Milton Erickson: Would You Shake this Man's Hand?

Milton Erickson invented a special hypnotic handshake. He describes the beginning like this:

The letting loose becomes transformed from a firm grip into a gentle touch by the thumb, a lingering drawing away of the little finger, a faint brushing of the subject's hand with the middle finger - just enough vague sensation to attract the attention. As the subject gives attention to the touch of your thumb, you shift to a touch with your little finger. As your subject's attention follows that, you shift to a touch with your middle finger and then again to the thumb.

After more mysterious steps, the other person's hand is left suspended in mid air, and they are paralyzed in general, occasionally being guided to other phenomena. And it doesn't take much reading between the lines to see that the person shaking his hand usually didn't exactly agree to be hypnotized by him. Erickson notes in passing:

There are several colleagues who won't shake hands with me, unless I reassure them first, because they developed a profound glove anaesthesia when I used this procedure on them.

Running into Erickson, in the faculty lounge say, how keen would you be to accept his friendly handshake offer?

Milton Erickson was a clinical psychologist who died in 1980, having enormously influenced psychiatry, psychology, and the understanding of hypnosis. His hypnotic handshake is symbolic of both sides of Erickson that I got from reading his book, Hypnotic Realities (1976): Erickson had eerie insight into the workings of the human unconscious, and he sometimes used it in ways that are disrespectful of people's autonomy.

Hypnotic Realities is an extraordinary book. It was recommended to me by MrDream, and I can see why it might be the best way to encounter Erickson: rather than glowing stories of patient cures and his outsized personality, most of the content is transcripts of actual hypnotic sessions by Erickson, integrated with detailed discussions and deconstructions, sometimes literally line by line, by Erickson and his colleague Ernest Rossi. Even without Erickson's striking manner of speaking and personal aura, I could feel the power of some of his formulations:

Now physical comfort exists, but your don't even need to pay attention to your relaxation and comfort.

Please let me know when that feeling of warmth develops in your hand.

Do you think you're awake?

Something has happened to your left hand.

Now the important achievement for you is to realize that everybody does not know their capacities. (pause) And you have to discover these capacities in whatever slow way you wish.

Eveyrone has had the experience of nodding their head "yes" or shaking it "no" even without quite realizing it.

That's a little taste of Ericksonian language, although they're even more compelling in the flow of the transcribed session. You notice that the language could not be more different than a stage hypnotist, and in fact the flow is utterly different too: there is often nothing that resembles a traditional induction - he just talks for a while - and trances most often take their own course, gently nudged along by his masterful indirect suggestions. As one example, he will encourage visual hallucination, without telling the hypnotee what to hallucinate. So what they report afterwards is a complete surprise to him.

If there's any hypnotist in history that today's recreational hypnotists can name and explicitly claim as an influence, it's Erickson. My understanding is that he made at least two enormous contributions:

1. He argued that depth of trance and suggestibility are not the same thing. Someone can be completely zonked, and not respond to a particular suggestion for a whole variety of reasons. And someone could respond well to a well crafted suggestion even when not really in a trance. The important thing is knowing how to speak to the unconscious mind.
2. He discovered how to talk to the unconscious mind. A huge host of principles and tactics and even bits of phrases that hypnotists use today can be traced back to him: truisms, leading questions, double binds, and many others. (which  also formed the foundation of NLP, I believe)

I had heard of Erickson, originally from a section in Wiseguy's book that didn't clarify much, but I first started to get an idea of what he was about when MrDream used one of his techniques on me at Deepmind Darkwood, when I was not in a trance. (with my consent) He simply sat across from me and began with, "Which of your feet feels more stuck to the ground?" Then when, after a few more words, he told me my feet were free, I felt like they really had been stuck! The opening is what Erickson called a double bind, and appears in this book almost word for word.

I'm so excited about this book. It's answering so many of my questions. For example, how to achieve good results with people who aren't particularly suggestible. Well unlike stage hypnotists, Erickson set himself to hypnotize everyone who wanted to be (and some who didn't). And direct suggestions don't work for everyone. So he comes at the hypnotee from the side, making statements that seem innocuous to the conscious mind while they have the intended effects on the unconscious: "Suggestions are statements that the patient cannot possibly argue with." There's a recognition that hypnotees are different in infinite ways, and that the hypnotists must take a great deal of trouble to attend to every microreaction and tune in, since "hypnotic suggestions are effective only to the degree that they can activate, block, or alter the functioning of natural mental mechanisms and associations already existing within the patient."

Since Erickson is already an important teacher for me, it's important to examine what kind of attitudes I might inadvertently absorb along with the technique. Erickson was potentially more dangerous than the proverbial ethically-challenged online hypnotist douche for one reason: his shit worked.

I have to say, though, that he doesn't come across as the patriarchal nightmare I was expecting from my glancing knowledge of other oldschool psychologists. It helps that his actual therapeutic approach is based on the idea that the therapist doesn't necessarily know better than the patient what they need, and that the therapist's role, whether using hypnosis or not, is to help them break themselves out of self-defeating patterns they're stuck in, or "depotentiating habitual frames of reference" (got to love the jargon). So that calls for playful, open-ended trances, with the hypnotee doing much of the guiding. Not much room for therapist as god, or anything like the power imbalance of the stage or fictional hypnotist.

But as might be expected from someone who goes around giving non-consensual hypnotic handshakes, there are a few things even in this book that were red flags to me. He loves to initiate trances and amnesia without warning or discussion, including one instance of inducing amnesia for an educational hypnotic session he did with a fellow psychologist when it was in fact against her wishes. He simply decided it would be better if her unconscious, rather than her conscious mind, worked away at the lessons. In another case, he gives a hypnotee the sensation of being topless, without it having been discussed, or any kind of sexiness being established between them. It's notable that every one of the five or six hypnotees is a woman.

The situation gets worse with his wikipedia page (which shows clear signs of ideological editing warfare), as in his own case report:

"Now you need to know how to undress and go to bed in the presence of a man. So start undressing." Slowly, in an almost automatic fashion, she undressed. I had her show me her right breast, her left breast, her right nipple, her left nipple. Her belly button. Her genital area. Her knees. Her gluteal [buttock] regions. I asked her to point where she would like to have her husband kiss her. I had her turn around [naked]. I had her dress slowly. She dressed. I dismissed her.

This and other anecdotes hint that he might have been a stealth hypnofetishist, and one without a lot of respect for boundaries or consent. At the very least, there's a lack of recognition of the power position he puts himself in as the hypnotist and influencer. Other anecdotes talk about him influencing his students' and colleagues' lives, as well as his patients', with prescriptive suggestions intended to make their lives better. It's clear he got off on that, at some level, which is what bothers me about practically all famous, influential psychologists I have read about.

The great gift the kink world has given me is learning that it's ok to want to feel powerful and have strange influence over your partner's thoughts and actions, as long as that person is in on it, and properly consents. You don't have to be sneaky about it - and in fact if you are feeling sneaky, that probably means something is very wrong.

But even though I have no interest in therapy - or nudging the lives of the people around me via hypnosis for what I consider to be their own good - studying Erickson will be extremely important for my progress. Since my focus is erotic hypnosis, my goals fall somewhere between the stage hypnotist and Ericksonian nearly undirected healing trances (though some of that is an illusion, as he subtly exerts control). I do want to achieve specific effects, but there are a wide range of effects that please me, and already I've experienced plenty of surprises delightfully arising from my trance partner's mind. Where I can learn the most is about how to work with the inexperienced and doubting person, building that person's hypnotic capabilities cumulatively over time and carefully avoiding giving the impression of having "failed". I saw MrDream achieve startling effects in that realm (including with me!), and in other Deepmind Darkwood trances, and now that I've read this book I'm convinced that Erickson holds the key to truly understanding and communicating with the unconscious.