Through the Eyes of Iconoclasts Bert Hellinger and Milton Erickson Come Alive in New Books from Zeig/Tucker

Through the Eyes of Iconoclasts

Bert Hellinger and Milton Erickson Come Alive

in New Books from Zeig/Tucker

Charles Holton, LCSW

By now Milton Erickson, once the bad boy of psychiatry and radical innovator of hypnosis, has become an icon himself, and Erickson stories and fables have a ring of the familiar. Therapists sharing their favorites can sound a little like good old boys sharing fishing stories around the fire. The hot new therapy techniques have scientific-sounding acronyms or persuasive personalities with Oprah appearances driving them into public consciousness. It’s all very efficient and public, and a bit corporate.

What a refreshing difference it is to discover Bert Hellinger’s Love’s Hidden Symmetry and Acknowledging What Is, and The Letters of Milton Erickson edited by Jeff Zeig and Brent Geary. The former distill a lifetime of thought and practice in psychotherapy from a German iconoclast just coming into renown late in his career, the latter is a remarkable achievement in documentation, compiled from the private correspondence of a passionate and devoted activist.

While all three books are well-organized, one guesses this was not an easy task: neither man thinks or lives in conceptual containers. Both men think outside the box, and respond to clinical problems with not merely unorthodox approaches, but radical approaches in the deep sense of the word: they construct their responses from the root up. The difficulty with organizing theory around their work is that systematic intellectual articulation does not precede but rather comes after the gestalt of their vision and its organic responsiveness.

The beauty of this is the beauty of being part of the awakening of an emerging worldview and its vitality. These books are not museum exhibits, history lectures, or therapy primers: they are a chance to see life fresh and break habitual response sets. For Erickson, this originates in his refusal to accept the dominant psychoanalytic culture of mid-century as a given and to think for himself. For Hellinger, it comes from early resistance to the Nazi movement, spiritual and practical life as a missionary, a penchant for taking challenging positions, and an impatience for irrelevancies.

A challenging notion of Hellinger’s that immediately catches one’s attention is “The partner who is too good to be nasty destroys the relationship” in which he explicates his idea of positive revenge. Without getting even after a wrong, he suggests, a power imbalance persists which will make level communication impossible. This is characteristic of his empirical and practical approach, which embodies both primitive emotional and subtle spiritual truths. He adds, when revenge is taken, do a little less than was done to you, and when love is returned, add a little more. These notions are so different from the dominant style of psychotherapy in the United States that to even to consider them seriously demands you examine and articulate the foundations of your disagreement. On the other hand, you may notice obvious parallels with the therapeutic rituals developed by second-generation Ericksonians in the ‘80’s. Or perhaps you’ll make the connection with John Gottman’s research finding that reciprocity of negative affect “in kind” is common in successful marriages, while escalation of negativity predicts divorce. If your curiosity is whetted – and it will be, since clearly Hellinger is not merely being provocative but is speaking from conviction and experience – you will find yourself drawn into a unique and coherent worldview with surprising integrity and power.

Another unusual thread in Hellinger’s work is the depersonalization of therapy. My first encounter with this approach has been in the work of Stephen Gilligan and his informal aphorism, “Life is coming to get you, but don’t take it personally.” Hellinger’s language has a European, spiritual patina, and his vision has a tragic and inevitable quality. He talks about fate and how events percolate through family systems for many generations with the detachment of a geologist. He discourages cathartic parent-blaming or even much personal detail in the family constellations he creates. This sounds like it could be dehumanizing (or perhaps the Next Big Thing for managed care – therapy without personal details!) but in Hellinger’s hands what comes across is the commonality of universal experience. The need for accountability shifts from the distant and unreachable past to the vibrant, living present, where the client can see clearly and make real choices in his life today.

Some of the most fun parts of The Letters of Milton Erickson were his correspondence with famous people like Margaret Mead – his lengthy discussions of the nature of hypnosis could be published separately as a required monograph for students – and Stanley Milgram, who conducted the well-known experiments in which 90% of subjects were willing do deliver what they understood could have been lethal doses of (fake) electricity to screaming “victims” in the next room as long as the white-robed scientist leading the experiment assured them he would take responsibility for the outcome . Milgram explains the historical context of those experiments as his response to the post-World War II notion that Germans deference to the brutal Nazi agenda was peculiar to Germany : it could never happen here. Erickson sees the hypnotic ramifications, and the dialogue is engaging.

The greatest variety of Erickson’s personality shows up in his letters to Leslie LeCron as he offers editorial advice on the latter’s book on hypnosis. He comes across as alternately stern (he won’t help if LeCron’s intent is just to get another book written, only if the intent is to make a valuable contribution), supportive, even deferential (he wishes tangentially that LeCron could analytically treat Aldous Huxley’s psychogenic symptoms which are “beyond my abilities”), politically astute (urging LeCron to delete the section on telepathy to minimize the association of hypnosis with eccentric and cult phenomena), and pragmatic: asked about Mesmer’s philosophy he answers tersely “Mesmer was in error in what he believed. … I am more concerned about what he did.” He was even ironic, identifying himself as the world’s worst hypnotic subject, explaining he was always so rigorously and analytically conscious of what was occurring he couldn’t relax and let his unconscious take over. I would have to disagree and say that’s a fine example of a trance where both the conscious and unconscious minds are performing at a high level of excellence.

Kudos to the collaborators and editors of all three books: Zeig and Geary for Letters, Gabriele ten Hovel for Acknowledging What Is, Gunthard Weber and Hunter Beaumont for Love’s Hidden Symmetry. In each case, the books are well-organized and convenient to use. While the categories of the Erickson letters break up the chronological sequence, the coherence they offer and the ease they allow in finding letters increase its value as a reference work and preserve the narrative flow of each separate conversation. What a high standard is being set here in the inaugural catalog of the new mental health publishing house Zeig, Tucker & Company.

I find all three of these books to be rare opportunities to enter the very different minds of two great thinkers and doers. They are not, to be sure, protocols for how to treat your three o’clock client tomorrow. But, like successful art, they will, if you allow them to, open your eyes a little wider, make colors appear with a different sheen, give you a different slant on what you thought you knew, allow you to enjoy the process of questioning your assumptions, and finding with confidence what your sense of the world is.

For ordering information or a Zeig/Tucker catalog write Zeig, Tucker & Co., Inc. 3618 North 24^th Street Phoenix , AZ 85016 , call toll-free 1-877-850-1817, fax 602-522-1817 or email Orders@ZeigTucker.com