Milton H. Erickson

Milton Hyland Erickson, MD (December 5, 1901 – March 25 1980) was an American psychiatrist specializing in medical hypnosis. He was founding president of the American Society for Clinical Hypnosis and a fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Psychopathological Association.

Trance and The Unconscious Mind

Erickson believed that the unconscious mind was always listening, and that, whether or not the patient was in trance, suggestions could be made which would have a hypnotic influence, as long as those suggestions found some resonance at the unconscious level. The patient could be aware of this, or could be completely oblivious. In this way, what seemed like a normal conversation might induce a hypnotic trance in the subject.

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Erickson also believed that it was even appropriate for the therapist to go into trance.

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I go into trances so that I will be more sensitive to the intonations and inflections of my patients' speech. And to enable me to hear better, see better. I go into a trance and forget the presence of others.

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Erickson maintained that trance is a common, everyday occurence. For example, when waiting for buses and trains, reading or listening, sitting at a computer, or even being involved in strenuous physical exercise, you immerse yourself in the activity and go into a trance state, distant from any other irrelevant stimuli. These states are so common and familiar that most people do not consciously recognise them as hypnotic phenomena.

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Erickson expected trance states to occur, and was prepared to exploit them, even when the patient was not present with him in the consulting room. He also discovered many techniques for how to cause trance states, both verbal and non-verbal, and put forward the idea that the common experiences of wonderment, engrossment and confusion are, in reality, just kinds of trance.

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Implicit in this is the idea that there are a great many kinds of trance. Many people are familiar with the idea of a 'deep' trance, and earlier 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 test subjects, deepening the trance.

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That a trance may be 'light' or 'deep' suggest a one dimensional continuum of trance depth, but Erickson would often work with multiple trances in the same patient, for example suggesting that the hypnotised patient to behave 'as if awake', blurring the line between the hypnotic and 'awake' state.

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Erickson believed there are multiple states that may be utilized. This resonates with Charles Tart's idea (put forward in the book 'Waking Up') that all states of consciousness are trances, and that what we call 'normal' waking consciousness is just a 'consensus trance'. NLP also makes central use of the idea of changing state, without it explicitly being a hypnotic phenomenon.

Related Topics:
Charles Tart - NLP

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