Milton H. Erickson
Milton Hyland Erickson was an American psychiatrist and psychologist specializing in medical hypnosis and family therapy. He was the founding president of the American Society for Clinical Hypnosis. He is noted for his approach to the unconscious mind as creative and solution-generating. He is also noted for influencing brief therapy, strategic family therapy, family systems therapy, solution focused brief therapy, and neuro-linguistic programming.
Early life and education
Biographical sketches have been presented in a number of resources, the earliest being by Jay Haley in Advanced Techniques of Hypnosis and Therapy which was written in 1968 and in collaboration with Erickson himself. Though they never met Erickson, the authors of The World's Greatest Hypnotists wrote a biography. The following information about his life is documented in that source.Milton Hyland Erickson was the second child of nine of Albert and Clara Erickson. He was born in a mining camp in Aurum, Nevada where his father mined silver. The family moved to the farming community of Beaver Dam, Wisconsin when he was quite young and settled on a modest farm. The children all attended the one-room schoolhouse in nearby Lowell. The family farm demanded a great deal of physical labor.
Erickson was late in learning to speak and had difficulties in reading, which he described as dyslexia. He was also color blind and tone deaf. Later in life, when he explained what seemed to be extraordinary abilities, he stated that the disabilities helped him to focus on aspects of communication and behavior which most people overlooked. This is a typical example of emphasizing the positive, which is characteristic of his overall approach.
Though the family valued education, books were scarce. Erickson's desire to learn led him to repeatedly read the dictionary from front to back, along with the few other texts that the family treasured. He claimed to have overcome his dyslexia and described the pivotal moments in a paper entitled "Auto-hypnotic Experiences of Milton Erickson," which is found in The Collected Works of Milton H. Erickson, MD. He later characterized his early moments of creative change as an early spontaneous auto-hypnotic experience.
Erickson became interested in hypnosis at an early age when a traveling entertainer passed through the area. According to his later description, he felt that hypnosis was too powerful a tool to be left to entertainers. He decided to bring this tool into the realm of scientific evaluation as well as into the practice of medicine. Erickson already admired the local community doctor and had committed himself to becoming a physician.
At age 17, he contracted polio which left him with additional lifelong disabilities. Having long been interested in hypnosis, the year of his recovery gave him the opportunity to explore the potential of self-healing through hypnosis. He began to recall "body memories" of the muscular activity of his own body. 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. Still unable to walk, he claimed to have trained his body by embarking on a thousand-mile canoe trip with only a few dollars, following which he was able to walk with a cane. He continued to use a cane throughout his adult life, requiring a wheelchair only in his last decade of life. Erickson attributed his own self-healing to giving him additional insight into hypnosis.
After recovering his ability to walk Erickson attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he attained graduate degrees in both psychology and medicine. There he also embarked on formal studies of hypnosis in the laboratory of Clark Hull. However, because his ideas were somewhat different from Hull's, Erickson independently embarked upon rigorous scientific explorations regarding the nature of hypnosis. He received his M. D. degree from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine with an emphasis on Neurology and Psychiatry in 1928. Between 1929 and 1948, Erickson then took a series of positions at state hospitals that facilitated active research. He continued research in hypnosis as he refined his practical therapeutic skills. He was already a prolific writer focusing primarily on case studies and experimental work. These earlier writings greatly advanced the general understanding of hypnosis and are included in The ''Collected Works of Milton Erickson, M.D.
During WWII, Erickson conducted physical and mental examinations of soldiers. 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. In this capacity, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson were among those with whom Erickson worked and with whom he developed lifelong friendships. Over the subsequent decades these scholars collaborated on numerous projects.
In his late 40s Erickson developed post-polio syndrome. This resulted in additional muscle loss and pain. 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. There Erickson established himself in private practice, working out of his home for the remainder of his life.
In Phoenix, Erickson became active in the Society for Clinical and Educational Hypnosis. This organization promoted research and taught physicians how to use clinical hypnosis. Due to personality clashes and strong feelings regarding the most effective ways in which to bring clinical hypnosis into the hands of practicing physicians and dentists, Erickson broke away from the SCEH and formed the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis in July 1957. For a decade he was the founding editor of the American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis and had at least one article in every issue. He dedicated the next two decades of his life to professional writing, teaching other professionals, and maintaining a private practice. This was a productive period during which he developed and refined his own unique style of hypnotherapy, which caught the attention of other notables.
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. Erickson's fame and reputation spread rapidly, and so many people wished to meet him that he began holding teaching seminars. These continued until his death.
Throughout his professional career Erickson collaborated with a number of serious students. Colleagues who recognized the uniqueness and effectiveness of Erickson's approaches collected his publications into many volumes. His weekly workshops remained popular until his death. Towards the end of his life, Erickson's students began to formulate conceptual frameworks for his work and to explain and characterize it in their own way. Those efforts have influenced a vast number of psychotherapeutic directions, including brief therapy, family systems therapy, neuro-linguistic programming, among others.
Milton H. Erickson died in March 1980, aged 78, leaving behind his wife Elizabeth, four sons, four daughters.
Hypnosis
Trance and the unconscious mind
Erickson's view of the unconscious mind was distinctly different from that of Freud whose ideas dominated the context of the times. 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". Andre Weitzenhoffer points out: "The Ericksonian 'unconscious' lacks in particular the hostile and aggressive aspects so characteristic of Freud's system".Erickson relied on a supposition of an active, significant, unconscious. It was Erickson's perspective that hypnosis provided a tool with which to communicate with the unconscious mind and access the reservoir of resources held within. He describes in a 1944 article on unconscious mental activity, "Since hypnosis can be induced and trance manifestations elicited by suggestion, the unwarranted assumption is made that whatever develops from hypnosis must be completely a result of suggestion, and primarily an expression of it. The hypnotized person remains an individual, and only certain limited general relationships and behavior are temporarily altered by hypnosis. Hypnosis is in fact the induction of a peculiar psychological state which permits subjects to reassociate and reorganize inner psychological complexities in a way suitable to the unique items of their own psychological experiences." In the same publication Erickson repeatedly comments about the autonomy of the unconscious mind and its capacity to solve problems.
The essential element of Erickson's jokes was not hostility, but surprise. It was not uncommon for him to slip indirect suggestions into a myriad of situations. He also included humor in his books, papers, lectures and seminars.
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. Erickson's work on depth of trance is detailed in his 1952 paper in which he provided history, justification, and ideas about its use.
Where traditional hypnosis is authoritative and direct and often encounters resistance in the subject, Erickson's approach is permissive, accommodating and indirect.