The Dave Elman Hypnosis Institute is founded on the lessons and writings of the late Dave Elman. Born in 1900, Dave Elman was one of the most highly regarded and respected hypnotists of the 20th century, and with good reason. Dave was inspired to research hypnosis in his youth after seeing its effects firsthand when his father benefited from a pain relieving hypnosis session, and it eventually became the driving focus of his career.

Dave learned some basic hypnosis techniques from his father Jake, who was a hobbyist. After his father’s death, he inherited his father’s library. Dave was fascinated with H Bernheim’s concept that each time someone went into hypnosis they went deeper and more rapidly. Playing with this concept he experimented and had the basics of the Dave Elman Induction which he called his “three-minute routine” by the time he was approximately twelve. 

While working as a performer in Vaudeville, he played the saxophone and violin, was a comic, and did stage hypnosis. Dave was able to hypnotize subjects in less than 3 to 4 minutes, as opposed to his contemporaries at the time who would often take almost 20-40 minutes, which garnered the respect of his peers. 

After witnessing Dave’s rapid induction methods firsthand, a few doctors approached him to see how they could utilize his hypnosis methods to use for their medical, dental and therapeutic purposes, and the first class became a great success. Soon he was giving full-blown lectures on Medical Hypnosis to classes of physicians and dentists. He also wrote a book called “Findings in Hypnosis”, which was later published as “Hypnotherapy”. 

Despite the fact that his contemporaries wrote dozens of books on similar subjects, his single published work had such an impact that even today, many consider him to be one of the greatest hypnotists of all time.