Story of the Week, Milton Erickson, Master of Healing Stories
July 5, 2009
Milton Erickson was the greatest medical hypnotherapist in history. He was known for his legendary ability to read people and to produce change in even the most unworkable patients.
Erickson was a Master Storyteller who did much of his most powerful work using stories. Milton used metaphor to anchor effective attitudes, self-images and behaviors for people who did not know how to find these experiences for themselves. Many of Milton’s stories were healing reframes which allowed people to find new possibilities that were not previously in the picture.
Erickson was a classically trained psychiatrist who specialized in medical hypnosis and family therapy. He was the founding president of the American Society for Clinical Hypnosis.
He is noted for his approach to the unconscious mind as creative and solution-generating. He is also noted for influencing brief therapy, strategic family therapy, family systems therapy,solution focused brief therapy. He was an important influence on Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP), which was in part based upon his working methods.
Milton grew up in Lowell, Wisconsin in a modest farming family, and intended to become a farmer like his father. He was a late developer, and was both dyslexic and colorblind. He overcame his dyslexia, and had many other inspirations via a series of spontaneous autohypnotic “flashes of light” or creative moments. At age 17, he contracted polio, and was so severely paralyzed that the doctors believed he would die. But his remarkable recovery was formative in his life and work.
Erickson identified many of his earliest personal experiences as hypnotic or autohypnotic. Milton was a classic ‘wounded healer’, whose own difficulties informed his work with others.
There are many famous stories about Erickson’s work. He worked with the most difficult and unreachable patients and was known to cure thousands of people. He was noted for his ability to utilize anything about a patient to help them change, including their beliefs, favorite words, cultural background, personal history, or even their neurotic habits.
Through conceptualizing the unconscious as highly separate from the conscious mind, with its own awareness, interests, responses, and learnings, he taught that the unconscious mind was creative, solution-generating, and often positive. 
Erickson frequently drew upon his own experiences to provide examples of the power of the unconscious mind. He was largely self-taught and a great many of his anecdotal and autobiographical teaching stories are collected in the book, My Voice Will Go With You.
Near the end of his life, Erickson was known for speaking mostly in story. As one of his patients said, “He would illustrate everything through a little story”. A client would go see him and he would just talk and tell stories the whole time and then later many mysterious changes would happen in their lives.
He was truly the great Master of the art of healing Storytelling. Many people, including myself, model their work after his legacy. I am grateful for his work and the legacy of story that he left behind.
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