Milton Erickson is an American psychiatrist who specializes in medical hypnosis. Born December 5, 1901, Aurum, Nevada; died March 25, 1980, Phoenix, Arizona).
Milton G. Erickson has received world recognition as the largest psychotherapist-practitioner. His approach to altered states of consciousness formed the basis of a whole trend known as Ericksonian hypnosis and psychotherapy, which gives quick strategic results. One of the people whose psychotherapeutic model formed the basis of Neuro-Linguistic Programming. He was M.D., founder and first president of the American Society for Clinical Hypnosis, Associate Professor at Wayne University, Chairman of the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Psychopathology Association ( American Psychopathological Association) was a member of the American Psychiatric Association. His name is associated with the founding of the Training and Research Foundation of the American Society for Clinical Hypnosis.
Milton Erickson was not a completely healthy person from a medical point of view. From birth, he was deprived of color perception, did not distinguish sounds in height and was not able to reproduce a musical melody. As a child, he suffered from a reading disorder, and at the age of seventeen, Milton suffered an attack of polio and recovered completely thanks to the only rehabilitation program he developed himself. However, at the age of fifty, Milton again felt an attack of polio and this time he managed to recover only partially, so that the last years of his life Milton was chained to a wheelchair, he was tormented by constant severe pain and he was partially paralyzed.
In 1936, Milton Erickson wrote an article in which he presented the results of his experiment with the word association test, the essence of which is that a person unconsciously associates a stimulus word with those words that describe his problem. For example, to the stimulus word “belly”, the subject gave the following words: big, anxiety, baby, afraid, operation, illness, forgotten. And that was information about her unwanted pregnancy that she didn’t remember. Using some reverse logic, Erickson realized that the therapist could reverse the whole process and send a disguised message to the client in the form of a story. It was then that he had the idea of creating a special language of hypnosis, in which suggestion is carried out gently, without violence, bypassing the patient’s consciousness. The components of this hypnotic language are poetry and imagery, the diversity of the information provided for consciousness and subconsciousness, care and respect for the wishes of the patient. “My voice can turn into the sound you want to hear. In the singing of birds, the sound of the wind, the rustle of leaves, the rumble of a waterfall … ”- so said Milton Erickson.
Milton Erickson, who earned the nickname «Mr. Hypnosis» and «American Hero», returned to hypnosis the status of the most effective therapeutic method, while depriving it of a halo of mystery and mysticism.
Erickson’s hypnosis opens up the widest possibilities in psychotherapeutic medicine. Ordinary psychotechniques increase their effectiveness many times over if they are carried out in a state of trance. This becomes possible because in such a state there is no controlling role of consciousness that slows down or even blocks the process. Based on this phenomenon, it becomes possible to work with psychosomatic disorders, which are based on a severe neurotic disorder and which in a normal state of consciousness the patient is simply unable to cope with. The trance state makes it possible to selectively work with healthy layers of the psyche without affecting the damaged ones, thereby gradually “growing” the necessary health resources. The use of hypnosis as a therapeutic enhancer helps the physician to work many times more effectively.
Publications
- My Voice Stays With You: Educational Stories
- The February Man: Hypnotherapy and Self-Awareness Development
- Hypnotic Realities: Induction of Clinical Hypnosis and Forms of Indirect
- Psychotherapy strategy
- Seminar with Milton G. Erickson, MD: (Hypnosis Lessons)