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The Writings of Milton H. Erickson by Harry Procter (2001)

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 THE WRITINGS OF MILTON H. ERICKSON

Harry Procter (2001)

University of Hertfordshire.

https://www.academia.edu/12531648/The_Writings_of_Milton_H._Erickson_by_Harry_Procter_2001_

The following pieces are the edited English originals written, for translation into Spanish, for a two-volume

selection of papers by Milton H. Erickson, published by Paidos, Barcelona (Procter, 2002).

Essential Writings of Milton H. Erickson, Volume 1 - Hypnosis and Psychology

Introduction

Milton H. Erickson (1904 – 1980) was undoubtedly one of the most interesting and original writers and

practitioners of psychotherapy in the twentieth century. He transformed hypnotherapy from a set of rather

dubious and rigid, formulaic routines into a sensitive approach to therapy. Whereas the old practitioners of

hypnosis sought to ‘implant suggestions’ in their clients, Erickson worked from the premise that the client has

an inherent creativity which he sought to release. His work reaches well beyond hypnosis, however. He

provides a vision of human functioning of great relevance to students in psychology, psychotherapy and

philosophy.

There is now an extensive range of Erickson material available including the four volumes of collected

papers edited by Rossi (Erickson, 1980), the Erickson and Rossi volumes (1976, 1979, 1981, 1992), Haley's

casebook and edited conversations (1973, 1985), the transcribed seminar by Zeig (1980), Rosen's collection of

teaching stories (1989), the seminars, workshops and lectures edited by Rossi et al (1976, 1979, 1981) and the

collection of citations edited by Havens (1985). There is also the secondary literature describing Erickson's

work from various points of view (for example Bandler and Grinder, 1975; O'Hanlon, 1989 and Yapko, 1995)1,

but this is no substitute for reading Erickson’s original writings. These constitute the most important source

material and are models of scholarship and communication. He outlines a careful, naturalistic, experimental

method, acceptable now that qualitative research has come into its own in academic and clinical psychology.

There are various accounts of Erickson’s own life and how he struggled against the adversities of some

neuropsychological impairments and two separate bouts of poliomyelitis (see for example, Zeig, 1985). We

also know about many of his experiences because he told stories about himself and his family as an intrinsic

1
method in teaching and in therapy. His life spanned the period of enormous development in psychotherapy

from psychoanalytic through behavioural, humanistic, systemic and cognitive approaches, his concern with

stories anticipating and influencing also the more recent narrative approaches: Yet he remained critical of

‘schools’ of psychotherapy and the development of theories which can so easily obscure the living and unique

individuals therapy is trying to help.

Back in the early 1920's, Erickson (1961, 1967) was critical of the behavioural pioneer Clark L. Hull

because he tried to define objective methods of hypnosis, whilst ignoring their meaning for the subject.

Erickson thus anticipated critics of the behavioural approach, such as Carl Rogers and George A. Kelly. Erickson

was also critical of psychoanalysis in a similar way because it tried to erect universal truths and a standardised

therapeutic method. He developed a different concept of the unconscious mind to Freud, more in common

with modem cognitive conceptions (see Volume 2 for a further discussion). He was concerned to work with

the individual’s unique reality but also frequently worked with families – and he was a major early influence

on family and systemic therapy (Haley, 1973, 1993).

I have selected what I considered the important and representative of Erickson's published articles.

The first volume covers hypnosis and research into hypnotic phenomena. The second presents the application

of all this to the practise of psychotherapy. However, the reader will soon find a world of richness and

complexity which belies these classifications. The work of Milton H. Erickson consists of a comprehensive

approach to psychology and psychotherapy of extraordinary originality and depth

Vol. 1, Part 1: The induction of hypnosis

This section consists of six selected articles by Erickson about the induction of hypnosis. The first paper ‘Deep

Hypnosis and its Induction’ (1952) is a tour de force and is generally regarded as a classic paper and a milestone

in the writing on hypnosis. In contrast to much writing on hypnosis in which the technique itself is emphasised,

Erickson immediately argues that it is the subject's own interpretation and experience that is crucial. Thus,

very early on. Erickson, who worked with the early behaviourist Clark L. Hull in the 1920's, criticised the latter's

attempts to find the ‘perfect induction’ which Hull played to the subject on a ‘phonograph record’. Erickson

thus proved himself to be one of the first critics of the behavioural and standardised approaches to therapy.

Indeed Erickson's model, largely implicit in his writings, predates many of the later developments in

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psychotherapeutic theory such as the humanistic, cognitive and constructivist writings of the 1950's onwards

and which constitute a major alternative to the psychoanalytic discourse.

Whilst Erickson does outline different approaches to hypnosis, he is at pains to emphasise that each

subject or client is a unique individual and that the hypnotherapist, for satisfactory results, must orient

everything he or she does around the unique individual. This immediately gets us away from the idea that

hypnosis is about power or domination. In fact, the reverse is the case: the hypnotist must continually

accommodate to the person's needs and responses in order that the subject may achieve satisfactory hypnotic

experience.

In this paper, Erickson outlines his theory of trance as a natural phenomenon that people experience

frequently in the course of their everyday lives. When we become absorbed or fascinated in something, this

is, for Erickson, hypnosis. He defines deep hypnosis in terms of a division of mental processing into conscious

and unconscious processes. But his view of this distinction is different from that found commonly in

psychoanalytic writings. Erickson's ‘unconscious’ has more in common with Freud's preconscious mind, part of

the mind that is capable of planning and anticipating the future and that is in touch with the external world,

as opposed to being deeply buried and instinctual in nature. For Erickson it is a creative and even wise part of

ourselves. Other matters covered in this chapter include the famous ‘confusion technique’, the technical

problem of maintaining trance and the care with which Erickson takes to protect the subject. This involves

having a profound respect for the subjects’ constructs and defences, working with the latter, rather than

attempting to ‘break them down’.

‘Naturalistic Techniques of Hypnosis’ (1958) gives examples of Erickson working therapeutically and

could therefore have been included in volume 2. However, I included it here as it introduces one of Erickson's

most important contributions, the naturalistic approach in inducing hypnosis. In this, he works with whatever

the person is presenting in terms of their realities and behaviour. Note how, by using a woman's chief construct

of the hypnotic situation, being ‘scared stiff', promoting it and then deconstructing it, she is enabled to achieve

hypnotic states.

The importance of protecting the subject, mentioned above, is nicely exemplified in the third case, in

which he helps a woman whose panic and anxiety has prevented her from consummating her marriage. He

arranges the situation to help her feel maximally safe and in control, for example by suggesting she sit by the
3
door, whilst the husband and he sit some distance away. Some years ago, in my own practice, I was able to use

this very technique in a similar situation. It even elicited the typical type of outcome frequently reported by

Erickson. The couple wrote to me shortly afterwards, delightedly informing me that she was pregnant! I report

this to demonstrate that Erickson's techniques are applicable by people other than himself, although obviously,

extreme care and sensitivity are required in modifying the method to suit the particular people and situation

concerned.

The third paper on ‘Utilisation Techniques’ (1959) is another extremely important contribution and is

revolutionary in character. Exemplified here are Erickson's famous ‘judo like’ methods of flowing with a

person's behaviour, opinions and ‘resistance’ including both external and internal experience (an important

construct flowing through Erickson's work), are subject to utilization. These techniques are eminently

applicable with a little practice. I have often been able to encourage somebody to enter trance who is

apparently ‘resisting’ through shifting and moving about or changing the subject. Simply pointing out this

behaviour or labelling it as resistance will not achieve much. Erickson describes a tremendous variety of ways

of proceeding in seemingly impossible situations. Typically, he includes charming and playful situations with

his own children.

If hypnosis often seems to be based on verbal technique, then the next paper on ‘Pantomime

techniques’ shows Erickson at work with a young woman, a Spanish speaker. Neither can speak the other's

language. He works with her purely through signing and mime. The use of catalepsy and hand levitation are

central to Erickson's methods and are exemplified in the so-called ‘handshake induction’. By interrupting the

normally very automatic and habitual social ritual of the handshake, a person can be enabled to enter deep

trance very quickly, in the right situation, often with deep amnesia because words have not figured centrally

in the induction.

The fifth paper describes how the phenomenon of a third party listening in on hypnosis can find

themselves easily going into trance themselves, the ideas presented beginning to evoke internal imagery, even

though they are not directed to the listener. This is a common experience in seminars in which hypnosis is

demonstrated and becomes a valuable technique, especially working with couples and families. where

somebody initially unwilling to relax and go into trance, can be encouraged to do so by watching another family

member hypnotised and then going into trance themselves much more readily, or occasionally, if necessary,
4
entirely without their conscious knowledge. In the ‘My-friend-John technique’, Erickson uses a role play in

which the subject imagines he is hypnotising another person.

The final paper describes a phenomenon of central importance - the post-hypnotic suggestion. In a

fascinating paper written with his wife Elizabeth M. Erickson in 1941, the subtle but vital observation that

people briefly re-enter trance during the execution of a post-hypnotically suggested act. This is fascinating in

itself but also it forms the basis for re-inducing subsequent trances effortlessly. In his work, Erickson (see for

example Erickson and Rossi, 1976) typically worked with people for long sessions, often of several hours in

length, inducing many trances with talk in between each and connected to the next through post-hypnotic

suggestions. Through such repetition the person achieves really deep trances and enabling them to achieve

fundamental cognitive change and effective resolution of problems.

Vol. 1, Part 2: The use of hypnosis for psychological research

In the 1930's, Erickson wrote various papers systematically examining how much hypnosis could alter sensory

and somatic experience. The creation of deafness, blindness and colour blindness and other ‘negative

hallucinations’ are reported (Erickson, 1938a, 1938b, 1939, 1943, 1944). By the lengthy and careful training of

subjects in achieving deep hypnotic states, Erickson reported how they could achieve radical alteration in their

response to stimuli in various sensory modalities. I have included here two particularly fascinating papers, one

about the visual and one concerning the auditory mode.

In ‘The hypnotic induction of hallucinatory colour-vision followed by Pseudo-negative after-images’

(1938), Erickson devises an ingenious research design in which the subject is asked to hallucinate vivid colours

and then to report what colour they see afterwards on a white sheet of paper. Normally, if we are exposed to

a bright coloured light, we tend to see the complementary colour as an afterimage, because of temporary

habituation of the cones, the neural receptors for colour in the retina. In the case of hallucinated colours,

clearly there is no retinal habituation, and so Erickson's result, that subjects still tended to see the

complementary colour implies, perhaps, an equivalent habituation, but further up the optical pathway,

somewhere in the central nervous system. Replication of this experiment, using tomography and other new

techniques would certainly make for a fascinating research programme.

In ‘A field investigation by hypnosis of sound loci importance in human behaviour’ (1973), in typical

fashion, Erickson describes another interesting phenomenon. The context for this is the person's ability to
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localise sound through stereophonic perception, an area that has been neglected in neuropsychological

investigation. This is a capacity that is largely unconscious and that we tend to take for granted in our normal

everyday life. Erickson observed that in the situation of being in a boat, the normal stability of our audio-spatial

environment no longer holds. This is clearly, from the experiment, intimately connected with the genesis of

sea-sickness and possibly the proximity of the inner ear to the semi-circular canals of the vestibular system,

which record head position and movement, is relevant here. Erickson discovered how, making bobbing

movements of his head, whilst speaking to the hypnotic subject (whose eyes are closed), tended to induce

sickness and the feeling of spatial instability, but with the subject remaining unaware of the cause of these

feelings. I experimented with this phenomenon myself on one occasion with a middle-aged man and evoked

in him a similar feeling together with a spontaneous image of being in a boat. I had not mentioned anything to

do with boating or water, but the variation in location of my voice had in itself constituted a suggestion. He

had no awareness of the connection until I explained it.

The next paper, in which he helps a man overcome premature ejaculation is a landmark case. It uses,

for the first time, as early as 1935, the idea of utilising a story, offering a parallel neurotic situation, as a

therapeutic technique. The idea of inducing a ‘neurotic’ reaction, through the use of a ‘complex story’ was

devised by no less a psychologist than the Russian Alexander Luria (1929). (I like to, compare Luria and Erickson

in their approach to their clinical work, so creative, and with the keenest of observation and recognition of the

individual - see for example The Working Brain, Luria, 1973). In resolving the problems induced in hypnosis by

the story and breaking the amnesia, the client finds that he has simultaneously resolved the clinical problem.

I believe this could be the origin of Erickson's method, especially in his mature therapeutic work, of

using many stories evoking different psychological and life situations, often with examples of their resolution.

It has been contrasted with and seen as the opposite process to Freud's ‘dreams as the royal road to the

unconscious’. Instead Erickson achieves progress, stimulating change and learning in the unconscious

construing through story and narrative. The care with which Erickson works out the method, and the sensitivity

to the psychodynamic meanings of the words he uses are exemplary. His analysis of the story, given in the next

paper ‘The method employed to formulate a complex story’ (1944) gives an idea of how detailed and elaborate

Erickson's work was, as he analyses the nuances in meaning of every single word in the suggested story. A

6
reading of Erickson's work indicates that he maintained this care and attention to detail throughout his

practice.

The last two papers show Erickson at home in inducing and working with a wide range of psychological

and psychodynamic phenomena. This knowledge clearly forms part of the bedrock of his extraordinarily

creative and effective approaches to psychotherapy, as will be reflected in the writings of volume 2 of this

collection.

Essential Writings of Milton H. Erickson, Volume 2 - Psychological Therapy

Introduction

This second volume consists of a selection of Erickson's published accounts of examples of his clinical work.

Over thirty case histories are offered varying from brief vignettes through to extended accounts of what

happened in the therapy sessions. Erickson's therapeutic practice was remarkable for the range of problems

that he was willing to address. Thus, he worked with young children through to older adults. His work covered

a number of medical specialities including pain problems, various psychosomatic presentations, cases in

dermatology, obstetrics and dentistry as well as the wide variety of psychiatric problems including using

hypnosis to help with schizophrenic and manic-depressive psychoses and occasionally even with organic brain

pathology. More broadly than this he was willing to help people promote their quality of life, including

improving their performance in sports and to deal with the creative blocks of artists. The work also ranges

between very specific symptom-focused work through to facilitating some fundamental changes in identity,

the classic case here being his work with the 'February Man' (Erickson and Rossi 1992).

What emerges from this series of case histories is the remarkable extent to which Erickson was willing

to address himself to the uniqueness of each individual client. Erickson counselled thus:

Really look at your patient and really listen to your patient. Always pay attention to the situation in
which the symptom occurs. The personality of the patient is of primary importance. In rendering aid,
there should be a full respectful and utilisation of, whatever the patient presents (Zeig, 1985).

In reading the accounts one can infer the thoroughness of Erickson's interviewing procedures by looking at the

kind of information that he gathered and in particular the unique significance of events for each client. It is

helpful to know that Erickson typically worked with people for intense periods of time or for several hours for

several days rather than the more traditional therapeutic practice of spacing one-hour sessions at weekly or

monthly intervals. In this way, using hypnosis in a repeated and cumulative way he was able to achieve his
7
remarkable results. He was seemingly able to help people achieve the kind of comprehensive changes and

problem resolution claimed in intensive and extended psycho-analytic psychotherapy but concentrated into

brief work of often no more than a few days.

Erickson typically used his case histories as ‘therapeutic stories’ to tell other clients and therapy

trainees. By sharing, often in great number, examples of how people resolved similar problems, he encourages

in the client a ‘therapeutic frame of reference’ and an optimistic perspective that opens a mind to the

possibility of movement and change (Erickson & Rossi 1979). More specifically though, he believes that by

talking about particular mental processes it evokes similar processes in the hearer. For example, talking about

remembering a football game naturally tends to evoke equivalent memories. Talking about forgetting naturally

leads to an amnesia. Erickson counselled: ‘If you want the client to consider his mother, talk about a situation

involving a person's mother!’ As the client speaks, the therapist uses examples, of stories, jokes and metaphors

that then evoke similar examples from the client's experience producing in the conversation a spiral of

increasingly rich personal associations and memories.

The volume is divided into two parts, the first four chapters covering papers written in the 1930's and

1940's. The context of these papers was a largely psycho-analytic one and Erickson proves himself at this stage

of his work as a master of the language and understandings of depth psychology. Development of Erickson's

work can be traced as we proceed into the 1950's and 1960's of the second part, where his work becomes

increasingly economic, rarely needing to go beyond utilising the material given by the client. This phase of his

work, of course, had a hugely influential effect on the development of brief, strategic and systemic therapies

in the second half of the twentieth century. It is important though to see Erickson's work in the entirety of its

development. Writers such as Haley (1973) can, in their account of Erickson, underestimate his psychodynamic

sophistication. Erickson was himself critical of the psychoanalytic method in its rigidity of approach and

reliance on conscious insight but, as these cases show, his work demonstrates a sensitivity to the

psychodynamic meanings of the clients' experiences that is one of the keys to his success.

Introduction to Volume 2 - Part 1: Early Hypnotherapy Cases and psychodynamics

The following four papers offer a fascinating insight into Erickson's earlier work of the 1930's and 40's. He did

not explicitly elaborate a theoretical model which could explain his work. He clearly preferred to proceed by

offering numerous rich examples of clinical work putting the onus on the reader to struggle to find common
8
themes and formulations. Having said that, these four papers are particularly rich in allowing us to gain a

deeper insight into what Erickson thought hypnotic trance might be and the distinction that he makes between

conscious and unconscious functioning. Chapter 1 offers an intriguing situation allowing speculation into the

relationship between trance and physiological unconsciousness. Chapter 4 is particularly helpful, in its

introduction, to the distinction between the subject's experience of the induction of trance and the trance

experience itself and how it is important to remember that the subject is always actively construing suggestions

made rather than passively responding to them. Erickson helps us to return to the subject responsibility for

the autonomous processes of trance phenomena, pointing out that it is erroneous to attribute to the

hypnotherapist responsibility for the remarkable phenomena that can be experienced. This error has led to an

exaggeration of the powers of hypnotists which can ultimately lead to the discrediting of hypnotherapy as a

valid procedure.

In this 'psychoanalytic' phase of Erickson's work a theme running through is the utilisation of 'defence

mechanisms' such as regression, dissociation, repression (or amnesia) and projection in order to enable and

aid the therapeutic process. More generally we can summarise Erickson's work as being a utilisation of the

phenomena of hypnosis in his therapy. Erickson would often practice therapeutic work with what he calls

‘trance training’. This involves exploring and encouraging a wide variety of hypnotic phenomena in training

sessions that could last many hours. The book 'Hypnotic Realities' by Erickson, Rossi & Rossi (1976) gives the

full transcripts of eight sessions of trance training in a single subject and repays close study. This careful training

and preparation is most in evidence in chapters 2 and 4. In chapter 2, Erickson and Kubie recount the successful

treatment of a woman with acute depression whose mother had died when she was 13 after having impressed

upon the young girl that ‘sex was nasty and disgusting’. The comparison of the woman's account of this while

regressed to the age of 12 or 13 compared to her adult account is extremely interesting and instructive. By

fully accepting the girl's understanding of her mother's admonitions and helping her to construct how her

mother would have continued to advise her daughter in later adolescence and adulthood is elegant and quite

moving. It seems hard to imagine how this woman could have overcome the problem without Erickson's

elaborate intervention, including his use of her roommate as a chaperone, without whom it is hard to see how

she could ever have engaged in a therapeutic process at all.

9
 In chapter 4 he works with a man who feels he does not love his wife and who only married her because

she resembled his mother (to whom he was very attached). In typical fashion Erickson utilises the tendency of

this man to project and goes on to conduct an entire course of 'family therapy' or psychodrama with several

hallucinated members of his family, first in pairs and then bringing these together. Erickson is here attempting

no less than a comprehensive change in the client's core construct system (Kelly, 1955). In fact, looked at in

this way, Erickson's methods can be seen as a type of radical cognitive therapy in a way which may legitimise

it for readers who emphasise the importance of evidence-based practice and its current emphasis on cognitive-

behavioural therapy as supposedly the main form of effective treatment known to us.

Chapter 2 is interesting in its approach to working with obsessive compulsive problems through hypno-

analytic techniques, in this case, automatic writing. It raises interesting questions about what we now call

multiple personality disorder or dissociative identity disorder and to what extent these are genuine

phenomena. Erickson explicitly gave the woman a 'trance name', quite a common thing for him do as a

technique for accentuating and handling trance work.

Introduction to Erickson Vol 2 Part 2: Later Papers on Hypnotherapy.

The following papers give a selection of 28 of Erickson's case histories covering a remarkable range of

difficulties and different ways of addressing them. Three of the cases in the first chapter are concerned with

people diagnosed as suffering from psychosis or schizophrenia, as does the first case of chapter 7. Erickson

worked as a research psychiatrist in a psychiatric hospital during the 1930's and 1940's and there are a number

of cases that demonstrated his willingness to apply psychological therapies to people who had been diagnosed

with schizophrenia for many years. He admits that there were more failures than successes but felt that

hypnosis has something unique to offer. It is interesting to compare the list of hypnotic phenomena with the

list of psychotic experiences (including hallucination, catalepsy, dissociation, amnesia, regression, alterations

of bodily sensation) as was discussed many years ago by Weakland (unpublished) and King (1957). The idea

that there might be a similarity in the underlying dynamics is intriguing, the one involving the deliberate

evoking of experiences whilst the other is possibly the use of these experiences as a retreat or avoidance.

The time that Erickson was willing to devote to a single case instructive. He reports spending 25 hours

in training the first client to be a somnambulistic hypnotic subject. With the fourth case (George) he was willing

to spend twelve hours exchanging ‘word salad’ before George finally asks him to ‘talk sense, Doctor''. The
10
importance in hypnosis of the therapeutic relationship is underlain in the case of Sandra. He had promised to

keep her ‘psychotic episodes safe in his filing cabinet’, in manila envelopes. She comes back to check that he

has kept them safe, saying ‘now I know I can trust you’.

I was able to use Ericksonian techniques myself in a case for a patient with catatonic schizophrenia

(see Procter 1985). A young man in a profound catatonic state, his breathing was rapidly failing with a chest

infection and who had identified with Jesus, was addressed gently with relaxation instructions and the memory

of learning how to use woodwork tools in his training as a carpenter (he was a carpenter in real life). He

reported later how helpful this had been in galvanising his wish to live and enabled him to be back on his feet

again within a few hours, walking with a shuffling gait which resolved a few weeks later.

Chapter 6 contains two cases of stereotyped behaviours or routines which nowadays would possibly

be classified as examples of autistic spectrum disorders. They provide early examples of what is currently

known as the 'graded change approach' (Howlin, 1998). In the first case he helps a young man who has a

compulsion to urinate through an eight or ten inch pipe in which Erickson suggests he should first use a twelve

inch bamboo and then gradually reducing it in length over subsequent sessions. In the second case he helps a

17-yearold boy who has a compulsion to flex and extend his arm. He suggests a gradual reduction in the

frequency of this action. In typically Ericksonian fashion, behaviour is first utilised or even prescribed and then

gradually modified or reduced.

Quite apart from how Erickson approaches his cases, the stories themselves demonstrate a rich fund

of clinical material which lay bare the psychodynamics of the difficulties. Several of the cases show how early

traumata lead to specific psychosomatic reactions which, in retrospect, appear quite logical reactions to the

person's dilemma. In chapter 6, Patient F, a man experiences acute blindness on passing a garage where the

man with whom his wife is having an affair, works. In another case a woman, the victim of a rape, becomes

disturbed and suffers amnesia and dissociation on hearing a name and after seeing a Borden's milk truck

through a window. These triggers later turn out to be related to the rapist's name. In the last case in the volume

(chapter 13) a medical student who had been unable to tolerate sitting in dermatology lectures recovers a

memory in which, whilst playing with a friend on the farm at the age of eight, thought he had accidentally

killed his friend, and was then severely punished by his father. He had seen his friend's wound, which was an

‘awful, nasty green colour''. The experience was rendered even more traumatic, perhaps, because it was paired
11
with a severe admonition by his father. He had therefore repressed it but he had been left with a severe anxiety

to the whole subject of dermatology, at the core of which was his unconsciously remembered horrifying image

of the discoloured skin.

Chapter 6, Patient G consists of a promiscuous young woman, who’s sexualised behaviour is resolved

when she becomes aware, through the special technique of selecting words at random, about her desire to

have sex with her own father in the context of having ‘domineering, nasty mother and a nice but ineffectual

father'. No doubt the psychoanalytically inclined theorist would be particularly interested in these examples

but Erickson proceeds with them in an entirely different manner to the original analytic technique of ‘making

the unconscious conscious’. In contrast, Erickson consistently works on the side of defence mechanisms, even

actively encouraging and prescribing them at times, carefully allowing the client to deal with the material at a

pace that precludes the development of resistance and in many cases allows for a resolution of the difficulties

without the client even becoming aware of the unconscious dynamics.

The effectiveness and brevity of Erickson's therapy is achieved, perhaps, through the particular

techniques that he uses together with his extraordinary ability to understand the core of the person's

difficulties. Central here, of course, is Erickson's utilisation of the presenting difficulty. A man who construes

dental procedures as necessarily painful is allowed to keep this strong sensitivity and hyperaesthesia of his left

hand throughout the procedure (chapter 7 case number 2, also reported in volume 1 of this series chapter 2).

In two cases of a paralysed arm developing in a work context (chapter 6 cases A and B), Erickson leaves a small

but symbolic difficulty in the form of a stiff wrist or a crippled little finger, thus accepting the psychodynamic

need to continue with a problem whilst reducing it so that it no longer disrupts functioning.

Erickson's work helps us to understand that 'resistance' is not generally a quality contained within the

client's mind and is better seen as an indication to the therapist that he or she is taking the wrong approach or

going at too fast a pace. Erickson uses a wide variety of approaches in this context. He will typically re-establish

a symptom, for example the blindness in the man mentioned above (chapter 6 case F) and will re-establish

amnesia for the therapeutic work, progressively allowing the person to become more aware of the material as

they are ready to do so. By reorienting a person to the beginning of a session or going back to a topic discussed

previous to the work, an amnesia is created by implication. This 'structured amnesia' tends to occur naturally.

For example, a holiday can drop into unawareness as we afterwards resume work that was interrupted by the
12
holiday. Erickson sometimes uses a whole series of stories in an 'arch form' to encourage amnesia, interrupting

Story A with story B, and again interrupting this to tell Story C, resuming Story B and then Story A, at the points

at which they were left off (Lankton et al, 1983):

STORY A
STORY B
STORY C
STORY B (continued)
STORY A (continued)

Using this method, story B and story C, in particular, tend to be forgotten, as there is no logical cue to aid the

retrieval process.

Another fascinating series of techniques are concerned with the two chapters utilising time distortion

(chapter 11) and pseudo-orientation in time (chapter 12). Our sense of the duration of time, of course, varies

according to the activities that we are involved in. A very eventful week tends to drag by slowly, a very

enjoyable holiday tends to go quickly. Dreams which only last a short time can commonly seem to have

involved months or years of events. Subjective sense of time can be systematically altered in hypnosis (Cooper

and Erickson, 1954). It can be condensed or dilated. Erickson uses this in two areas of helping with the creative

process in the arts. In chapter 11 he helps an artist (Patient A) having trouble with a creative blockage to paint

a picture very quickly and to help a busy musician (Patient C) get some extra rehearsal time in, by practising

music in rapid time. Patient D consists of a 19-year-old woman, distressed by the sight of blood in her dental

work, review her whole lifetime of potentially traumatic experiences with blood 'in 20 seconds', somewhat

reminiscent of reports of people who have had near death experiences who say they have reviewed their

entire lives.

Another technique for getting around ‘resistance’ is pseudo-orientation in time or the imagined

progression into the future. It is well known in hypnosis that one can regress to past experiences but Erickson

brilliantly reverses this, encouraging people to imagine going forward to a time after which they have resolved

the problem. After doing this with an obsessive-compulsive problem in which a man has to compulsively visit

his mother's grave (after very abusive admonitions to do so in childhood by his father), he somehow has ‘found

himself too busy to visit the grave over the previous two weeks’.

In perhaps one of my favourite Erickson cases (chapter 9), he helps a man suffering from the pain of

terminal cancer, and who is resistant to the idea of hypnosis, to feel more comfortable by responding to
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hypnotic suggestions for comfort interspersed in Erickson's harmless discussion of growing tomatoes, which

has been the man's lifetime work. At the end of this paper Erickson shows how his secretary responds to

subliminal suggestions included in the material she is typing, allowing her to overcome a painful headache. I

Have found that the 'interspersal technique' can be generalised into an interviewing technique useful clinically

in a wide variety of situations especially working with children. Sometimes one can hold as many as four or

five topics in a conversation, jumping from one to another in a seamless flow. Thus, I may be talking to a child

about their interests and what they are best at in school, dipping into their painful experiences with their

father, returning to their interest before they naturally tend to clam up about the painful topic. One then

returns later and do a little more work in the painful area when it feels right to do so.

In chapter 10, Erickson talks of helping his son Robert who has seriously hurt himself in a fall. He guides

Robert through a series of wonderfully constructed and timed suggestions to clean the wound and even to

accept stitches by using his natural rivalry with his sister. Erickson titles this story from his own family

‘paediatric hypnotherapy’ with the implication that there is enough in this short paper to cover this topic!

Careful analysis of this paper certainly teaches us a lot about working with children and young people.

These papers (and they are only subset, about 10% of his accounts of therapeutic cases are included

here) show Erickson to be an extraordinarily versatile worker, occasionally wild and breaking many rules of

what should be done according to traditional models in psychotherapy. I believe Erickson maintained the

interest of his clients at heart, always wanting to promote their wellbeing. This is a controversial area especially

in the light of more recent thinking about power and gender in psychotherapy and with therapeutic abuse. His

work raises ethical questions. For example, with Ann R (chapter 5) he is willing to insult a young woman with

a poor body image. This is one of a series of cases of this kind. He is successful in that she feels he understands

her properly and that he is accepting and utilising her core construct about herself. In the two cases in chapter

6, concerned with helping men with arm paralyses, he utilises spurious medical knowledge to help them with

their difficulties. In the hands of a sensitive and experienced psychotherapist one could justify the use of these

approaches but I have personally stopped short of using these kinds of techniques in my own practice and

would counsel others to do the same. I would also however, want to remind readers who may be offended by

some of Erickson's approaches, to remember the time in which they were written and the context in which

professional and medical relationships were very different to how they are today.
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 Readers may be interested to read papers by this author who has attempted to make sense of

Erickson’s work through the lens of George A. Kelly’s Personal Construct Psychotherapy (Procter and Brennan,

1985; Procter, 1989). They can be accessed through the links provided in the references.

References

Bandler, R. and Grinder, J. (1975) Patterns of the hypnotic techniques, Vols 1 & 2. of Milton H. Erickson, M.D.
Cupertino: Meta publications.

Cooper, L. F. and Erickson, M. H. (1954) Time distortion in hypnosis. Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins.

Erickson, M.H. (1938a) A study of clinical and experimental findings on hypnotic deafness: I. Clinical
experimentation and findings. Journal of general psychology, 19, 127 - 150.

Erickson, M.H. (1938b) A study of clinical and experimental findings on hypnotic deafness: II. Experimental
findings with a conditioned response technique. Journal of general psychology, 19, 151 - 167.

Erickson, M.H. (1939) The induction of colour blindness by a technique of hypnotic suggestion. Journal of
general psychology, 19, 61 - 89.

Erickson, M.H. (1943) Hypnotic investigation of psychosomatic phenomena: Psychosomatic interrelationships

studied by experimental hypnosis. Psychosomatic Medicine, 5, 51 - 58.

Erickson, M.H. (1944) An experimental investigation of the hypnotic subject’s apparent ability to become
unaware of stimuli. Journal of general psychology, 31, 191 - 212.

Erickson, M.H. (1960) Clinical and Experimental Trance: definitions and suggestions for their development. In
Rossi, E. (ed) The Collected Papers of Milton H. Erickson, Volume 2: Hypnotic Alteration of sensory, perceptual
and psychophysical processes. Irvington, New York.

Erickson, M.H. (1961) Historical note on the Hand Levitation and other Ideomotor techniques. American
Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, 3, 196-199.

Erickson, M.H. (1967) Further experimental investigation of hypnosis: Hypnotic and non-hypnotic realities.
American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, 10, 87-135.

Erickson, M. H., Rossi, E. L. and Rossi, S. I. (1976) Hypnotic Realities: The induction of clinical hypnosis and the
forms of indirect suggestion. New York: Irvington.

Erickson, M. H. and Rossi, E. L. (1979) Hypnotherapy: an exploratory casebook. New York: Irvington.

Erickson, M. H. and Rossi, E. L. (1981) Experiencing hypnosis. New York: Irvington.

Erickson, M. H. and Rossi, E. L. (1992) The February Man. New York: Irvington.

Haley, J. (1973) Uncommon therapy: The psychiatric techniques of Milton H. Erickson, M.D. New York: Norton

Haley, J. (1985) Conversations with Milton H. Erickson, M.D. 3 Volumes. New York: Triangle Press.

Haley, J. (1993) Jay Haley on Milton Erickson. New York: Brunner/Mazel.

Havens, R. A. (1985) The wisdom of Milton H. Erickson. New York: Irvington.

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Howlin, P. (1998) Children with autism and Asperger syndrome: a guide for practitioners. Wiley, Chichester.

Kelly, G.A. (1955) The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Vol. I, II. New York: Norton. (2nd printing: 1991,
Routledge, London, New York).

King, P. D. (1957) Hypnosis and Schizophrenia. In Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 125, 481-486.

Lankton, S.R., Lankton, C.A. and Lankton, C.H. (1983) The Answer Within: A Clinical Framework of Ericksonian
Hypnotherapy. New York: Brunner/Mazel.

Luria, A. R. (1929) Die Methode der abbildenden Motorik bei Kommunikation der Systeme und ihre
Anwendung auf die Affektspsychologie. Psycho Forsch, 12, 127 -179.

Luria, A. R. (1973) The Working Brain: An introduction to Neuropsychology. Penguin, Harmondsworth, UK

O’Hanlon, W. (1987) Taproots: Underlying pri8nciples of Milton Erickson’s therapy and hypnosis. New York:
Norton.

Procter, H. G. (1985) A construct approach to family therapy and systems intervention. In Button, E. (ed)
Personal Construct Theory and Mental Health. Beckenham: Croom Helm. Retrievable from:
https://www.academia.edu/540452/A_construct_approach_to_family_therapy_and_systems_intervention_
1985_

Procter, H.G. (1989) Aspects of hypnosis and personal construct theory. Paper presented to the Eighth
International Congress on Personal Construct Psychology, Assisi, Italy, 1989. Retrievable from:
https://www.academia.edu/801406/Aspects_of_Hypnosis_and_Personal_Construct_Psychology_1989_

Procter, H. G. (Editor, 2002) Escritos esenciales de Milton H. Erickson, Vols 1 & 2 (Edited Papers of Milton H.
Erickson translated into Spanish) Paidos, Barcelona.

Procter, H.G. & Brennan, J. (1985) Kelly and Erickson: Toward a Personal Construct Hypnotherapy. Paper
presented to the Sixth International Congress on PCP. Churchill College, Cambridge, UK. Retrievable from:
https://www.academia.edu/649183/Kelly_and_Erickson_Toward_a_Personal_Construct_Hypnotherapy_198
5_

Weakland, J. (1956) Schizophrenia and Hypnosis: phenomenal similarities and their potential relevance.
Unpublished manuscript, Mental Research Institute, Palo Alto.

Yapko, M.D. (1995) Essentials of Hypnosis. New York: Brunner/Mazel.

Zeig, J. K. (1980) Teaching seminar with Milton H. Erickson, M.D. New York: Brunner/Mazel.

Zeig, J. K. (1985) Experiencing Erickson: An introduction to the man and his work. New York: Brunner/Mazel.

1
I am aware that, writing this in 2020 that there is a considerable amount of material published since the above was
written for the Paidos Volumes.

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