Hypnosis: Erickson and the Start of Conversational Covert Hypnosis

The question then arises, how do we make changes in a subjects unconscious mind? How are we even able to communicate at that level? This is where hypnosis and trance come in. In the hypnotized state we gain access to that level of the mind where the patterns that dictate our behaviours are stored. Much of the time it is not even necessary that the subject understands consciously the changes being made. In fact, in many cases it is not even desirable that they do so. Once the conscious, analytical mind gets involved it will have a tendency to undo much of the work done by over analyzing the intervention.

Originally, Erickson would hypnotize his patients in much the same way as other’s had done before him but gradually, over an extended period of time, his style became more and more subtle and more and more conversational in nature. At times the client would not even be aware of having been hypnotized at all. They would leave his office with a vague notion of having had a pleasant chat with an interesting doctor but would be completely unaware of the interventions made.

Towards the latter years of his life even this level of trance induction became subtler. Erickson began to realize how naturally hypnotic well told stories can be and how, by utilizing this natural form of trance induction, a formal induction would be rendered unnecessary. Listening to stories takes us back to childhood and evokes from us that state of child like wonder and fascination. Sometimes this is all that is needed in order to open up channels of communication with a subject’s unconscious mind. Erickson’s stories would be in the form of multi level metaphors, he would tell stories within stories within stories. Erickson would simultaneously be interweaving suggestions and embedded commands into the narrative whilst the listener would find themselves in that fascinated and absorbed state that one finds oneself when listening to well told stories.

With Erickson we come to a whole new level of understanding of the phenomenon that is hypnosis. Rather than some special state that one can only experience by being induced by a powerful and mysterious hypnotist it is, on the contrary, a perfectly natural state that go into and out of all the time. Erickson often said that the problem was not so much getting people into trance but getting them out of the self induced trances they spend their lives in! Our beliefs and expectations often beguile us to the extent that we see the world through these self limiting filters. From an Ericksonian point of view often the real task of hypnotherapy is to de-hypnotize people so they can free themselves of such self limiting beliefs and expectations.

By the end of his life Erickson’s reputation as a healer had spread far and wide and thus he came to the attention of the founders of NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming), Richard Bandler and John Grinder. These two modeled Erickson’s methods and thus began a whole new phase in the history and understanding of hypnotic phenomena. Their story will be the subject of the next article in this series.