The February Man: Evolving Consciousness and Identity in Hypnotherapy

Milton H Erickson, M.D.

Ernest Lawrence Rossi, Ph.D.

Review by Charles Holton, LCSW

If we are to learn to emulate something of the process of his creative work – rather than merely copying by rote the contents of his therapeutic method – the lesson is clear: Take delight in your growing awareness of how people all around you develop in everyday life; enjoy the surprise and humor inherent in helping your ‘patients’ learn to recognize and utilize these life lessons; and cherish the birthright of each succeeding generation to create its own unique patterns of consciousness and understanding. – Rossi, p. 88.

Two characteristics of Erickson’s practice strike me as central to his work with the pregnant woman in February Man. First, the unflagging confidence he brings to the relationship provides container for troubling experience. “And is there anything else you’d like to talk about?” He gently presses for detail on worries and fears, never avoiding or rushing past them. He reassures the client’s anticipation that “Maybe you’ll think I’m awful” with a present tense statement, “No, I’m quite sure I do not.” Second, his relentless emphasis of the details of growth and development. Whenever the client brings up a painful subject Erickson immediately provides both some distance and an experiential “double description” by wondering how the client will feel about it at some future time. He refers back to traumas from earlier regressions during each later regression, celebrating shifts in attitude and perspective: “You are really getting grown-up ideas. They are better than those scared feelings, aren’t they? Isn’t it grand to grow up?”

And early on, he transforms the isolating experience of physical pain into an experience of connection with others and anticipates its usefulness in the development of empathy: “But don’t you think everybody should stub their toes, too, just so they will really know what it is like? Maybe sometime you will talk to a little girl about her stubbed toe. You will really want to know what a stubbed toe felt like. Isn’t that right?”

He even corrects her “childish misunderstanding” of pushing her sister into a bathtub when she was four, frightening her mother and traumatizing herself with a near-drowning incident. “And do you suppose you learned something nice about you and Helen when you pushed her in the water?” Subject: “I shouldn’t have picked her up.” Erickson: “You learned something, didn’t you? Suppose you had waited to try and pick her up until she was bigger and heavier, and then dropped her and hurt her a lot more. That would have been much worse than pushing her in the tub.” Charged memories of her sister being blue and coughing are deflated of an intense negative association with the belief her sister was dying: the client has been blue in the cold, and has coughed; “So blueness and coughing doesn’t mean dying, does it? Do you think that’s a good thing to know? Do you think you should remember that?” Subject: “Yes.”