Collected Works of Milton H. Erickson, Volume 1 Quotes

“Trance helps depotentiate our old programs and gives us an opportunity to learn something new. The only reason why we cannot produce an anesthesia at will, for example, is because we don’t know how to give up our habitual generalized reality orientation that emphasizes the importance of pain and gives it primacy in consciousness. But if we allowed young children to experiment with their sensory perceptual processes in a fun way, they might easily develop skills with anaesthesia that could be very useful when they needed it. This would be an interesting piece of research, indeed.”
― Milton H. Erickson, The Collected Works of Milton H. Erickson, MD: Volume 1: The Nature of Therapeutic Hypnosis

“you say the right thing at the right moment. But you have no business knowing it ahead of time because as surely as you know it consciously, you start to improve on it and ruin it.”
― Milton H. Erickson, The Collected Works of Milton H. Erickson, MD: Volume 1: The Nature of Therapeutic Hypnosis

“In a different room, but comparable to the first, subjects were met individually, and it was explained that they were to seat themselves comfortably with their hands in their lap in a chair before a writing table on which was a pad of paper and a pencil. They were to look continuously at the pencil until their hand picked it up and started to write involuntarily. They were to concentrate secondarily on the lifting of the hand and primarily on seeing the pencil begin to write, and to do nothing more.”
― Milton H. Erickson, The Collected Works of Milton H. Erickson, MD: Volume 1: The Nature of Therapeutic Hypnosis

“during voluntarily directed activities of the mind turn on what the molecular biologists call “activity-dependent gene expression” (or “experience-dependent gene expression”) and “activity-dependent brain plasticity” in the epigenetic modifications of our neural networks in the construction and reconstruction of the physical brain during salient and”
― Milton H. Erickson, The Collected Works of Milton H. Erickson, MD: Volume 1: The Nature of Therapeutic Hypnosis