Magic Tricks

Only someone with no background or training in hypnosis would accept as original, new, or somehow "cutting edge" the explanations being given by this so-called authority, who actually has simply copied completely the ideas of others, and presented them poorly. James Brown has simply borrowed every single idea presented in this lecture from other English hypnotists (for the most part), including hypnosis without trance, the automatic imagination model, body magic tricks, and the idea that hypnosis is suggestion.

Every so often he quickly dropped the name of someone who actually thought of these concepts, but only in a way that he could later claim he gave credit, when in fact he should have clearly stated when others discovered years before this copy-cat lecture. He gave the lecture as if the ideas presented were his concepts, which is utter rubbish. And he presented them extraordinarily poorly and superficially, which I suspect was to get people to sign up for his "academy".

The idea that the standard hypnosis induction is only a ritual that excites the imagination of those being hypnotized has been discussed since the 1950s. That's not a James Brown discovery. The idea that hypnosis is suggestion has been repeatedly stated since the 1800's, as evidenced by Hippolyte Bernheim's book, published in 1880, entitled "Suggestive Therapeutics". The showman Kreskin built his reputation on the idea that hypnosis is only suggestion, beginning in the 1960's. And he clearly has no concept that many other approaches to hypnosis exist, not the least of which is that of Ericsson.

James Brown is trying to portray himself as some type of pioneer in hypnosis, when in fact he is simply taking the ideas of others (mainly in England), and presenting them poorly to magicians who are unaware of what's already been presented to the hypnosis community in far greater detail. He presentation was poor, he presented no evidence to back up anything he said from actual textbooks of hypnosis (and there are many great ones from the UK), or publications, and he basically wasted 170 minutes to say what he could have said in 30 minutes at most.

I gave him 2 stars because he did give a good explanation of a body magic trick involving a foot stuck to the floor because of a shift in the center of gravity. That explanation he did well.