HIPNOSIS

This book is a continuation of our earlier work in Hypnotic Realities (Erickson, Rossi, &
Rossi, 1976) and Hypnotherapy: An Exploratory Casebook (Erickson & Rossi, 1979),
whereby the senior author, Milton H. Erickson, trains the junior author, Ernest L. Rossi, in
clinical hypnosis. Taken together, these three volumes present a deepening view of what
hypnosis is and the ways in which a creative process of hypnotherapy can be achieved. The
material in these volumes touches ultimately on the nature of human consciousness and
suggests a variety of open-ended approaches to facilitate its exploration in hypnotherapy as
well as in more formal research situations.
Indirect communication is the overall concept we use to cover what we have variously
described as two-level communication, the naturalistic approach, and the utilization
approach. The common denominator of all these approaches is that hypnotherapy involves
something more than simple talk on a single, objective level. The readily apparent, overt
content of a message is like the tip of an iceberg. The recipient of indirect communication is
usually not aware of the extent to which his or her associative processes have been set in
motion automatically in many directions. Hypnotic suggestion received in this manner results
in the automatic evocation and utilization of the patient's own unique repertory of response
potentials to achieve therapeutic goals that might have been otherwise beyond reach. In our
previous volumes we outlined the operation of this process as the microdynamics of trance
induction and suggestion. Although this is the essence of the senior author's original
contribution to modern suggestion theory, we will review in this volume some of the many
means and meanings that other authors have used as they struggled to reach an
understanding of indirect communication in the long history of hypnosis.
The first section of this volume presents an historically important lecture on clinical
hypnosis by the senior author wherein we witness his transition from the older authoritarian
approach to hypnosis to the new permissive approaches, which he pioneered. Due to the
unique nature of this presentation, an audio cassette of it accompanies this volume. We
strongly recommend that our professional readers listen to this cassette and savor it a bit
before dealing with the lecture as presented in the text.