Introduction

Hello, I’m Pam Young.  That’s how I begin my recordings.  All this began when I enrolled in a Ph.D. in obesity at Uni. of New South Wales.   At the time I was staff and student counsellor at University of Technology, Sydney.  One day the editor of the student newspaper “Newswit” asked for hypnosis to help give up smoking cigarettes.  I routinely recorded my hypnotic inductions so the person could listen to the recording at home, but on this occasion the tape became tangled and I volunteered to make another recording.  I did so and settled down to listen to it.  After that I gave up smoking.  It was as if smoking had been ablated from my consciousness.  I didn’t smell other people’s cigarettes and my mind blanked out the ads at the movies.  Not a shadow of interest.   So I shifted my research to cigarette smoking.  What was happening?  The dramatic effect of listening to my own recording compared strikingly with my own fruitless efforts to give up and the total lack of response when someone else tried to hypnotise me.