The Collected Works series represents a major and ongoing commitment to gather and assemble the wealth of material created by Dr. Erickson during five decades of work. Beyond preserving this great pioneer's legacy, the purpose of the series is to make his knowledge, insight, techniques, and discoveries accessible to students, researchers, clinicians and educators in the behavioral and health sciences, including neuroscience.
Though he died in 1980, Dr. Erickson remains a seminal force in hypnosis and psychotherapy. He added more cases to psychiatric literature than any other therapist in history.
This series presents his groundbreaking studies in therapeutic hypnosis, psychotherapy, rehabilitation, and research. Each volume contains new material or updated information created by the editors.
Erickson’s experimental and therapeutic explorations with the hypnotic modality span more than 50 years. His successful rejuvenation of the entire field may be attributed to his development of the nonauthoritarian approaches to suggestion wherein subjects learn how to experience hypnotic phenomena and how to utilize their own potentials to solve problems in their own way. The contents of this volume can be best understood as working papers on a journey of discovery. There is little that is fixed, final, or permanently validated about them. Most of these papers are heuristics that can stimulate the mind of the reader and evoke the awe of discovery, which is unlimited in the realm of human consciousness.
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In these papers, written over a period of several decades, we see a renaissance of new approaches to hypnotherapy and a remarkable creativity in facilitating symptom relief, depth psychology, and the actualization of personal potentials. One intuits in Erickson’s innovative approaches an unusual respect and appreciation for the complexity of the human psyche. We see him as an explorer who is constantly mindful of his own limitations, while fully aware of the patient’s own potentials for self-cure and development. We see in these papers his efforts to break out of the limiting assumptions that underlay many “schools” of psychotherapy.
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The collected papers of the first section all demonstrate Erickson's utilization approach to a variety of psychological problems. Utilization theory emphasizes that every individual's abilities and inner resources must be accessed in order to determine how they may be evoked and utilized for therapeutic purposes. The next part illustrates a variety of Erickson's indirect approaches to symptom resolution. This is followed by papers on sexually related problems illustrative of the extremely wide range of approaches the hypnotherapist has available. The last section illustrates the facilitation and utilization of the patient’s own inner resources for solving personal problems. In a number of these illustrations, Erickson did not even know the nature of the problem that the patients solved within the privacy of their own trance experience.
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This volume contains some of Erickson’s most brilliant yet controversial papers about utilizing the patient’s classical symptoms of anxiety, confusion, and resistance in psychotherapy and therapeutic hypnosis. Even reading the first paper about Erickson’s “confusion technique in hypnosis” tends to make some readers confused about how this pioneering work is supposed to operate. What are the basic principles of working with the patient’s conflicts, confusion and resistance? Like many pioneers, Erickson tried to explain his thinking as he reported his actual experiences with patients, but one looks in vain for a clear protocol that students can follow to repeat his therapeutic success. The patient’s urgent needs and Erickson’s highly original approaches interact to generate complex therapeutic responses that always seem to be one-of-a-kind situations that defy scientific analysis.
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The papers of this volume are illustrations of Erickson's early work on classical hypnotic phenomena such as amnesia, age regression, automatic writing, and literalness as well as the mental mechanisms involved in Freudian “psychopathology and dual personality.” In this clinical research Erickson frequently was responding to the Zeitgeist that surrounded him in his professional appointments in the 1930s and 1940s. While Erickson was able to use hypnosis to validate certain psychoanalytic conceptions of psychodynamics, he never identified himself as a partisan of any psychoanalytic school. Indeed, he often decried what he felt was a premature limitation and rigidification of our understanding of human nature in the belief system of most “true believers” of any “school.”
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This volume highlights some of the most significant transitions from his classical papers about hypnotic phenomena written during his early career when he was working in isolation to his eventual co-authorship with a number of his colleagues and students over two generations. The final section of this volume, “Explorations in Hypnosis Research and Practice,” presents an overview of some of these developments from Erickson’s founding of The American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis to the present. An interesting example of a practical, teachable, action model of Ericksonian approaches to therapeutic hypnosis and psychotherapy is offered, for example, by the current editor of The American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, Stephen Lankton, in his chapter: “A Basic Footprint of Erickson’s Process of Change.”
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This volume illustrates how classical psychosomatic medicine becomes psychosocial genomics just as surely as the 21st century becomes the 22nd. This is an example of how science is self-correcting and continually evolving. Erickson's Collected Works is updated with current concepts of neuroscience, psychosocial genomics, and bioinformatics for students, clinicians, and researchers who wish to extend his innovative therapeutic approaches into the future. Erickson mediated the transition between classical hypnosis as a curious alchemy of abnormal states of mental dissociation and suggestion to a new form of psychotherapy when he began publishing his early studies of psychosomatic phenomena in the 1930s.
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In these papers, written over a period of more than four decades, we see a renaissance of new approaches to hypnotherapy and a remarkable creativity in facilitating symptom relief, depth psychotherapy, and the actualization of personal potentials. One senses in Erickson’s innovative approaches an unusual respect and appreciation for the complexity of the human psyche. We see him as an explorer who is constantly mindful of his own limitations while fully aware of the patient’s own potentials for self-cure and development. We see in these papers his efforts to break out of the limiting assumptions that underlay many “schools” of psychotherapy.
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This volume is a rare record of Milton H. Erickson's pioneering genius in facilitating the evolution of new patterns of consciousness and identity in a young woman. It is the only completely documented report of an entire hypnotherapeutic case from the middle phase of Erickson's career, when his innovative approaches were being developed. It brilliantly illustrates the actual words and methods used by Erickson that are currently transforming the meaning and essence of the entire field of psychotherapy. Therapists of all persuasions will appreciate the detailed commentaries offered by Erickson himself on the whys, ways, and means of his naturalistic and permissive approaches to healing. This intimate portrait will be treasured by all who seek to grow along with one of the most humane therapists of our time.
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Includes the updating essay—“What is a Suggestion? The Neuroscience of Implicit Processing Heuristics in Therapeutic Hypnosis and Psychotherapy” By Ernest L. Rossi and Kathryn L. Rossi
“For the many who never had the opportunity and never will have the opportunity to attend workshops led by Milton Erickson, this work will serve as an invaluable surrogate. Psychotherapists, in general, as well as hypnotherapists, will find the work rewarding reading and study, for Erickson is above all a psychotherapist, and his modus operandi transcends clinical hypnotism. As for academicians and researchers, I believe they will find enough food for thought and research here to keep them busy for some time to come.” —Andre M. Weitzenhoffer
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In my original Foreword to this volume I expressed the opinion that, with Milton Erickson, Ernest Rossi “has done the best job to date in clarifying Erickson’s ideas on the nature of hypnosis and hypnotic therapy, on techniques of hypnotic induction, on ways of inducing therapeutic change and of validating this change.” Many books have been written about Erickson’s approaches to therapy in the 33 years that have passed since this book was published, yet I will still stand with that opinion. On reading or re-reading this book and others, edited by or co-written by Ernest Rossi we cannot fail to be impressed by Rossi’s ideas, about the Utilization Approach and the development of new frames of reference, for example. These ideas have become so accepted in different approaches to psychotherapy that they seem to have been obvious and to have existed forever. We are especially struck by Erickson’s incredible, sometimes exquisite use of words. As Paul Watzlawick has noted Erickson “heals with words.” —Sidney Rosen, MD
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Indirect communication is the overall concept we use to cover what we have variously described as two-level communication, the naturalistic approach, and the utilization approach. The common denominator of all these approaches is that hypnotherapy involves something more than simple talk on a single, objective level. The readily apparent, overt content of a message is like the tip of an iceberg. The recipient of indirect communication is usually not aware of the extent to which his or her associative processes have been set in motion automatically in many directions. Hypnotic suggestion received in this manner results in the automatic evocation and utilization of the patient’s own unique repertory of response potentials to achieve therapeutic goals that might have been otherwise beyond reach. In our previous volumes we outlined the operation of this process as the microdynamics of trance induction and suggestion.
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This contains a fascinating biographical chapter on Milton Erickson, revealing the many important events of his life that contributed to the development of his ideas. The lectures, seminars and workshops were not scholarly by nature. They were usual spontaneous, with only a very general theme to guide them. The special interests, needs and questions from each group of participants frequently generated ingenious, unpremeditated demonstrations of hypnosis and hypnotherapy. All contributed to a significant shift from the older authoritarian techniques of hypnosis to the more creative approaches pioneered by Erickson.
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This volume is an incredibly rich presentation of his ingenious approaches to hypnosis and psychotherapy. It was during the time period covered by this volume that Erickson wrote some of his most original papers on the naturalistic and utilization techniques which are considered to be the essence of his approach. It was Erickson’s genius to find in the natural patterns of everyday behavior the secrets of each patient’s individuality which he then utilized for therapeutic purposes. The stories and anecdotes he tells about his friends, family, colleagues, and patients in this volume provide a delightful tapestry illustrating just how his creative mind went about the process of scientific discovery and hypnotherapeutic innovation.
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This volume features much of the source material wherein Erickson first expressed his views on psychosomatic medicine and healing. It will be of vital interest to students, therapists, and practitioners of therapeutic hypnosis who want to integrate Erickson’s approaches with the current breakthroughs that are taking place in psychoneuroimmunology and the new mind-body methods of holistic healing. The issues dealt with in this volume are fundamental. Many laboratory researchers believe we are in the midst of a profound revolution that is resolving the mind-body problem. Cartesian dualism has dissolved. Well-designed research experiments are demonstrating the psychobiological pathways by which mind modulates the biochemistry of the body. We are learning how the languages of mind (thought, imagery, emotion, and sensation) are communicating with the languages of the body (hormones, messenger molecules, information substances).
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More than any other individual, Milton Erickson has been responsible for shaping the modern view of hypnosis. This volume explores some important questions through a presentation, never before published, of Erickson’s own hypnotic workshops and demonstrations: is hypnosis a process of manipulation or facilitation? does the hypnotherapist control people? does the hypnotherapist simply give people permission to heal themselves? The authoritarian-permissive paradox of hypnotherapy is most evident in Erickson’s use of the double bind. Volume IV takes the reader on a journey that recaptures his evolution of the therapeutic double bind: from a technique based on an authoritarian concept of ‘illusory choice’, to a modern vision of the double bind as a ‘free choice among comparable alternatives’. This new vision represents a profound shift in attitude: creative choice, not control or manipulation, as the inherent agent of healing in psychotherapy.
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