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CH: How has your sense of Erickson's work ripened over the years?
JZ: I first met Erickson in 1973, and at the time was 26 years old, so I would say my perspectives have ripened over time. Technically, I would say I've developed much more sensitivity to the process of therapy. At first I was more interested in Erickson as a technician, and tried to learn the specifics of the techniques that he had pioneered - how do you do the confusion technique, how do you do a hypnotic induction, how do you do a symptom prescription - and then, in my evolution, I started becoming attuned to Erickson's brilliance in creating a dramatic process of change. It wasn't just the technique, it was what he did before, and what he did after, that determined some of the power of the intervention. A more recent phase of evolution has been an understanding of postures in Erickson, orientations that he took as a person in the world that were integral to the way that he did therapy. For example, you can take the concept of utilization, and you can think of it as being a technique. But if you do, I believe you miss an essential aspect of utilization, which is to conceive of it as an orientation - maybe even conceive it as a trance. The therapist gets into the first trance, which is a utilization trance. Taking on utilization as a posture rather than a method gives you much more of the sense of its depth. So my more recent evolution has been to emulate some of the postures, the orientations, that Erickson took, in a way that fits with my personality.
CH: It reminds me of Dvorah Simon's paper on "Solution-focused
Therapy as Spiritual Practice" where she talks about the importance of the intent that you hold, the orientation that you hold, that makes you a solution-focused therapist, not whether you ask the miracle question. Maybe like Noam Chomsky discovering the deep grammars common to languages, we're gradually uncovering a healing structure common to different therapy approaches and models.
ZG: I think the way of being a therapist counts for more of the variance in successful or unsuccessful therapy than the way of doing therapy.
Q: Last year Cloe Madanes illustrated her ideas about the use of money in therapy with a video of a piece of work you did with a Jewish woman terrified to fly to Germany to do a professional presentation. She was also gnawing terribly at her fingers. After building up intense anticipation by promising her at the very beginning of the session you had an intervention that would cure the gnawing, you absolutely shocked her with your suggestion that she mail a small donation to the American Nazi Party every time she exceeded her self-defined maximum number of chews on her fingers. Technically, it was a beautiful illustration of several classical Ericksonian interventions, especially in the absence of the kind of talking about feelings that people associate with traditional psychotherapy. Yet one of the most extraordinary qualities of that piece of work was the rapport between you, and the tenderness. You ended the work by singing her a children's song that you said you used to sing to your daughter when she was little. Even there, you could talk about how technically you were activating a child ego state, deflecting her attention from her shame about her raw fingers, and hypnotically providing a corrective emotional experience. I'm wondering, though, how you were thinking about or sensing your relatedness, your connection with her, and how generally you approach relatedness to the client in your work?
A: As a matter of fact, I just got a note from the patient saying that she has had no problems with her fingers - her nails have grown long - and also the anxiety has been quelled. She described going through a family life-cycle transition that under normal circumstances would have been stressful , but she just went right through it. So there was a generalized change, not only in her symptom, but also in her emotionality.
Now the contact was something that I was very conscious of. I was thinking hard when I was doing that session about the process - how was I going to offer her the guaranteed cure that I had promised her earlier in the session? There was a series of steps I was taking, which were methodical, building up to the point where I could present that intervention. And then there were a series of steps that I took to follow through. As a matter of fact, in that therapy, there was a novel use of hypnosis, which was that I used hypnosis as the desert, rather than as the entree, or even as the main course. The hypnosis followed the therapy, was part of the follow through.
The contact was intense. Part of that was due to the setting - we were in a cavernous meeting room with seven thousand chairs and one or two thousand people present - I couldn't even tell because of the lights. So we were being observed by all these people, and the camera, in this intimate moment. Also the contact was enhanced by the fact that I'm Jewish, which I alluded to by using some Yiddish phrases early in the session. I couldn't have easily done that intervention if I wasn't Jewish, asking her to send money to the American Nazi Party - which, of course, I never wanted her to do.
So part of my thinking was, this woman had been free before. And so she could be free again. All I had to do was to have faith in her ability to be free of that troublesome habit, and in my ability to utilize all she was bringing to me, and set up a situation where it would clearly be ego-dystonic for her to anything self-destructive. I think the contact was enhanced around that idea of faith. I knew she could do it. I knew that I could be there as an agent of helping her to change.
Then, in the forefront of my mind is a hallucination of Virginia Satir, who I didn't know so well, but well enough to know she was a genius at making contact with people. You could be in an auditorium as part of a lecture that she was doing and still feel the tremendous power of the contact that Virginia could muster. The contact was such an integral part of the therapy that she did. Truthfully, I've been more of a cerebral person, yet in my own personal evolution I've tried to be more humanistic and contactful. So I was there. Like the old story about when Erickson set up his office on Cypress Street with only two bridge chairs and a card table, and someone asked him how he could set up an office with such paltry furnishings, and he said, "Yes, but I was there."
CH: It's funny how the meaning of that response has changed for me over the years. I remember first hearing it as Erickson's almost arrogant confidence. If you think of it as him valuing the quality of connection, and seeing relationship as a healing force, it's not arrogant at all, it's just saying the relationship will be there no matter what furniture is present.
JZ: Moving from "I was there" to "I was there."
CH: Yeah. Over the years you've edited everybody who's made a significant contribution to Ericksonian psychotherapy, so your overview of the field is really comprehensive. What do you feel are your unique understandings and emphases of Erickson's legacy?
JZ: I've edited or co-edited fourteen books and five monographs that appear in nine languages. Most of those are about Erickson and practically all of them contain something about Ericksonian psychotherapy - the ones on brief therapy, on the evolution of psychotherapy, and on eclectic psychotherapy still contain work on Erickson. In my contributions to those books I have emphasized utilization. I think the concept of utilization is so essential to Erickson. Now every great practitioner, no matter what the discipline - psychodynamic, Gestalt, family systems - utilizes, but Erickson brought the concept of utilization into the forefront in a way no therapist had historically and no-one has done subsequently. So I think there's an awful lot in the orientation of utilization that is still unmined. I've tried to make my professional contribution a way of shining a lens on this concept, bringing it to the forefront, talking about utilizing the context, the symptom-pattern, utilizing the patient's values, the history, the family systems, utilizing symptom words by turning them into solution words. So I've been exploring facets of utilization in my contribution. I think it's where I've contributed the most to the corpus of work on Erickson as an explicator.
CH: Do you have any favorites among the books you've worked on?
JZ: The first book I edited was A Teaching Seminar with Milton H. Erickson and I still think it sheds an interesting light on Erickson as a teacher. Certainly he was a genius as a therapist, and also at doing hypnosis, but his genius as a teacher hasn't been mined much, either. I once said to him after listening to an old lecture that I couldn't get much out if because the whole thing seemed like one big hypnotic induction. He said, "Jeff, I never listen to those old lectures. I didn't teach content. I taught to motivate." It shocked me - it hadn't occurred to me, as someone who is more cerebral and teaches more content, that you could teach to motivate.
CH: Teaching process.
JZ: Mm-hmm.
CH: The conclusion of your article on utilization in Ericksonian Methods: The Essence of the Story states, "Once the therapist assumes the posture of utilization, the therapist will naturally develop techniques such as sequences, symptom words, and idioms." I was struck by that line's similarity to a favorite quote of mine by Vietnamese Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh describing nonviolent political activism: "Out of love and the willingness to act selflessly … techniques for a nonviolent struggle arise naturally. … If you are alert and creative, you will know what to do. The basic requisite is that you have the essence, the substance of nonviolence and compassion in yourself. Then everything you do will be in the direction of non-violence."
JZ: When I was in my early twenties I worked for the Institute for the Study of Non-violence which was set up by Joan Baez in Palo Alto, California. Ellen Bader (In Quest of the Mythical Mate) and I worked there, and I steeped myself in Ghandian non-violent tradition, which he called satya graha, or "truth-force." So I agree with Thich Nhat Hanh that the orientation comes first. It's a problem, because in many ways in contemporary psychotherapy is becoming manualized. There are treatment protocols and therapy is thought of as being a linear endeavor that leads to a researchable solution. Mostly therapy is being thought of as an algorithm. You do these steps, you work out this mathematical process, and you get to a finite endpoint. When I first asked Erickson in 1978 for a quote that we could put on the brochure for the first Congress he said extemporaneously, "Each person is a unique individual, hence psychotherapy should be formulated to meet the uniqueness of the individual's needs rather than tailoring the person to fit the Procrustean bed of a hypothetical theory of human behavior." To Erickson, life was a dynamic process, hence therapy was going to be a dynamic process, and there wasn't going to be any algorithm that would really help. It's a terrible thing to say, because it makes me an anachronism in the contemporary therapy world based so much on this concept of manualized treatment.
CH: I think you're not alone. I'm hoping you'll be less and less alone in the emphasizing of process and relationship and quality of relatedness as where therapy comes from, and where training should focus. I think you'll find an enthusiastic audience here in April. I think that's one of the things people resonated with in Steve Gilligan's training last year. And people appreciated that it didn't collude with bottom-line emphases. Someone commented it was the first workshop they'd been to in years where managed care wasn't mentioned. That's what I like about the quote from your article, the emphasis on therapy. I feel as though there's a resurgence of interest in real psychotherapy, as though we're breaking out of a kind of negative trance that it's about numbers and bottom-line, and waking up to human values and attention to quality of life, dynamic processes without endpoints. Hopefully we can carry that part of Erickson's legacy forward with some vigor.
CH: Do you ever surprise yourself in a therapy session with a response you only understand later, one that comes from outside your usual ways of thinking?
JZ: Yes, I love those moments. Camus used to say that he loved to write because there were moments in writing when suddenly his hands started to flow across the page and something came out that shocked him and he realized there was something inside him that was much greater than he was. Can't think of a good story about one of those moments at the moment, though.
CH: Is there anything you're reading that's exciting to you now?
JZ: Well, I'm starting a publishing company, Zeig/Tucker, with Suzy Tucker, the ex-acquisitions editor of Brunner/Mazel so I'm doing massive amounts of reading in all different areas of psychotherapy. I like to fashion myself as an integrative psychotherapist, because there's not a day I don't use techniques from transactional analysis, family systems, Gestalt, and psychodynamics. We're trying to bring together ideas from many sources, both theoretically and also clinically. We'll be putting out our first book in April called Love's Hidden Symmetry by Bert Hellinger, a systems therapists in Germany - his book has sold like a hundred thousand copies there, he's really a force in contemporary German therapy. He's also weaved his way into contemporary German culture. So we're introducing some of the rather controversial approach that Hellinger has in this forst book. I think it'll make a bit of a stir on the American scene. And Jon Karlson is setting up a video series on brier therapy for us. And I'm working on a book of Erickson's correspondence with Bret Geary which Zeig/Tucker will publish. It'll include his correspondence with Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Jay Haley - kind of a history of twentieth-century hypnosis.
CH: Is there any context you'd like to set for folks who will attend your workshop on Self-Development of the Clinician this April?
JZ: I've done countless workshops since 1977 in thirty-two or so different countries teaching psychotherapy and hypnosis and the latest component of my teaching is this idea of helping people to be better therapists rather than just do competent psychotherapy. It's my favorite workshop. It's an experiential program. I taught a piece at the December Erickson Congress that we had here in Phoenix on communicating for effect; I've taught others on utilization, and on improving acuity. At the workshop we'll be covering these comprehensively. They're methods not only to help evolve the therapist, but also to help evolve the therapy, because the techniques that we'll experience at the workshop are readily applicable to the process of therapy. You'll be able to take them and use them to make the therapy immediately more experiential and more impactful. I hope people will have a great time, and come away with a different orientation, and some very practical approaches that they can immediately integrate into their practice of therapy no matter what school of therapy they're doing. They don't have to be schooled in Ericksonian therapy, they don't have to be schooled in hypnosis. Generally anybody in the helping professions will benefit from the teaching.
CH: Sounds terrific. Thanks so much for the conversation.
JZ: Pleasure talking with you, too.
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© 1998 Chuck Holton All rights reserved.