Milton Hyland Erickson (5 December 1901 – 25 March 1980) was an American psychiatrist and psychologist specializing in medical hypnosis and family therapy.
[1] Biographical sketches have been presented in a number of resources, the earliest being by Jay Haley in Advanced Techniques of Hypnosis and Therapy[2] which was written in 1968 and in collaboration with Erickson himself.
Later in life, when he explained what seemed to be extraordinary abilities, he stated that the disabilities (dyslexia, color blindness, being tone-deaf) helped him to focus on aspects of communication and behavior which most people overlooked.
By concentrating on these memories, he claimed to have learned to tweak his muscles and to regain control of parts of his body, to the point where he was eventually able to talk and use his arms.
Eventually the U.S. intelligence services asked him to meet with other experts in an effort to better understand the psychological and mental factors involved in communications relating to combat.
[8] At that time Erickson, his wife Elizabeth, and his family of five children left Detroit and his position at Eloise State Hospital and relocated in Phoenix, Arizona, where they believed the weather conditions would be conducive to his healing.
[9] His ongoing relationship with Gregory Bateson led some to take an interest in Erickson's unique communication skills and therapeutic approaches.
In 1973 Jay Haley published Uncommon Therapy, a book that first brought Erickson and his approaches to the attention of those outside the clinical hypnosis community.
Zeig quotes Erickson as describing "The unconscious mind is made up of all your learnings over a lifetime, many of which you have forgotten, but which serve you in your automatic functioning".
[17] Early in his career Erickson was a pioneer in researching the unique and remarkable phenomena that are associated with that state, spending many hours at a time with individual subjects, deepening the trance.
[20][21] While Erickson explored a vast arena of induction methodologies and techniques of suggestions, there are certain areas where his name is known as key in the development or popularity of the approaches.
Therefore, effective hypnotic suggestion should be "artfully vague," leaving space for the subject to fill in the gaps with their own unconscious understandings – even if they do not consciously grasp what is happening.
He developed both verbal and non-verbal techniques and pioneered the idea that the common experiences of wonderment, engrossment and confusion are, in fact, just kinds of trance.
His narrative and experiential metaphors are explored extensively in Sydney Rosen's My Voice Will Go With You, but an example is given in the first chapter of David Gordon's book Phoenix.
The following quotes Erickson:[24] I was returning from high school one day and a runaway horse with a bridle on sped past a group of us into a farmer's yard looking for a drink of water.
One patient was suffering from intolerable malignant pain from a terminal condition, while the other subject was an intelligent though illiterate man who sought to relieve a disabling symptom of frequent urination.
In the follow-up case discussions Erickson credits the patients' positive responses to the receptivity of their unconscious minds: they knew why they were seeking therapy, they were desirous of benefiting from suggestions.
He offers the following example: One may declare so easily that the present and the past can be so readily summarized by the simple statement "That which is now will soon be yesterday's future even as it will be tomorrow's was.
Taken in context these verbal distractions are confusing and lead progressively to the subject's earnest desire for and an actual need to receive some communication they can readily understand.
A primary consideration of the confusion technique is the consistent maintenance of a general causal but definitely interested attitude and speaking in a gravely earnest and intent manner expressive of a certain utterly complete expectation of the subject's understanding.
In the book Uncommon Therapy, Jay Haley[5] identified several strategies that appeared repeatedly in Erickson's therapeutic approach.
Thus, Erickson used this as the basis for suggestions that deliberately played on negation and tonally marked the important wording, to provide that whatever the client did, it would be beneficial: "You don't have to go into a trance, so you can easily wonder about what you notice no faster than you feel ready to become aware that your hand is slowly rising."
[35] Lankton and Matthews state that perhaps Erickson's greatest contribution to psychotherapy was not his innovative techniques, but his ability to de-pathologize people and consider a patient's problematic behavior as indicative of a best choice available to the individual.
Erickson worked with him and provided a summary of the case, after carefully assessing the patient's potential for safe practices, as well as his motivation for change.
A colleague, friend and fellow researcher, André Weitzenhoffer, an author in the field of hypnosis himself, has criticized some ideas and influence of Erickson in various writings, such as his textbook The Practice of Hypnotism.
Weitzenhoffer displays a clear and explicitly stated, opposition to Ericksonian hypnosis in his book, in favor of what he terms the semi-traditional, scientific, approach.
She added that although he tirelessly advocated scientific investigations of hypnosis and was a prolific writer on techniques, he often left details out of case reports that could have been meaningful to clinicians of today.
[clarification needed] Self-professed "skeptical hypnotist," Alex Tsander, cited concerns in his 2005 book Beyond Erickson: A Fresh Look at "The Emperor of Hypnosis", the title of which alludes to Charcot's characterization in the previous century as "The Napoleon of the Neuroses."
Equally prejudiced are those who regard Erickson as a maverick whose egregious methods are a passing fancy that will eventually be consigned to the dustbin of outmoded schemes.
[Both] these attitudes do injustice to a highly creative and imaginative original mind... A poignant criticism of Erickson's strategic therapy is that it is overvalued by those who believe that clever tactics can substitute for disciplined training.