Most accounts of Milton Erickson focus on his techniques: the stories, the indirect suggestions, the famous handshake. Those make more sense once you know the life behind them. He learned what he knew about attention, movement and the mind the hard way.
A different sort of child
Milton Hyland Erickson was born on 5 December 1901 in Nevada and grew up on a farm in rural Wisconsin.
He was unusual from the start. He was colour-blind, tone-deaf, and had what would now be called dyslexia. He later described the day a teacher finally got him to see the difference between the numeral 3 and the letter m, as a sudden flash of light. He regarded his differences as an education: because he did not perceive things as others did, he paid close attention to how other people perceived them.
Polio
In 1919, aged 17, he contracted polio. He was not expected to live.
A story he often told concerns the night of the crisis. He overheard the doctors tell his mother that her boy would be dead by morning. Furious that anyone should say such a thing to her, he asked for his bed to be turned so that he could see the sunset through the window. He was determined to see one more. He did, and then lost consciousness for three days.
He awoke almost completely paralysed, able to move little but his eyes.
Learning from stillness
Unable to move, he watched. He was one of a large family, and he spent months observing his sisters and brothers. He noticed that people said one thing with words and another with tone and body. He watched his baby sister learn to walk, studying each stage.
He also experimented on himself. Sitting in a rocking chair, wanting to be nearer the window, he noticed the chair begin to rock very slightly. His intense wish to move had produced small movements. He spent hours recalling in vivid detail what it had felt like to use his muscles, and gradually regained some control.
Within a year he could walk on crutches. To build his strength, the story goes, he set off alone on a canoe trip of around a thousand miles down the Mississippi and back, starting barely able to pull the canoe out of the water. He returned able to walk with a cane.
These experiences shaped everything that followed: his belief in what people could do with resources they did not know they had, his attention to tiny movements, and his interest in what the mind does without conscious direction.
Medicine and hypnosis
At the University of Wisconsin he encountered hypnosis in the laboratory of the psychologist Clark Hull, and was fascinated. He qualified in both medicine and psychology and worked for years in psychiatric hospitals in the eastern and midwestern United States, where he carried out a large amount of experimental work on hypnosis.
In 1948 he moved to Phoenix, Arizona, for his health, and practised from his modest family home. Patients waited in the living room, among his eight children.
In 1957 he became the founding president of the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis, and founded its journal.
His way of working
Erickson broke with the authoritarian style then standard.
- Every person is unique. He had no fixed script and tailored everything.
- Utilization. Whatever the patient brought, including resistance, was used.
- Indirection. He made suggestions through stories, jokes, puzzles and apparently casual remarks.
- The unconscious as a resource. He saw it as a store of learning and ability, not a source of trouble.
- Brief and practical. He was interested in what would help now, not in lengthy analysis of the past.
- Tasks. He often sent patients to do something: climb a local peak, visit the botanical garden, grow a plant.
His cases became legendary. They are also mostly known through his own accounts and those of admirers.
Later years
In the 1950s he developed post-polio syndrome, with increasing pain and weakness. From the late 1960s he used a wheelchair. He managed severe chronic pain with self-hypnosis every day, which gave his teaching on pain a particular authority.
Students came from all over the world to his home for informal teaching seminars. He often wore purple, one of the few colours he could enjoy. He died on 25 March 1980, aged 78.
His influence
Erickson’s ideas spread widely through his students. Jay Haley’s book Uncommon Therapy brought him to a large audience. His work fed into brief therapy, strategic and family therapy, solution-focused therapy, and the founders of neuro-linguistic programming, who modelled his language.
A balanced view
Erickson is revered, and it is worth keeping a level head.
- The evidence is anecdotal. His reputation rests on case stories, not trials.
- The stories improved in the telling. He was a gifted storyteller, and some anecdotes exist in several versions.
- His central claim has not been confirmed. Controlled studies have not shown indirect suggestion to be more effective than direct.
- Some of his methods would not pass today. He could be manipulative and directive in ways that modern ethics, with its emphasis on informed consent, would question.
- Imitators lack his skill. What worked for a uniquely observant clinician does not always transfer.
What lasts
- Respect for each person’s individuality
- Using what the person already has
- The view that people have more capacity than they realise
- Kindness and humour in therapy
- The example of a man who turned severe limitation into expertise
The bottom line
Erickson learned about the mind by losing the use of his body and getting it back. That made him an extraordinary observer and gave hypnotherapy a gentler, more flexible form. His stories are best taken as inspiration and not as evidence, but his respect for the patient’s own resources remains the heart of good practice.
Next in the series: Ernest Hilgard: The Scientist Who Made Hypnosis Measurable
This article is for general information and is not medical advice.