A Brief Note About Milton Erickson ( 1901 -1983)
Born into a poor farming community in Nevada, Milton Erickson M.D. didn't speak until he was four. Later, he was diagnosed with severe dyslexia; he was also profoundly tone deaf and colour blind. Like many people with such afflictions, he had to be tenacious in finding ingenious ways around these undoubted difficulties - which probably set the scene for his later prodigious achievements.
Originating from farming stock he was an energetic and observant boy who was struck down and paralysed for a year by Polio at seventeen. The doctors expected him to die.
He was often left for many hours whilst his family busied themselves about the farm and had ample opportunity to observe himself and others and to reflect what he noticed.
Gradually he noticed tiny spontaneous movements in his own inert body. He discovered how to amplify these responses by reconnecting them in his imagination with the activities of his active younger days. Then with a tenacious spirit he learned
to harness and direct this movement to achieve mobility in a body that had previously resisted all his considerable will-power.
He managed to rehabilitate himself completely in the space of a few months - and also to repeat this feat when the condition
recurred in his fifties. This early experience provided invaluable insights into ways we can guide unconscious process to regenerate ourselves physically, psychologically and emotionally.
It also proved invaluable in his medical and psychiatric practice in Phoenix Arizona, where he lived most of his professional life. Often he achieved results through simple and original means that amazed and mystified colleagues.
He influenced major thinkers like Gregory Bateson ( who did much early thinking on cybernetics ) and Margaret Mead, inspired many techniques now used in Neuro Linguistic Programming and laid the groundwork for early brief therapy innovations like the influential book Change by Paul Watzlovitz.
In his fifties he was struck a second time with polio. From
then onwards he had to detach himself from acute physical pain each day before he could work. This learning he was able to use to extraordinary effect in treating intransigent pain in others.
He published hundreds of books and papers, inspiring a world-wide movement which has developed brief, thorough, effective therapies for many distressing medical, psychological and personal adjustment problems. Discriminating readers of his work will easily appreciate his intellectual calibre from the lucidity of his literary style.
His singular achievement was to transform little understood and even worse exploited hypnotic processes from a means of public entertainment into a range of serious and powerful instruments and ethical procedures. In alliance with other therapeutic skills, and in the hands of a properly qualified therapist, these can confer lasting benefits on the experience
of living.
Copyright keith bibby august 2004 >> Return
