Understanding Ericksonian Hypnotherapy

Selected Writings of Sidney Rosen

Victor Kiarsis, Victor Kiarsis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000734218
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

This book is a collection of selected writings by Dr. Sidney Rosen that aim to demystifythe work of the leading clinical psychiatrist, Dr. Milton Erickson, and illustrate Erickson's unconventional and life-changing hypnotic techniques and strategic therapy.

An essential reading for those who seek to learn essential elements of psychotherapy, this collection elucidates fundamental aspects of Erickson's approaches and outlines factors effective in all forms of psychotherapy. It contains core teachings of many central elements in psychotherapy and stresses the importance of techniques such as therapeutic trance and hypnosis. As a student and close friend of Dr. Erickson, Dr. Rosen shares his own personalinsights about Erickson's teaching methods in a direct and straightforwardmanner that allows readers easy access to Ericksonian philosophy and techniques.

Many therapists, both psychoanalytic and others, will find both Rosen's and Erickson's approaches compatible with their own and far removed from their preconceptions about hypnosis. Providing guidelines for providers of individual and group therapy, this book is anexcellent guideto Ericksonian hypnotherapy.

1

THE VALUES AND PHILOSOPHY OF MILTON H. ERICKSON¹

Introduction

Milton Erickson’s values came from his observations of the uniqueness of each individual. Erickson’s experience taught him to resist generalizations, stereotypes, and labels, and to refuse to put individuals into categories or boxes. For him the differences among people were as important as the similarities, a value vividly captured by the allergist who noticed the differences among every blade of grass. This emphasis on the uniqueness of each individual contributed to his realistic, moderate, and ultimately optimistic view of life: because he encouraged the value of difference, he looked at each moment with an innocent eye, as a source of potential delight and surprise. Although patients could feel Erickson’s optimism and his sense of wonder and joy in the possibilities of fulfilling individual potential, Erickson did not embrace unrealistic abstractions or romantic idealizations. Instead, his optimism was rooted in the importance of recognizing and accepting human limitations.

“It is only when working within limitations that the master is disclosed,” Goethe wrote. Erickson, too, believed that only by accepting limitations could individuals learn and grow and realize their untapped potential. Perhaps the central value that emerges from Erickson’s thought is that, by realistically accepting our limitations, all of us can discover that “you know much more than you think you know.” Recognizing that we can’t have everything, we can also discover that our boundaries are broader than we know as well. This balance shows Erickson’s realism, and allows individuals to deal with the world realistically.

Erickson’s emphasis on reality, on living in the here and now, led him to focus not on achieving our untapped potential, or what we might achieve, but instead on recognizing and enjoying what we have now. Imagine you are walking along a path and reach a cleft from an earthquake in the ground. If you refuse to accept the reality that the cleft is in front of you, you could walk into it. If you accept the reality of the cleft, you can devise ways of avoiding it or going around it. Erickson always wanted to know what individuals could do in a particular situation, not what they would like to do in their dreams.

Erickson rejected parapsychology as not being based in reality and was not himself a practitioner of organized religion. But individuals experienced him as spiritual because of his acceptance of the mystical aspects of life that cannot be explained by the conscious mind. Describing dreams, he said, “the unexplainable fits into the realm of the spirit.”

For Erickson, an emphasis on mindfulness in the here and now can help individuals be fully present and enjoy their lives. Focusing on the details of flowers, mushrooms, and birds can give us pleasurable experiences, and Erickson himself emphasized pleasurable sensations, as opposed to the physical pain he himself experienced for much of his life. One of the last times I saw Erickson, I asked him, “How are you, Milton?” He said, “If I could cry, Sid, I would.” My response: “It’s painful, but if you consider the alternatives, you prefer to experience the pain, don’t you?” He nodded.

Erickson loved to have fun with his family—he was always a prankster as well as a teacher—and until the end, he never lost his optimism, his acceptance of reality, and his sense of humor. All this was embodied in his response to a story soon before his death that he was about to die. “I think that is entirely premature,” Erickson responded. “I have no intention of dying. In fact, that’s the last thing I’m going to do.”

***

When we observe and examine the work of Milton Erickson, we must conclude that he was one of the most effective manipulators in the field of psychotherapy. Was he therefore a dangerous man—and are his admirers and followers likely to propagate harmful, self-aggrandizing movements? Most of us realize that it is not possible to be with others, psychotherapeutically or otherwise, without influencing them. The “value-free” approaches of psychoanalysis are obviously far from that goal. Therefore, we understand that therapists who do not consciously “manipulate” their patients are still influencing them and that the type of influence must be determined by the “kind of person” the therapist is—his manner, physical appearance, dress, and way of living. Under all of these attributes must lie his value system. Many therapists are not at all explicit about their value systems or even aware of them. In judging whether Erickson was dangerous or helpful, meddlesome or wise, we are not confronted with this vagueness. In over 150 papers, he was most explicit and accurate in reporting what he actually said and did with patients. We can review some of these papers and tape recordings of actual sessions and derive a rather consistent picture of his values and life goals. He was often explicit about his own values in his teaching sessions. I have had the privilege of discussing his values with him, with Betty Erickson, and with the Erickson children. Still, of course, any interpretations in this chapter are my own.

Uniqueness of the Individual

Most philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, and other scientists who examine the human condition, and even those who examine nature, have emphasized similarities and have grouped phenomena according to their similarities. For example, almost every psychologist or psychoanalyst has a theory of personality or character types. This tendency goes back to ancient days when the various temperaments were divided according to the elements as they were then seen: earth, fire, water, and air. In modern times, Freud grouped personality types (as later elaborated by Abraham) according to stages of psychosexual development into oral, anal, phallic, and genital types. Erich Fromm divided people into the marketing personality, the hoarding type, and others. His concept of the productive personality was equivalent to Freud’s genital type. Karen Horney defined a morbid dependent type of personality, an arrogant-vindictive, and a detached type. Even in ordinary conversation we tend to type people-as geniuses, lazy bums, alcoholics, work addicts. Then, when we look at a particular person, we tend to see him in a narrow way.

Erickson’s approach was different. He emphasized the differences between people, the uniqueness of each individual and even of each object. This emphasis is exemplified by his story of the allergist whom he told to sit in a field. After about three hours, the allergist returned to Erickson and said, “Did you know that every blade of grass is a different shade of green?” In telling this story, Erickson was pointing up the value of noting distinctions. Every person has different shades of any characteristic that we can define. Erickson encouraged us to treasure those unique shades.

In many stories, Erickson emphasized the value of his own differences from others, especially as manifested in his physical defects—color blindness, dyslexia, lack of sense of rhythm, and so on. Although most of us do not have so many obvious outer manifestations of difference from others, certainly we are all aware of thoughts and points of view that we assume are markedly different from the “normal.” Erickson encouraged us to value these differences.

Optimism

He encouraged people to look at themselves and to treasure not only their differences from others, but also differences between their present and past behavioral patterns. This very emphasis on these latter differences, in contrast to others’ emphasis on our tendency towards repetition, may be the prime factor leading to Erickson’s optimistic view of life. For him, every day, every moment, offered an opportunity for new beginnings. This optimism is illustrated in his statement that in playing golf or any other game one ought to approach each shot as if it was the first one. Thereby one forgets previous attempts, previous tensions, previous failures, and even previous successes.

“Since we do not know what the next moment will bring, what tomorrow will bring,” Erickson pointed out, “life is not something you can give an answer to today. You should enjoy the process of waiting, the process of becoming what you are. There is nothing more delightful than planting flower seeds and not knowing what kind of flowers are going to come up.”

With regard to goals he said, “You encourage patients to do all those simple little things that are their own right as growing creatures. You see, we don’t know what our goals are. We learn our goals only in the process of getting there.” As his young daughter said once, when he asked what she was making, “I don’t know what I’m building, but I’m going to enjoy building it. When I’m through building it, I’ll know what it is!” As he said, “You don’t know what a baby is going to become. Therefore, you wait and take good care of it until it becomes what it will.”

This approach leads to looking at life with what I call the “innocent eye,” with every moment being a potential surprise. Terms such as “surprise” and “delight” commonly were used by Erickson. With this way of looking at life’s phenomena, one is more likely to feel optimistic than pessimistic. Certainly, pessimism is promoted by the conviction that we are bound to repeat the same destructive and boring patterns to which we have been conditioned, and Erickson was aware of both the value and the limitations imposed upon us by our conditioned patterns. Yet, more than most therapists he emphasized the positive.

The Wisdom of the Unconscious

As Jay Haley pointed out in Uncommon Therapy,

Unlike psychodynamically oriented therapists who make interpretations to bring out negative feelings and hostile behavior, Erickson relabels what people do in a positive way, to encourage change. He does not minimize the difficulties, but he will find in the difficulties some aspect of them that can be used to improve the functioning of a person or his family.

(Haley, 1973, p. 34)

Haley related this emphasis on the positive to the fact that Erickson worked in a framework of hypnosis and that while others felt a distrust of those ideas outside of conscious and rational awareness, hypnotists made up another large stream of therapists who emphasized that the unconscious was a positive force.

In fact, if Erickson and his followers have any “religious” guide or belief, it must be in the wisdom of the unconscious. He believed that people can be guided by and can trust their own unconscious minds to determine what is best in any particular moment and in general. Even during hypnotic inductions he expressed this trust and belief by saying such things as, “Go as deeply into a trance as you wish.” He believed that people have the capacity and the resources to comfort and heal themselves. As he once advised a therapist who was treating an adult patient, “You can regress her to 11 years of age and then have her, as a separate person, comfort that 11-year old girl as herself comforting herself.” He felt there was always something constructive, even in the most foreboding or apparently sterile or destructive situation. He expressed this belief in an indirect hypnotic induction which began, “In my way of living, I often like to climb a mountain. I always wonder what’s on the other side. On my side of the mountain may be meadows, hills, rivers and on the other side, there may be a desert, dark and foreboding.” He concluded, “And I would know that however harsh and foreboding a desert was, I would find something there of interest to me.”

Imagination

Like Blake and Yeats, Erickson placed a high value on “imagination” or our capacity to form inner images. In modern times, the word “imagination” has become denigrated. We must go back to Blake and Yeats in order to understand the connection of this word with words such as “vision,” “visionary,” “imagery.” Bronowski writes, “In my view, which not everyone shares, the central problem of human consciousness depends on the ability to imagine” (Bronowski, 1978, p. 18). In his work with hypnosis, Erickson had discovered that by evoking imagery it was often possible to help patients change. Mere intellectual recollection often was ineffective. This emphasis on imagery, which after all is itself a form of experiencing, is connected with another value that Erickson emphasized, viz., experience is essential.

He would not want anybody to accept his philosophy or any of his statements because he had said them or because they were published in some book. In fact, he taught that “Therapy cannot be learned from books. It is learned from life.” Erickson told me, “I received a letter from a woman last week which told about her daughter becoming six years old. The next day she did something her mother reprimanded her for and she made the remark, ‘It’s awfully hard to be six years old. I’ve only had one day’s experience.’”

Protection of the Patient

Although he believed in the tendency of the unconscious mind to protect the conscious, Erickson felt that it is incumbent upon the therapist, who temporarily may be given the power to override this protective function, to himself protect the patient. He noted,

The patient does not come to you just because you are a therapist. The patient comes to be protected or helped in some regard. But the personality is very vital to the person, and he doesn’t want you to do too much, he does not want you to do it too suddenly. You’ve got to do it gradually and you’ve got to do it in the order in which he can assimilate.

He would time his interventions according to the responses of his patient. When he said, “You’ve got to do it gradually,” he obviously meant that you must allow the patient time and scope to move and grow, based on his own unconscious wisdom. He also felt that people’s privacy must be protected against the intrusion of others. When he gave a demonstration before a group, he would always ask his subject to reveal, “Only that which you can share with strangers.” When I called him and asked him to coauthor our book, My Voice Will Go with You: Teaching Tales of Milton H. Erickson (Rosen, 1982), his first response was, “We must protect the individuals who are described.”

Betty commented on her husband’s desire for privacy:

Milton always took a dim view, and I have exactly the same feeling too, of having his biography written. He had a strong feeling of privacy that there are things in your life, experiences, beliefs and relationsh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• Photos
• Original Article Publications
• 1. The Values and Philosophy of Milton H. Erickson
• 2. What Makes Ericksonian Therapy So Effective?
• 3. One Thousand Induction Techniques and Their Application to Therapy and Thinking
• 4. Concretizing of Symptoms and Their Manipulation
• 5. The Psychotherapeutic and Hypnotherapeutic Approaches of Milton H. Erickson, M.D.
• 6. Hypnosis as an Adjunct to Chemotherapy in Cancer
• 7. A Guided Fantasy
• 8. Recent Experiences with Gestalt, Encounter and Hypnotic Techniques
• 9. The Evocative Power of Language
• 10. The February Man Foreword
• 11. Hypnotherapy: An Exploratory Casebook Foreword
• 12. Stories for the Third Ear Foreword
• Index