[up]. PSYCHOLOGISTS DON'T KNOW THE REAL WORLD. "Now, Dr R here is somebody who is trained in psychology. He has been oriented to place individual meaning or interpretation on everything according to his past teachers. He does not know very much about looking at or experiencing reality. He must experience reality in terms of what he has been taught and read" (MH Erickson and EL Rossi, Experiencing hypnosis, page 193, 1996, Irvington publishers). In fact, even Rossi was not at ease with Erickson, because the latter de-emphasized the traditional insight, and that is an unacceptable behavior for the common psychotherapist (source: Rossi, 1983, in: Healing in hypnosis, The Seminars, Workshops and Lectures of Milton H. Erickson, Vol. 1, Introduction, page 51, Irvington Publisher Inc., New York). Erickson has been unique and inimitable because until now nobody has dared to follow his brilliant but also revolutionary ideas. He also wrote: "consider the idea that speech comes from the mouth. It doesn't come just from the mouth: the neck is involved, respiration is involved, the shoulder movements are involved, and the tension of the hands is involved. Everything is involved. Once you start that pattern, you can learn a great deal about it. But to isolate it, as so many psychologists do, as a single unitary thing, I think is wrong" (MH Erickson, in: Am J Clin Hypn, July 1977, 20, 8-19).
[up]. THERAPISTS LIVE INTO THEIR THEORETICAL CASTLES. Erickson personally trained many laymen in using hypnosis (e.g. policemen). He said: "ever since I don't know how long, psychiatrists and psychologists have been devising theoretical schemes, disciplines of psychotherapy. Every year the president of the American Psychological Association propounds a new psychological theory of human behavior. And psychiatrists have always been propounding schools of psychotherapy. I think Freud did the worst job. Now, Freud contributed very greatly to the understanding of human behavior and he did a great disservice to the utilization of understanding human behavior. He developed a hypothetical school of thought which could be applied, according to Freud, to all people, of all ages, male or female, young or old, all degrees of education, in all cultures, in all situations, and at all times. Freud analyzed Moses, Edgar Allan Poe, Alice in Wonderland, a North Dakota farm boy, and he wouldn't know the difference between a North Dakota farm boy and a ping pong champion in New York. And so it is in all schools of psychotherapy" (MH Erickson, in 'Phoenix - Therapeutic patterns of Milton H. Erickson', by Gordon and Meyers-Anderson, 1981).
[up]. HYPNOSIS DOESN'T NEED A THERAPIST. During a seminar, Erickson said: "there is really no such thing as hypnotherapy [..]. Hypnosis is a means of establishing a more adequate contact with your patient and a more favorable environment in which your patient can seek to understand the total situation" (Seminars, Workshops, Lectures of Milton H. Erickson, Vol IV, Edited by Ernest L. Rossi and Margaret O. Ryan, 1998, page 126). Erickson (1948) also wrote: "too often the unwarranted and unsound assumption is made that, since a trance state is induced and maintained by suggestion, and since hypnotic manifestations can be elicited by suggestion, whatever develops from hypnosis must necessarily be completely a result of suggestion and primarily an expression of it. Contrary to such misconceptions, the hypnotized person remains the same person. His or her behavior only is altered by the trance state, but even so, that altered behavior derives from life experience of the patient and not from the therapist. At the most the therapist can influence only the manner of self-expression. The induction and maintenance of a trance serve to provide a special psychological state in which patients can reassociate and reorganize their inner psychological complexities and utilize their own capacities in a manner in accord with their experiential life. Hypnosis does not change people nor does it alter their past experiential life. It serves to permit them to learn more about themselves and to express themselves more adequately. Direct suggestion is based primarily, if unwittingly, upon the assumption that whatever develops in hypnosis derives from the suggestions given. It implies that the therapist has the miraculous power of effecting therapeutic changes in the patient, and disregards the fact that therapy results from an inner re-synthesis of the patient's behavior achieved by the patient himself. It is true that direct suggestion can effect an alteration in the patient's behavior and result in a symptomatic cure, at least temporarily. However, such a 'cure' is simply a response to the suggestion and does not entail that reassociation and reorganization of ideas, understandings, and memories so essential for an actual cure. It is this experience of reassociating and reorganizing his own experiential life that eventuates in a cure, not the manifestation of responsive behavior which can, at best, satisfy only the observer".
[up]. HYPNOSIS BELONGS TO ALL OF US. Erickson (1962) wrote: "so far as I know, HYPNOSIS AS A FORM OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR has been in existence since the beginning of the human race. Then why should hypnosis necessarily be singled out from the entire variety of human behavior and designated as something that is highly specific or even slightly specific in relationship to mental health or mental sickness, emotional health or emotional sickness?".
[up]. SHUT UP, ALARMISTS! During a seminar in Los Angeles (1952), Erickson said: "let us discuss this matter of the correction of symptoms and the development of symptom substitution. I would like to emphasize my belief that this is a most unfortunate, unhappy, medical superstition that is old enough to be retired! [..] In medicine and in dentistry, a large part of your practice is symptom removal. Wouldn't it really be reasonable to expect your patient to replace a symptom with something less serious? I think it is awfully important for you to recognize that possibility, instead of listening to the alarmist who shouts that if you remove a symptom, it will be replaced by something much worse. I can think of that unfounded declaration by certain critics that curing cigarette smoking with hypnosis will lead to obesity in the patient. If you cure a patient of alcoholism with hypnosis, he will become a drug addict. If you cure the patient with drug addiction, then a psychotic depression develops. I wonder if these critics have ever discovered the fact that when you fail to cure the cigarette habit, patients go right back to smoking cigarettes; and obese patients go back to shoveling food into their faces. They do not develop alcoholism, or drug addiction, or psychotic depression. They go back to their old familiar patterns". The message is that hypnosis is safe.
