Erickson & Svengali


My first formal training in hypnosis came when I found a "school" which was actually two guys who'd set up some classes. One of them was a psychologist who had done some seminars with Milton Erickson, who was considered the greatest medical hypnotist in the world. That's a way of saying he was a doctor, and not just some Svengali. Erickson had transformed the entire field of hypnosis, from one in which there was a procedure to be followed to one in which there were underlying observations, or principles, allowing a more informal style of hypnosis.

In the book I read, and rewrote for my edification, by Pierre Clement, the old model of hypnosis was well explained. It was broken down into a pre-talk, an induction, a deepening, a suggestion, and of course you had to "wake them up" and, if you've implanted a post hypnotic suggestion that they quack like a duck when you touch your nose with your magic wand, you do the post hypnotic demonstration of the "power of hypnosis."

"What a quack!"

Actually I shouldn't denigrate the duck, as it is a symbol of unification, a powerful figure which can operate under the water, on the water, and in the air.

"Thank you. My bill will go with you ..."

Hypnosis has not been licensed, at least in California, because it can't really be defined. There is a creeping and, I think, insidious influence by some of the more self-promoting people to make anyone who practices get continuing certification from schools, and from a Board of Examiners. I was very lucky in working with a good psychologist first, before going to a heavily advertised and attended school for more hours, to gain a certificate as a Master Hypnotist and then a Hypno-therapist.

Let me give you one scene from this school, which, with enough lobbying of legislators, will probably be typical of what is required for somebody who wants to enter the field. There is a guest instructor who bills himself as "the greatest hypnotist in the world." He presents himself as having the power to force a trance on people, like an old style stage worker. Of course his power depended entirely on the students not knowing anything about hypnosis, and being gullible. We were paying for this, after all, and that in itself is a powerful suggestion. Pierre Clement explained it to Dutch: "The best outcome is insured by getting the money in advance."

The guest instructor was a joke, but maybe I was the only one who got it, having, as I said, learned something about the field before entering the school to get the wallpaper. He had five of us sit in chairs and he made a great dramatic production of putting us under, like a preacher saving a gaggle of hillbillies, and he went into a spiel about how our bodies were going limp and we were slipping out of the chairs onto the floor. I went along with it not because I had to, but because I didn't want to embarrass the old fart. Then he began to say we were frozen to the floor and could not get up. "Try to get up!"

Well, I'd had enough of it. I got up and went back to where I'd been sitting, and I'll be goddamned if they didn't applaud, as if I'd done some kind of Houdini trick or something. That was when I realized that you just cannot underestimate the willingness of people to do what's expected of them by an authority figure. In fact, stage hypnosis depends entirely on choosing the right people to bring up on stage. As the hypnotist talks to the group, he notices those people who are most suggestible. For example if he's saying something and you're sort of nodding your head, he sees that. So you're expected to follow suggestions and go along with the show if called up for service.

That is not to say that traditional hypnosis isn't real. It is real and it is powerful, but it is communication, and it depends on the suggestibility of the subject. That's why engineers are hard to hypnotize. They don't shut down the rational process so easily. So one of the tenants in hypnosis used to be that there are about thirty percent of people who can't be hypnotized. That means about seven of ten people are nice enough to do what they're told, and when you are told, "Try to get up," you are not expected to get up.

To try is to make an unsuccessful attempt.

If you follow the suggestion you won't get up, you will simply try to get up. So long as you are not conscious of the literal meaning of the suggestion, and the literal understanding of the unconscious, you can't get up I suppose. But it seems like a moot point, really, because the field of hypnosis supposedly concentrates on making people more empowered, not gluing them to the floor to inflate a self-promoting old toad. Imagine that guy trying to pick up somebody in a bar. I'd like to have a surveillance video of that.

The other teachers in the "advanced" school were also pieces of work. One of them was focused, always, on the little child, the inner child, and her suggestions turned anybody she got hold of into an infant. She was childless, perhaps because she would have devoured an infant with overweening mothering -- the classic gingerbread house in the woods -- so she created children like preparing cakes and puddings. At one session she actually lost it and became irrational, while the class sat in mute shock, waiting for her to come back together and hoping she didn't go berserk and sink her teeth into some especially passive victim.

It reminded me of Bandler and Grinder observing a priest doing exorcisms, and seeing that he was in fact destabilizing his victims and creating all these personalities under the guise of flushing them out, like partridges, so that the Lord could have a clear shot at them. This was the kind of training that allowed me to get a piece of paper to hang on the wall, attesting I'd spent the required hours for setting up a practice. It was interesting that the only relatively sane, but not exceptionally talented, teacher talked a lot about how you can't really hurt anybody with hypnosis. That is subject to debate.

It was a matter of great luck that I studied with a good psychologist, and intelligent person, first. He understood that putting somebody in a trance is like putting somebody under anesthesia. It's part of a larger procedure, and it's really not about you and your powerful technique.

This is where Ericksonian hypnosis differs most markedly from the older form. Erickson could just talk to somebody and they went in and out of hypnosis, because people do that anyway. The difference was that he understood some of the things that naturally put someone in a trance. For example, Confusion is one technique he used. If you talk about something that another person can't understand, eventually their conscious mind will get tired and just shut down. This is acknowledged in everyday communication when someone says, "I can't talk about that subject with most people; their eyes just glaze over and they go away."

They go into a trance because they have just been inducted by a Confusion technique. But then what? In order to make that useful, a suggestion is implanted during the trance, which is sometimes just a moment. That's all that's needed. "Why don't you make yourself a little more comfortable?" That's a suggestion that the person stop trying to end the confusion and just let it go. That happens all the time in sales presentations, police interrogations, examinations by attorneys, etc. They don't need to know that they are using hypnotic technique to know what works. "Just sign the confession and this will all be over."

Another technique used by Erickson was to embed a suggestion in what the surface mind perceives as ordinary conversation. For example, if I want to say to somebody with writers block, "Write something. Amplify some idea." I will get resistance if I put it directly because the block insists that what is to be written has to be part of some larger process held in consciousness. But of course consciousness cannot hold the larger process. It's not that well time integrated. So I drone on awhile about how I once had a teacher in college who had writer's block, and he told me a story about how for years he was trying to write something that would make his reputation. One day he was sitting in a cafe, listening to a conversation at a nearby table, trying to amplify some idea because he was getting desperate, nothing was coming to his head, and then there was an explosion. The gas water heater had exploded in the kitchen and the cook ran out screaming because the blast blew the hot grease out of the frying well onto his hands and arms.

Well, I could go on and on of course, because what I am doing is demonstrating "stacked reality," which is another hypnotic technique of Erickson's and which is related to Confusion and also Age Regression. By moving from the present moment back to a college and then to a cafe, the realities are "stacked." It begins to create time disorientation, which takes advantage of the weakness of the conscious mind to deal with time. It also tends to create an age regression by association, assuming the blocked writer went to college and wrote in cafes. (This information would already be known.) But there is another, really subtle technique by which certain phases or words are emphasized to create a separate message, picked up by the unconscious mind.

In this case I started out with the intention to simply use, "Write something, amplify some idea." At the point where these simply suggestions come up, they can be "marked." In actual practice I would use more than two in order to create a visible pattern. I could mark, "nothing was coming to his head, and then there was an explosion." One easy way to mark a word or phrase is to simply move the head so that the sound comes from a different place for the marked passages. Another would be to clear the throat or simply move the index finger up at the beginning of the mark and down at the end of the mark.

The technique is up to the individual and only limited by his or her creativity. The point is that there is no formal induction required and no "convincers" required. A convincer is a suggestion which the person has to follow because they are confined to a literal meaning, being bereft of the ordinary filters provided by the critical faculties. In people with weak or no critical faculties no hypnosis is necessary. The mere presence of an authority figure is sufficient to overwhelm any resistance to suggestion.

If you say, "Just write something for chrissakes, take some idea and amplify it. You do that and instead of sitting there with your head empty, you'll have an explosion of creativity," you'll likely get a baleful look and a reiteration of how the problem is causing pain and angst. So you have to bake a cake with a file in it and slip it past the guards, so that the problem can be solved from the inside.

Posted: Thu - April 5, 2007 at 02:41 PM