Dr. Jean Becchio is a general practitioner, a consulting physician at the Hôpitaux de Paris (palliative care – psychiatry), and director of the Diplôme universitaire d’hypnose clinique Paris XI. He is one of the founders of the Association française d’hypnose médicale. An instructor in the new field of consciousness activation therapy, he is a founding member of the Collège international de thérapies d’activation de conscience (CITAC), where he is head of clinical teaching. He is the author of several books.

There is still the scent of sulfur around hypnosis, even though, in earning the respect of the medical and scientific worlds, it has made its way into hospitals. Esotericism, manipulation, influence, the portion of mystery that surrounds the mechanisms involved: Jean Becchio banishes that “dark side” by bringing the reader up to date on contemporary practices and their theoretical and neurobiological foundations.

As Ghislaine Dehaene points out in her preface, consciousness is only “the froth of an underlying ongoing activity, and attention is the projector that enables us to call upon a sensation, a thought, a memory, in that conscious space.” The techniques for the activation of consciousness presented here allow the reader to both understand the functioning of this theatrical scene, and to learn to direct the flow of attention.

Following a short history of hypnosis and of its medical use up to the advent of consciousness activation therapy, Jean Becchio focuses on the most recent advances in the neurosciences to explain the processes upon which it is based. He presents techniques for attention activation through clinical examples. In his conclusion, after a chapter that discusses when consciousness activation therapy is indicated and a reminder of the principles of the method and techniques of therapeutic communication, the book ends with self-activation exercises, which offer the reader instructions enabling him or her to carry out sessions autonomously, without being accompanied by a therapist.