Before beginning his induction that evening, Erickson purposely arranged the seating of the people in the room. A short time later he rearranged the seating, having Sue move each time. His later comment on this was, “I put her in the chair that I later sat in, then I shifted her to the couch. I was in her place. And she had obeyed me by shifting to the couch. She’d put me in her place, with all its subtle implications. If there had been some other chair there, even if it had been more convenient to sit in it, I would have sat in her chair. The shifting prior to that implied that if there is prior shifting, there can be subsequent shifting. I introduced the idea of shifting earlier to make it completely acceptable. Then there is no chance that she is going to resist the shift.” He also pointed out that on the couch Sue sat in a position where a good subject had been sitting. The transcript of the recording of the comments on the induction, and the induction itself, follows:

The hypnotic subject, who will be called Sue here, was not entirely a naive hypnotic subject. A stage hypnotist had tried to hypnotize her and rejected her, giving her the idea that she was a poor hypnotic subject. Dr. Erickson reports, “I met her for the first time at Dr. M’s. I looked her over and nodded to Dr. M that she would make a good subject, and I indicated that later I wanted Dr. M to work on her. This was done by signals that Sue could not see. I went ahead on this occasion to work with another subject, and then I asked Sue to sit down in a chair beside me. I asked her if she’d like to be hypnotized, and she said, ‘Yes, but I’m not a good subject.’ I told her I thought she was a very good subject. I took hold of her arm and tested it for catalepsy. At the same time I tried to get some eye fixation. There was a fairly responsive eye fixation, then she shook her head and said, ‘I don’t think I can be hypnotized.’ I asked her if she wanted Dr. M to work on her, and she did, so Doctor M had her look at the reflection of the light on the doorknob. Dr. M worked quite hard with her and produced practically no results. There was closing of the eyelids, but no catalepsy, no hand levitation, and rather restless behavior. When Dr. M told her to arouse, she explained that she wasn’t so sure she had gone into a trance, but that she had tried very hard to cooperate. Perhaps she ‘cooperated too hard.’ She didn’t think she would make a good subject, even though Dr. Erickson said she would. She thought that perhaps I had made a mistake. The next time hypnosis was attempted was in her home. I had two good subjects there, and Sue really watched both of them. She was the hostess and was answering the telephone and worrying about the children making a noise. She said, ‘I’d like to be hypnotized, but I’m afraid I can’t be.’ I asked her to sit down and be a subject. She sat down, and I tried to hypnotize her. She was restless and said, ‘I can’t be hypnotized, I’m no good as a subject. I’m really not listening to you. I don’t think I could be a subject, but I’d really like to be one.’ That was the second effort. This recording constitutes the third attempt.”

This discussion was initiated by Jay Haley and John Weakland as part of their research on the Communications Research Project directed by Gregory Bateson. The project was financed by the Macy Foundation, administered by Stanford University, and located at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Palo Alto, California. The “double bind” mentioned in this paper is discussed in “Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia,” Behavioral Science, 1, No. 4, 1956.

One evening in 1956 Milton H. Erickson hypnotized a subject during a weekly seminar he conducted in Phoenix. This trance induction was recorded. The following day he listened to the recording and discussed the induction with Jay Haley and John Weakland. This conversation was also recorded. What follows is a verbatim transcript of the two recordings: the trance induction recording is presented in the first column; the conversation about the trance induction (as the initial tape is played back) is given in the second.

The art of offering hypnotic suggestions in such fashion that the subject can accept them and then respond to them is difficult to explain. As an approach to this involved task, the following exposition of a trance induction is offered to clarify in some ways how suggestions are offered, presumably why they are effective, the methods that may be utilized to integrate one suggestion with others and to incorporate various responses into others, and to demonstrate the readiness with which communication with a subject can be established at various levels, both separate and distinct as well as interrelated. The situation and procedure are given in the full detail afforded by tape recordings, together with a brief explanatory introduction, with only that editing requisite to make the conversational situation intelligible to the reader.

Transcript of a Trance Induction With Commentary

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Milton H. Erickson, Jay Haley, and John H. Weakland

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Reprinted with permission from The American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, October,

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1959, 2, 49-84.

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Similarly, if a client discussing her memory of abuse says, “I feel frozen in that moment, and I need to get some distance from it,” she needs to allow her still image of the event to become a movie, so that it can change as time passes and then recede into the distance, becoming smaller, dimmer, and less disturbing. This approach isn’t rocket science, nor is it neuroscience. Instead, it’s a simple matter of finding out exactly what the structure of someone’s personal experience of a problem is—rather than the content within that structure—and then experimenting with useful ways to change it.

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If you’re really listening to your clients, you’ll realize that they’re often being quite specific about what their problem is and what kind of solution would be useful. If a client speaking about his wife’s infidelity says, “It’s in my face, and I’d really like to put it behind me,” that isn’t just a metaphor: he’s telling you that the image of his wife enjoying sex with someone else is right in front of him, where he can’t possibly ignore it, and that if the same image were literally moved far behind him, where it would be less obtrusive, he’d pay less attention to it and respond less intensely.