Milton Erickson was the father of modern day hypnosis, he was an innovator who developed novel approaches that were extremely effective .Many found him to be the most effective therapist of the last century.

​

He treated over 10,000 people with hypnosis. He was the first to realize that Trance was a normal human activity and that people are going in and out of trance all the time, every day, everywhere. And although the idea of the unconscious mind was not new, his view of the unconscious as a vast storehouse of experience that could be used to enact change was new.

​

He was very creative and innovative in his therapeutic techniques and interventions. And he was primarily focused on change and on how to help a person improve her or his life. He was not primarily interested in the prevalent insight approach of the day which was psychoanalysis.

​

Many of his innovative approaches came from overcoming his own childhood challenges.When he was young, he was considered slow as he didn't speak until he was four years old. He was dyslexic, he was colorblind, he was tone deaf, and it took him 15 years to learn the dictionary was alphabetized. As a result every time he looked up the word, he would start with the letter A and go through every word in the dictionary on every page of the dictionary till he found the word he sought.

​

At 17 he contracted polio and it was such a severe case the doctor said he would not survive the night. He did but was paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair, completely immobile. He could only move was his eyes and speak. His only entertainment, as his family live on a farm in a log cabin, was to watch his nine siblings, from which he learned a great deal about relationships, communications and human behavior.

​

He recovered his body movement in a very interesting way. As he sat unable to move, he drifted off to semi sleep state and he wondered “how can I get my movement back”. As he was pondering that, images came to him of himself at a younger age throwing a ball in the backyard. He meditated on those images for hours and hours and hours and finally focusing down to just the image of his hand releasing the ball. And as he focused on that for hours longer, he experienced a jerky movement in his finger. From that slight start he slowly and painstakingly recovered movement in the rest of his body.

​

From this unlikely beginning he ended up adding over 350 cases to the literature covering a broad spectrum of work. He was the author of over 140 articles and five books. He founded the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis. There of been countless books and articles written about him and today there are over 140 institutes worldwide on every continent that further his work.

​

​