson was a student of Milton Erickson, a psychologist who was a pioneer in the field of hypnosis. Kay Thompson applied his work in hypnosis in her practice of dentistry. She was also one of the first women dentists in the Pittsburgh area.

If you are interested in hypnosis in your dental practice, this is a must read for you. If you are not interested in hypnosis, several chapters are still worth reading.

They are:

• Part V: Therapy with Pain,
• Part VI; A holistic approach to Dentistry,
• And Part IX; The Personal Impact of Hypnosis

I give the book *** out of *****. You have to dig through a lot of information on hypnosis to find the pearls of Thompson's work on the dentist/patient relationship and pain. It is enlightening to read the language and metaphors of a skilled dentist/therapist as she works with patients. There is much to be learned from her commentary.

Kay Thompson's book is stunning!

She clearly explains and defines the basic tenets of hypnotherapy and, in particular, Ericksonian therapy with its premise of respect for what the client brings to the therapeutic relationship.

Her wisdom and experience shines strongly throughout this entire book. Even if you are an experienced therapist of many years, there is something new to be learned by reading this book. And if you don't read it, you will be missing out on a very rewarding experience.

I particularly liked the sections on language " how conversation is an artform that can be learned and used to effect change. How powerful metaphors, puns and plays-on-words can be. And how artful and creative words really are. Language is an area of therapy that needs to be rediscovered, it is an important aspect of all therapies and this book highlights this fact.

Kay has given us a wonderful gift in this book " she was truly a giant in the therapeutic communication area and it is sad that she is no longer with us to continue teaching and imparting her wisdom and energy to the rest of us.

Kay Thompson was a dentist, who trained with Milton Erickson from his very early days and who knew him and his methodologies better than most of the therapists who came to study with him in later years. In this book, which is taken from transcripts of the many talks and seminars she conducted during her career as a therapist and trainer, you will learn more about Erickson's techniques and the hypnotic language for which he became renowned. Indeed, you will find it difficult to avoid going into trance during the course of reading this book, as Kay had the enviable knack of dropping into hypnotic language without any warning during her talks and very adept at it she was too! The techniques and methods Kay used were many and varied and there are some excellent examples of her using some of them in the transcripts in this book. There are also many question and answer sessions, when she gave her students very full and detailed answers to their queries, about therapeutic language, about pain control and there is a very interesting section on the oral cavity and its importance as the emotional learning centre of the body, which may come as quite a surprise to some.

Included with the book is a CD containing recordings of some of her talks, which will give you a flavour of the wonderful way she had with words and will also allow you to learn of the wholehearted belief she had in mindbody healing, which she used for her dental patients and for herself throughout her career.

This is a thoroughly enjoyable, easy to read book which will prove invaluable to those wishing to learn more about Erickson's way of working and, at the very least, will be interesting to those of you who are already using Ericksonian techniques.

This is a love story. It is a story of a love of words and a love of communicating them in a positive and healthy way. More than that it is a love of people and the story of a woman's dedication to helping all those around her for whom she felt compassion and love - her fellow men. No monument could provide a more fitting or lasting tribute to Kay Thompson than this skilfully executed and beautifully presented book
I felt sorry for the girl who delivers my post when she came down my front path bearing the parcel which contained this book. To say that it is a hefty and weighty tome is an understatement, almost 600 pages long and with an accompanying CD.

I too groaned under the weight of it and just wondered whether the reading would be as heavy as the book.

I was very pleasantly surprised.

It proved to be not only a joy but also a privilege to be allowed to explore the pages of this book. It was fascinating to have insight into the thought and work of Kay Thompson who was arguably one of the world's greatest hypnotherapists of the twentieth century. She was an intellectual, a lively brain, but also had the linguistic capability to be able to share her thoughts and ideas with a wide audience. Indeed, if she hadn't made the grade as a therapist I am sure she would have made a great novelist or communicator in other ways..

Regular readers of my reviews will know that I am an ardent fan of the work of Milton Erickson. You can imagine the delight I felt when I read of Kay that she was one of his most gifted students. They shared a joy of communication, a gift for language. Their work is professionally intoxicating and compulsive reading.

Much of our thinking and methodology has been built upon foundations laid originally by Kay Thompson. She has done much to develop and expand the whole subject of contemporary hypnosis.

The book, a testament to her life and work, deals with the subject of therapeutic communication from a variety of angles - direct teaching, comment, explanation, example and is at all times fascinating as well as informative.

On the one level we get excellent instruction and advice on how to approach and conduct our own therapy sessions to achieve the greatest benefit. On the other hand, and in a very subtle way, we are also taught much about ourselves and the way we think and live. It is a book of intense humanity not a scientific tome alone.

Throughout all of the book we are being taught sensitively yet firmly, how to conduct our own personal lives ! It is a book of inspiration and interpretation. It is a book with both breadth and depth which covers the complexity of the subject in an immensely readable way. It is a book written with care, concern , understanding, respect and total integrity, and not a little love.

Speaking of love, I just have to quote a poem by Roy croft included in the book. It is sensational !

It sets out to describe the teaching of Erickson and the shared values and thoughts of his followers.

I love you, not only for what you are,
But for what I am when I am with you.

I love you, not only for what you have made of yourself,
But for what you are making of me.
I love you for the part of me you bring out.
I love you for putting your hand into my heaped up heart,
And passing over all the foolish, weak things you can't help dimly seeing there,

And for bringing out into the light all the beautiful belongings
That no one else had ever looked quite far enough to find.

I love you because you are helping me to make,
Of the lumber of my life, not a tavern but a temple,

And of the words of my everyday,
Not a reproach but a song.
I love you because you have done more than any creed could
Have done to make me good,
And more than any fate could have done to make me happy.

You have done it,
Without a word,
Without a touch,
Without a sign

You have done it by being yourself

Perhaps that is what being a friend means, after all.

I wish that I could have been one of the pupils that Kay guided through in their early years. I feel that I would have been uplifted by her excitement and commitment, captivated by her strength of personality and personal warmth and dazzled by the depth of her knowledge and the brilliant way in which she could share this with others.

It is a great book about a great woman written by two great authors who, through their careful editing and selection of material and contributors etc, have almost allowed us to travel within our minds so that we can experience the power that was, that still is Kay Thompson.
I finished the book feeling that I had met her, spoken with her and most certainly been affected by her in a very positive sense.

I will make a sweeping statement but it is one that will be true, I know, and that is I will never be the same therapist, maybe even person, again. I will have been strengthened, guided and enlightened by this experience and feel most if not all readers will feel the same. As Akira Otani says within the book, " and her words will go on".

Practically the book covers all aspects of a therapist's work. There are fascinating and very valuable sections on Therapy with Pain and an excellent section on Hypnosis in Dentistry which I found most helpful.

Inductions and the nature of trance are dealt with at length, including commentary on clinical work and demonstration.

As I said earlier, this book is about humanity, and I was delighted to see included a section on Ethics in caring, so often omitted from such texts. You will enjoy, too, "Why do we learn about hypnosis?"

"Well, if you can do something good for them, Do it!" Was her catch phrase and could well be the catchphrase of each and every one of us who endeavour to tread in her footsteps.

I have no doubt that if there was an Oscar for Hypnotherapy books of 2004 this one would come storming home as an undisputed winner, but it wouldn't be Kay standing up there making tearful thanks to her family, friends, patients, baby goldfishes. This would be drowned by OUR acclaim of a woman who has been and will continue to be a beacon for us to follow, an example to emulate. Sincerity breeds sincerity. Love breeds love.

As you read this book sense the sincerity, bathe in the love and bring part of her professionalism and expertise into your lives and practice.

Do I recommend this book ??

I most certainly do!!!!!! Oh yes, by the way, the experience in being in the company of this wonderful lady and teacher was made possible by the inclusion of a CD, secreted right at the back of the book. Crown House - I salute you. Another astonishing achievement I feel.

This collection captivates! It integrates the personal with the professional, the scientific with the poetic, the pragmatic with the inspired, and provides a dimension of beauty rare in a practical teaching guide.

In this text, you will encounter Dr. Kay Thompson as the first woman to be a member of the American Board of Dentistry, a president of the Pennsylvania Dental Association, and a president of the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis; you see her in action as a woman willing to take charge, a pioneer. Her skills as a dentist, hypnotist, hypnotherapist, and mentor stand beside her roles as beloved wife, colleague, and friend.

Through transcriptions of her workshops, Kay shares with humor and passion her controversial assumptions and special clinical techniques, especially useful for hypnoanesthesia, control of pain and bleeding, but also for the transcendence of ordinary awareness at home and at work that they inspire in the reader.

Sections are organized so that professionals from different backgrounds can pick and choose from the treasure trove of techniques. Chapters cover Hypnotherapy, The Language of Hypnosis, The Nature of Trance, (which includes Kay's innovative Dual Inductions), Suggestion and Utilization, Therapy with Pain, Holistic Dentistry, Ethics in Caring, Clinical Demonstrations, (with a charming companion CD), and the Personal Impact of Hypnosis on Kay's life "How I got to be what I am becoming." The book concludes with others' memories of Kay and their memorable memorials.

Appropriately, the book opens with Kay's review of the history of hypnotherapy and her expression of gratitude for 25 years of study with her mentor and friend, Dr. Milton H. Erickson, M.D., the father of Hypnotherapy.

Kay warns against the trend to over-simplify, or even trivialize Erickson's groundbreaking work. Transforming her admonishment into a hypnotic suggestion, she said, "It does not make sense for the imitators to sentence us to make sense of the essence of the essential scent that we sent for, since that one was not the scent sent for us and the sensitivity of the particular scent changes with the wearer."

Like Erickson, Kay practiced a physician heal thyself, model of therapy. Going through her own surgeries without anesthesia she practiced the self-hypnotic techniques she learned from Dr. Erickson, breaking the lock-step of clock time, and entering into subjective time, where pain management is possible.

"To be truly Ericksonian," Kay summarized, "you must be yourself."

Scattered throughout the chapters are Thompson's controversial tenets, that are so accessible and elegantly stated as to appear simple. Here are eleven highlights from this volume.

1. All hypnosis is self-hypnosis.
2. Laboratory measures of hypnotizability tell us little about the ability of a highly motivated person in a real life situation to enter into an altered state, to cope.
3. There are many different states of trance, not just one.
4. Client motivation is essential to the effective reception of a suggestion.
5. Utilization by the subject/client/patient is more important than the hypnotist's suggestion.
6. To mobilize our confidence against our own vulnerability and fear of the failure of our suggestions is the clinicians first step.
7. Carefully designed linguistic and metaphorical sleights of hand can help people sustain the unconscious concentration that can produce a shift in mental state.
8. When we know a patient can do something like stop bleeding during surgery and they actually do it, and all we did was say, "Stop bleeding," these liminal phenomena deserve our perpetual amazement.
9. Pain is a warning signal. "When everything that can be done and should be done, has been done, there's no longer any reason for pain."
10. Hypnosis does not follow neurological or physiological
    pathways.
11. Objectivity does not preclude compassion.

Kay loved to challenge the misconception that many professionals have of dentists. "Hypnosis is an oral art," she said, somewhat tongue in cheek; "as a dentist, I REALLY KNOW how to get inside a person's head." She emphasized that the mouth is the emotional learning center for the body.

Throughout the book, but especially in the section on pain, Kay shares her secret points of entry into dialogue with a person's physiology, where the regulation of temperature, blood flow, and unconscious rules takes place.

If you are looking for the specific words to use to entrance your clients, this is the book that will provide you with a wealth of Kay's poetic hypnotic tongue twisters for the unconscious mind.

These plays of word and image distract the conscious mind, so that the unconscious mind can stay focused. The focused unconscious keeps the client in the right mental state. As Kay put it, "You keep refocusing their attention so they can concentrate."Trance vs. our usual distracted state."

These word-vehicles use what we might think of as a subtle time-filing system. They keep the skeptical, conscious mind, back in clock time, where it is prevented from meddling with the unconscious or receptive process, that is safely tucked away in subjective time. Some Kay brain-puzzles:
"When you get off the plane, it's still plain to see that that pain from the plane is still there."
"You can become so entranced with really knowing all there is to know about how to make the memory of that experience change into something that it wasn't when it began, only because you hadn't thought about it as being what you didn't think it was."
"While you are breathing, I want you to do something you are not going to be able to do."
"You have all the time you need in the time you have."
"It's been such a long time that you've had anything but a short time""
With Kay's inductions, the conscious mind trips over itself trying to follow, and gives over to the consciousness that can receive a suggestion that the conscious mind would reject in disbelief.

Kay didn't miss an opportunity to weave into her suggestions aphorisms for life: "The way you get from yesterday to tomorrow is by going through today."

Kay elucidates steps for dealing with pain. First we recognize it as a warning. Once we have done what we can to take care of the problem, we keep feeling, but not feeling pain. We transform the pain into something else like hot or cold, kinds of pressure, a sensation in another body part. Then pain can be become a plane we take off in, a pane of glass we can see through clearly, a pain-ting of something very beautiful we can later share with others.

Kay shines through this text as the grand lady of post-hypnotic suggestion and healing.
"You can be pleasantly surprised at how comfortable you will be as long as normal healing is progressing."
One is forever struck by the ethicality in each suggestion, "as long as normal healing is progressing." She makes no false promises of cure. "You have all the time you need in the time you have." Like her mentor, Kay did not elicit private information from her volunteer subjects in workshops to make her work more dramatic. Respect was her bottom line.

Milton Erickson felt great joy to watch his students fly from his fold. Truly, through this collection, Kay's spirit flies on, released from its corporeal cage, to a higher standing of diligence, brilliance and love.

As Dr. Kay Thompson gave respect, so this text testifies that she merits respect, for the woman and the work.

This really is a special read. Although Kay Thompson is a name relatively unknown to British Hypnotherapists her reputation really does deserve a much wider dissemination, and experienced therapists would do well and learn much by reading this fascinating book full of insights, anecdotes and metaphors. Her Ericksonian background produces a great variety of multilevel communications, which are beautifully realised and expounded upon in page after page of intelligent, stylish and understandable learnings.

Although perhaps a little too advanced for beginners, therapists with a few years of experience under their belts will find much to interest and inform. I finished the book feeling enriched by Kay Thompson's contribution to the world of Hypnotherapy.

How wonderful to have this comprehensive records of Kay Thompson's work. It emphasises the important contribution she made in the field of hypnotherapy and the teaching of that subject and will be of value to new and experienced practitioners alike

The richness and multi-layered complexities of Kay Thompson's enormous contributions to all of hypnosis cannot be overstated. The blending of her own elegant words with the thoughtful perspectives of colleagues and students invites readers to enter Thompson's world from countless points of view. Everyone can learn more than they can even imagine from the multi-faceted talents of this superb teacher, trainer and human being.

Kay Thompson was, without doubt, a leading light in the world of clinical hypnosis and it is wonderful to have a comprehensive volume of her work.

" contains many pearls of great price"Kay Thompson was a great teacher, wordsmith and therapist and this collection is a fitting memorial to her.

Kay Thompson's enduring and profound contributions to the field of hypnosis cannot be overstated. She contributed so much to so many through the sheer force of her personality, the strength of her beliefs, and her extraordinary ability to teach and share generously the brilliance and depth of what she knew. This wonderful volume captures both Kay's spirit and her wisdom, and can be slowly savored by anyone wanting to get a glimpse of greatness.

This is an incredible book, one that contains material that is rich as well as inspiring. In fact, I know of no other book that covers the topic of hypnosis in such breadth and depth. Kay Thompson always wanted to write a book of her own. This marvelous volume, because of its multi-dimensionality and bolstered by the integrity of its contributors, will grant Kay her final wish.

There is so much to be learned from this book, not only about how to do therapy, but, on a deeper level, about how to conduct one's life.