50 Psychology Classics (17 page)

Born in 1913 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Ellis was raised in New York City. He gained a business degree at the City University of New York, and unsuccessfully attempted a career in business. He also tried and failed to become a novelist
.

Having written some articles on human sexuality, in 1942 Ellis entered the clinical psychology program at Columbia University. On obtaining his master's degree in 1943 he launched a part-time private practice in family and sex counseling, and in 1947 earned his doctorate. He held positions at Rutgers and New York University, and as a senior clinical psychologist at the Northern New Jersey Mental Hygiene Clinic
.

Ellis's ideas were slow to be accepted by the American psychological establishment, but today he is considered, along with Aaron Beck, to be the father of cognitive behavior therapy. The Institute for Rational-Emotive Therapy, founded in 1959, continues to disseminate his ideas. See also the biography
The Lives of Albert Ellis
by Emmet Velten
.

Ellis was the author of more than 600 academic papers, and his 50-plus books include
How to Live with a Neurotic, The Art and Science of Love, Sex Without Guilt, The Art and Science of Rational Eating,
and
How to Make Yourself Stubbornly Refuse to be Miserable About Anything—Yes, Anything.

Robert A. Harper
is a former president of the American Association of Marriage Counselors and the American Academy of Psychotherapists. He has a PhD from Ohio State University, and since 1953 has been in private practice in Washington DC. Other books include
Creative Marriage
(with Albert Ellis) and
45 Levels to Sexual Understanding and Enjoyment
(with Walter Stokes)
.

“If one reads these stories in the so-called waking state, one might dismiss them as being ‘clichéd,' ‘corny,' or ‘of interest, but not enlightening.' Yet, in the hypnotic state, where everything that is said by the therapist is heightened in meaning, a story, or a single word in a story, may trigger a mini
satori—
the Zen term for enlightenment
.”
Sidney Rosen

“It is really amazing what people can do. Only they don't know what they can do
.”
Milton Erickson

In a nutshell

The unconscious mind is a well of wise solutions and forgotten personal power.

In a similar vein
Robert Cialdini
Influence
(p 62)
Sigmund Freud
The Interpretation of Dreams
(p 110)
Carl Jung
The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
(p 168)
Fritz Perls
Gestalt Therapy
(p 216)
Carl Rogers
On Becoming a Person
(p 238)

Sigmund Freud experimented with hypnosis, but could never induce trances easily or get patients to accept his suggestions. Milton Erickson, born 45 years after Freud, in many ways fulfilled the potential of hypnosis and made it into a bona fide psychological tool, which can often bring about instant changes in people who have labored with complexes and phobias for years.

Perhaps the answer to why Freud failed and Erickson so brilliantly succeeded can be found in the dynamics of the psychotherapeutic relationship. Conventionally, because doctors have the knowledge, they are the healers. The patients, in their ignorance, are the ones to be healed. As a young doctor in mental institutions, Erickson inherited this understanding, but later began to comprehend the relationship as simply two people working together to tap their unconscious minds for solutions. By going into a trance himself, Erickson's voice would “become” the patient's voice (“My voice will go with you,” he would tell them), so creating a great power of suggestion.

Erickson's secret was his “teaching tales,” not old fairytales but anecdotes about his own family life or the cases of previous patients that carried with them special meaning for a person's problem. They usually involved an element of shock or surprise, and were designed to provoke an “aha” moment that allowed the person to get outside the normal circularity of their thoughts. Instead of saying “I see what's wrong, this is what you should do,” Erickson would let patients glean the message from the anecdote, as if they had figured it out on their own.

An alcoholic who came to Erickson seemed a hopeless case. His parents were alcoholics, his grandparents on both sides were drinkers, even his wife and brother were alcoholics. Erickson could have sent him to Alcoholics Anonymous, but given the man's environment—he worked on a newspaper, which he said encouraged a hard-drinking lifestyle—Erickson thought he
would try something different. He asked the man to go the local botanical gardens and just sit and contemplate the cactus plants, which “could go for three years without water and not die.” Many years later the man's daughter contacted Erickson, and told him that after the “cactus treatment” both her father and her mother had stayed sober. The image of a flourishing cactus needing little “drink” had obviously been a powerful one.

Erickson admitted that this treatment would never have been found in a textbook, but that was the point of his style of therapy: We are all different and we respond to the cure that means most to us. Sometimes his tales seem more like Zen
koans
or riddles, not making perfect sense. When you hear them in a normal state you may consider they are corny or think “So what?” but in a trance the loaded language, meaningful pauses, and element of surprise can jolt a sudden connection with the unconscious mind that triggers change.

Erickson gave psychiatrist Sidney Rosen permission to collate many of his tales and put them into a book with commentary. Though over 20 years old now,
My Voice Will Go With You
is a perfect introduction to Erickson, capturing his magic and unique contribution to psychology. Below is a brief look at a handful of tales and an interpretation of their meaning, but it is worth getting the actual book for the rest.

When working with patients, rather than trying to find out a lot of background history Erickson's priority was to establish “rapport.” He became very aware of how a person responded to a tale in terms of body language, breathing, and small facial cues.

One summer Erickson was selling books door to door to help pay for his college tuition. He visited a farmer, but the farmer wasn't interested in books. He was only concerned with raising his hogs. Giving up trying to sell anything, Erickson began scratching the hogs' backs; having grown up on a farm himself, he knew they liked this. The farmer noticed and was pleased, saying, “Anyone who likes hogs, and knows how to scratch their backs, is someone I want to know.” He asked the young Erickson to stay for supper, and then agreed to buy his books.

Erickson told the story to show that everything about us communicates something—we cannot
not
communicate. When we need to make judgments, just as the farmer did we have to let our subconscious minds have a role; feelings or hunches are usually correct and we must take in the “whole” situation.

A related technique is mirroring. By “going along with” what a patient was saying, Erickson could make them see more objectively how they were acting.

In a hospital where he worked there were two men claiming to be Jesus Christ. He made them sit on a bench and talk to each other. Eventually, by seeing the idiocy of the other person's claims each was able to see the silliness of their own. When a hospital was building a new wing, Erickson got another “Jesus” to help out with the carpentry, knowing that the man could not deny that Jesus was famously a carpenter before emerging as the Messiah. This unusual remedy got the man engaged with reality and other people again.

Ruth was a beautiful 12-year-old girl with a great personality. People did things for her because they liked her so much. However, she was apt to suddenly kick people in the shins, tear their clothes, or stamp on their foot and break their toes. One day Erickson heard that she was on a rampage in a ward. When he got there she was tearing plaster off walls, but he didn't tell her to stop—he began trashing the surroundings himself, tearing sheets off beds and breaking windows. “Let's go somewhere else,” he said, “this is fun,” and he went into the corridor. When he saw a nurse he ripped her clothes off, revealing only her bra and panties. At this Ruth said, “Dr. Erickson, you shouldn't do a thing like that,” and brought a sheet to the nurse to cover her up. With her own behavior revealed to her, she became a good girl. (The nurse who “happened” to be in the corridor had agreed to be part of the scene.)

Often, when someone came to Erickson with a control or addiction problem, he would not tell them to stop doing whatever they were doing, but to go on doing it more intensely. When a man came to him who wanted to lose weight and stop smoking and drinking, he did not tell him to cease any of these things. Instead, he ordered him to buy his food, cigarettes, and alcohol not from the local shops but from shops at least a mile away, so that frequent exercise would lead him to reconsider his habits.

A woman came to Erickson who weighed 180lb and wanted to weigh 130lb. She was stuck in a pattern of gaining then losing weight. Erickson said he would help her if she first made a promise. She agreed, and he told her to first
gain
weight until she reached 200lb. She fought against this, but once she had reached 200lb she was so desperate to be “allowed” to lose weight that she went down to 130lb without difficulty.

These examples of Erickson's “indirect” logic reveal his larger philosophy: You can only really get a person to change when they feel they “own” the change. Compared to coercion or instruction, change will always be more powerful and lasting this way.

A woman came to see Erickson who hated living in Phoenix, Arizona. Her husband wanted to go on holiday to Flagstaff (another city in Arizona), but she said she felt better staying in Phoenix and
hating
it than she did going else-where for relief. Erickson made her curious about why she hated Phoenix so much and why she punished herself with her thoughts. During a hypnosis session he told her to go to Flagstaff and watch for a “flash of color.” He secretly had nothing in mind he wanted her to see, but it made the woman curious, and when she found her flash of color (a red bird against a green background) she was elated.

Erickson wanted to change her mindset so that she would begin to see things she didn't normally see—in a deeper sense in addition to the physical faculty of vision. The woman ended up spending a month in Flagstaff, and thereafter went on vacations in different parts of America, looking for the “flash of color” that provided meaning. In one or two sessions, Erickson had facilitated a change from strong negative feeling to life-affirming curiosity.

If there is one thing that can be drawn from Erickson's work it is that inside each of us there is “something which knows.” He believed that every person had a healthy, powerful core, and that hypnosis was a useful tool in allowing this self to guide us again.

He illustrated this in an anecdote from his boyhood. One day a horse wandered onto the family property and they didn't know whose it was; it had no marks. Milton decided to mount the horse and take it back to the road, but instead of riding it different places to find the owner, he let the horse guide
him
. When the horse walked back to its owners' property, they asked how he knew it was theirs. He replied: “
I
didn't know—but the
horse
knew. All I did was keep him on the road.”

The “horse” is of course the unconscious mind, which if accessed in a trance state can solve any problem and return us to our true, powerful self. Erickson believed that most of our limitations are self-imposed, but that the barriers are mainly put up by our conscious mind. By accessing and reshaping the contents of our unconscious, we can reshape our lives. It is up to us to reprogram ourselves with information that is a better approximation of reality, not to be stuck with negative or twisted thought patterns.

Erickson's ability to pick up on tiny cues in a person's facial movements and body language often caused people to believe he was psychic. When he contracted polio at 17 he could hardly move, and with nothing else to do, he began watching and analyzing the behavior of his numerous siblings. He
noticed that sometimes when they said one thing they meant another, and that communication involved a lot more than merely speech. His famous ability to read people had begun.

If you have ever gone to a hypnotist to stop smoking, lose weight, or be cured of a phobia you are evidence that hypnosis is now respectable, and this is part of Erickson's legacy. His idea of “brief therapy”—that change can happen in an instant, instead of a patient spending years in psychoanalysis—is also now part of the psychotherapeutic landscape. In addition, his followers Richard Bandler and John Grinder went on to create neurolinguistic programming (NLP), a more codified version of Ericksonian techniques that has been taken up by business and personal coaches to provide an edge at work.

Yet as Rosen shows, Erickson was hardly technological in his approach. He recognized human beings as a story-telling species. A tale, myth, or anecdote is always the most effective way to express insights about life and personal transformation.