Neurosis seems to be a human privilege.
Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism
This reminiscence about the legendary Dr. Milton Erickson, the psychiatrist who was one of the world’s leading authorities on hypnosis, is part of a longer article on psychotherapy which will appear in an upcoming issue of The Fessenden Review. Our thanks to Lorenzo W. Milam for permission to print this excerpt.
— Ed.
I probably could be considered a fair example of the American system of psychotherapy at work. I visited my first therapist, a traditional Jungian, back in 1956. I was in trouble. I was haunted by a dark mood that wouldn’t go away. As they say, I didn’t have a clue. After a few weeks in which I bared what I thought was my soul, the therapist, a Quaker by the name of Dr. Clark, suggested that my depression might be caused by Unrequited Love. “Love for whom?” I asked. “For your roommate,” he said. I was puzzled, then scandalized, and after several months, forced to admit that he was right. (It’s a fine testament to the American educational system that I was twenty-two years old, a junior in a notable East Coast college, had read Shakespeare, Keats, Byron, Wordsworth and many of the Pre-Raphaelites, was, indeed, a major in English poetry — and I still didn’t know what the hell love was.)
Since then, over the decades, on and off, I have visited several other “counsellors,” “psychologists,” “therapists,” of all sorts of persuasions, with all sorts of degrees. I would like to attest here and now that I don’ t think I have been harmed by any of the M.D.s, Ph.D. s, and M.S.W.s that worked on me with me. To the contrary — I can’t think of one of them who was not helpful in one way or another, and I can think of two who got me out of psychological holes which I considered, at the time, to be impossible to escape from.
Now this does not mean that I am without reservations about the Helping Profession. A cousin of mine in New York started seeing a Freudian psychoanalyst twenty-five years ago. The analyst began by prescribing large doses of psychotropic drugs. Sometime in the mid-sixties, while my cousin was still a patient, he seduced her. She stayed on drugs throughout this period and for about ten years afterward. (I recall once when she was travelling to the Far East for six months, she showed me a canister of 1,000 pills he had prescribed for her so she could stay dependent — even as she was 12,000 miles away from him.)
It took a long time, but now she is more or less off drugs. She is still given to the strange movements and lip-smacking which are characteristic of tardive dyskinesia, which afflicts those who are addicted to Valium and the like. Her other self-destructive tendencies are still, to this day, considerable and ferocious. Her analyst, who wrought all this change, is still a respected member of the psychoanalytic profession, has never been sued, never been exposed for what (I assume) he has done to others besides my cousin. He is considered an expert on the psychological aspects of homosexuality. (He was one of the last vanguard of the American Psychoanalytical Association who fought, bitterly, to keep homosexuality on the list as a mental disease.) I understand that he is still, in his destructive way, “practicing,” still magnificently protected by his colleagues of the American Psychoanalytical Association and the American Medical Association. I can only wish, in the days leading up to his much-to-be-wished-for retirement, that he might come up with some insights that would give him a clue to the grief and horror that he has — in forty years of malpractice — wreaked on the innocent and the unprotected.
A whole Industry has risen about visiting the Prophet of Phoenix. One comes for a day or two, and then advertises that one has “studied under Milton Erickson.” This means you can charge $1,000 a day for seminars. Few pay attention to the fact that the master himself only charges $25 a day for visitors. I think I love him for that reason if for no other. He doesn’t care about money, getting rich, making it in the American Dream Factory. He gives away information, knowledge, insights — gives them to all comers for so little.
I was, as I say, far more fortunate. None of my therapists were in business to seduce or harm me. Some were incompetent — by which I mean that they didn’t have enough of the necessary combination of human compassion, brains, warmth and caginess to get me out of whatever it was that had brought me to them in the first place. Some were just plain dull. Some were brilliant, recognized all my tricks from the moment they met me (we all use tricks to defend our delusions — even when those delusions produce pain).
I sometimes consider my journey in and out of their various offices and thought-systems as a pilgrimage. I also sometimes think that this journey is no more harmful than the journey of the wandering fool in Czarist Russia, or the poverty-vow that takes some Indians a lifetime across their native land, journeys that are traditional for the students of Buddhism. My goal was neither more nor less meaningful than that of the Beats in their eternal car trips from New York to Denver to San Francisco, and back again. My wandering taught me no less than those of the European explorers who spent their lives on journeys into the heart of darkest Africa, or into the white and dismal wastes of Antarctica. That I chose to chase the will-o’-the-wisp in partnership with the practitioners of Jungian therapy, Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Sensitivity Training, Reality Therapy, Gestalt, Transactional Analysis, Fisher-Hoffman, Rolfing, est, and neo-Rankians probably did no harm and surely gave me hope at a time when I desperately needed hope. The actual insights that came about are part of the accoutrements I now take along with me on the remainder of this colorful journey through the world of men, women, families and children: the world.
One of my journeys led me — six years ago — into the office of Milton Erickson. It was long after he had given up private practice, and, it turned out, it was shortly before he died. He was spending four hours a day in “seminars”: that’s what they called them. That’s not what they really were. These are the notes I made at the time:
Milton Erickson still lives in the same tract house on 12th Street that he’s lived in since 1953, when he moved to Phoenix for his health. He wears his famous purple robes (he is color-blind — the only color he can see is bright purple). He also wears a purple shirt, and purple knit booties, which all make him look like a giant baby. His wheelchair is crammed awkwardly through the doorway of the room where seven of us are ranged. We are sitting on 1955 Motel Moderne Furniture. The room appears to be half-kitchen, half-living room — and I doubt if it has changed much in twenty years.
There are desert artifacts everywhere: skulls, stones, desert-bird bones. The air-conditioner (it is June) is noisy and inefficient and cranky; and the traffic outside on 12th Street is just as noisy.
The doctor sits in his uncomfortable wheelchair — no footpedals — on a giant foam cushion, his bootied feet scarcely touching the purple carpet set on the floor. He had polio twice: once in 1918, again during the last great siege of the early Fifties. He has no use of his left hand and little of his right. His one motion is to lean forward awkwardly to observe the visitors, or to sit back uncomfortably, in his chair. He looks like a great stuffed panda with huge, glaucous, penetrating eyes.
He gives “audiences” — my word, not his own — six-days a week to psychiatrists, psychologists, M.D.s, psychiatric social workers and counsellors who come from all over the continent to spend four hours in this room, listening to him “tell stories.”
It is hot and close in the room. Often, it is impossible to hear what he is saying. Not only do the traffic and air-conditioner create too much ambient background noise, but polio has robbed Erickson of many of the muscles of throat, mouth, tongue and lips. His words are difficult to hear, and often he will go into coughing spasms — wheezing, great weak indraughts of breath — so he sounds not unlike one on his death-bed. “Just my luck,” I think. “I spend months angling to see him, and he dies on the first of the days I’m to spend with him.” Since my coughs often sound the same (also a result of polio), I have the cold comfort of imagining us going together in this dingy, no-exit room.
This is the master. It is an honor to be here. Thousands try, few get past the eagle-eyes of his wife, who is also the reservations secretary. This is some feudal court out of the Chou Dynasty, and only the select of the masses get to the court (some court!) of the wise-man.
A whole Industry has risen about visiting the Prophet of Phoenix. One comes for a day or two, and then advertises that one has “studied under Milton Erickson.” This means you can charge $1,000 a day for seminars. Few pay attention to the fact that the master himself only charges $25 a day for Visitors. I think I love him for that reason if for no other. He doesn’t care about money, getting rich, making it in the American Dream Factory. He gives away information, knowledge, insights — gives them to all comers for so little.
His stories are Zen koans which follow each other without pause. Many of them are familiar. We’ve read them in one of the books about him by Jay Haley, or Eric Rossi, or Bandler & Grindler (who are known as The Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of the Ericksonian movement). Or we’ve read about him in Psychology Today, or seen one of his many videotapes floating around, or perhaps — those who are diligent enough — have read about him in the books that he has authored himself.
Many thus already know the punch lines of the stories he is telling. But there is a difference in hearing them directly from his lips. His voice is so quiet, his lung power so shot with what has now been labelled “Post-Polio Syndrome” (a gradual weakening of the muscles remaining which happens decades after the onslaught of the disease) and, with the outside noises, sometimes whole words, whole sentences are lost.
No matter — half the audience is in hypnotic trance. As Erickson speaks to us, he is also playing us like some great chromatic organ, putting this or that person under, keying words to one or another of us. And the whole thing is so subtle that I sometimes think nothing is happening at all. At other times, I am dead sure that this giant purple panda knows everything going on in the room, and is making some magic music with our minds and psyches. I think he is testing the aqua vitae of us, checking to see if our mental pumps are working, adjusting screws here and bolts there, then plunging with us into the pool of our souls, to come up with bits and pieces of our gossamer selves that don’t necessarily belong in this hot and dusty room in Phoenix, Arizona, on one of the hottest days of June, 1979.
The stories ramble on in apparently random order. There is the one of the two nurses who think their husbands are “sexually perverted.” There is another of the nurse who was required to squat over a mirror, so that she could learn to have intercourse. Her husband was required to learn how to masturbate, “to get an erection at will, and that’s no man named Will.” His stories use puns and anagrams and poetic techniques right out of Shakespeare, and are often just as obscure as Shakespeare. Sometimes I catch myself thinking: “What am I doing here, listening to this nonsense?” This old man, an old man with glittering eyes, not unlike the eyes of some of the more frightening desert snakes. “I flew to Phoenix for this?” I think. “What would it be if nothing was happening — nothing at all? Suppose we are so sucked in by his myth that we will believe anything?” I remember what I once read about people who were always trying to analyze his stories for some secret meaning. He called them “city slickers.”
Does he have that power because we all acknowledge that he is the master? Or is he the master because he has all that power?
I am sweating on my Drugstore Cowboy Naugahyde Chair, and there is a long confusing story about a man who had claustrophobia, and Erickson puts him in a closet, and closes the door one millimeter, and the wall is behind him, and he closes and opens the door, and closes the door, and opens it, and closes the door, and closes the door, and each time he says “close,” I find my eyes closing, and I cannot and do not wish to open them, and I am in one of the famous Ericksonian trances, and I want to stay there, as my mind struggles with trying to remember all those articles he wrote about telling stories with all those trance-inducing words in them, overcoming people’s resistance to being put under. One of the ladies in the audience is sobbing, found some secret grief in the story he is telling, a sadness stuck in it, clove-in-the-onion style, touching her in her deep trance state. “She’s getting something and I’m not,” I think jealously. “I want it too.” I remember when I forced myself to drag through two sequential weekends of est, so I could get it — and I remember not getting it, and thinking, “What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I get IT?”
At the break, I go into the bathroom, and steal some of the Ericksonian Aim for my breath, so I won’t offend my seatmates when I go into the Ultimate Trance. I come back and stand about, trying to avoid that butt-breaking Naugahyde chair, and I am sort of dreaming, and I look at Erickson, and his eyes, which are so heavily lidded, widen — all pupil, no iris — and he shoots a visual arrow at me, then down at the chair, which says, “Siddown Buster,” and I do, with alacrity. Does he have that power because we all acknowledge that he is the master? Or is he the master because he has all that power?
Later, we visit his house next door. His coach-dog growls at me. There are purple gowns and white orthopaedic corsets hanging on the clothesline. He has a purple telephone, and he writes in purple. Three of the seven audience today wore purple in homage to him. He shows us photographs of his granddaughter, one of eight children. I think how nice it would be to grow up the child of Milton Erickson. He was probably one of the first professionals to propound the idea — always known to all good mothers — that, as a parent, you never violate the experience of your child. He told Jay Haley about his son, age five, once falling out of a tree, falling badly. Between the boy’s screams, Erickson would say, “I’ll bet that hurts!” and “Oh, that must hurt bad!” What he was doing was confirming the child’s feelings, instead of doing what so many of our parents did (“Oh, pooh — that doesn’t hurt at all”), which confuses the child over what is felt, and what is heard.
The house is filled with ironwood statues of dogs, octopus, trees, ferns. My back hurts and so does my behind. I wish I could get a quick trance from him, so he could tell me that it doesn’t really hurt. What is it my friend Lorna says? That Erickson spends three hours each morning reframing himself in trance — because of his painful arthritis. I would probably be just as well off back at the hotel in the Jacuzzi, breathing the air that makes me sweat so copiously in this hundred-and-ten-degree city, which, I am beginning to think, doesn’t belong here at all.
Cathy and Lorna have travelled here with me from California. They are real therapists, and are the ones who got me in the door. After we leave Erickson’s, we go to the bar in the Arizona Hilton. They tell me some stories about him. Like most fans, they have a good complement which they’ve gathered over the years, some of which don’t appear in any of the books. We settle into a booth near the door. There is a live chamber group playing “Just a Violet.” At the bar, a young man with a camera challenges a man in tie and jacket to a fight. Seems Cameraman thinks the other man was making googoo eyes at his girlfriend, or wife, or hooker. “Oh, no,” I say. They go out into the hall, right next to where I am drinking my Molsons, and the cameraman kicks the feet out from under the well-suited fellow, and starts kicking him in the ribs, the back, the head, the face. “This is not happening,” I think. “I’m still in a trance, aren’t I?” I am in the elegant bar of the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Arizona Hilton. There are ladies here in long dresses, men in ties and formal jackets, waiters in tuxedoes, and this American macho brawl is happening right next to us, out in the hallway. “Did you see how that woman played those two guys?” says Cathy to Lorna. “Played them just like a violin. Boy, you sure are scared,” she says to me.
After the blood stops flowing and I can come up from under the booth, I tell them about the old geezer who got into the hotel Jacuzzi with me this morning. This was the dialogue that we had:
He: What happened to you?
Me: Polio.
He: When?
Me: Oh, twenty-five years ago.
He: You were born a cripple?
Me: No. I got polio twenty-five years ago. I ain’t no spring chicken, you know.
He: What happened to you?
Me: What do you mean?
He: Didja have an auto accident?
Me: (Resigns.)
Lorna and Cathy talk some about Erickson (this is Lorna’s tenth visit to see him). She says that he is somewhat nineteenth-century in his attitude toward women. She tells the story about the Chicana who got depressed because she just didn’t want to go out into the fields to work, to pick lima beans or cotton or whatever it is they grow in the irrigated fields of Arizona. Erickson arranged for her to go through shock therapy. That’s something you don’t read too much about in Jay Haley and Ernest Rossi. I couldn’t believe it: this gentle old wise-man guru, making someone go through that carnival of terror because she didn’t want to be a field hand. “The difference,” Lorna said, “was that Erickson checked it out ahead of time. He had them administer shock therapy to him, so he would know what it was like, so he would know what it was all about.”
That night I dream about long branches, the swamp, the two women talking about “pokeweed” [a plant used for making purple dye]. There is a couch made of it. It is a hot gulf night, and there is an incipient storm. The couch is made of the same purple cloth as Erickson’s clothes. The women are talking about being “three-legged.” There are swamp shadows all about, and a hot storm coming. I wake up at three or so and I am burning with the dry Arizona air. I don’t want to go get water, so I lie there, all dried out, thinking about pokeweed.
At Erickson’s the next day, Cathy and Lorna get me into the hot seat, right next to him. He is brought into the room, and everyone hooks microphones onto his lapel for their cassette recorders. It is a ceremony: this spider’s web of wires sprouting from his robe. They want to be sure that he, and his words, don’t escape. Recorders popping to a halt throughout the day don’t seem to bother him, just me.
We seem to have something even more bothersome than clicking tape recorders: a lady psychologist from New York. She is quite sizeable, and her voice is quite sizeable too. Like the rest of us, she can’t understand half of what Erickson is saying, but instead of viewing this as The Breaks when you are around the master, she keeps interrupting him: “What did you say, Dr. Erickson?” or “I didn’t catch that,” or “He put it up against her what?”
Erickson puts up with her strident interruptions for about an hour — he is remarkably patient — and then, after she says, for the eleventh time, “What did you say, the what?” he gives her the what: he looks directly at her, and closes his eyes, and — by my troth — she falls back on the couch in a deep trance, staying there (where she well belongs) for a half-hour. Then, as she bestirs herself, starts to come up, shaking her head, blinking, he just looks at her wide-eyed again, and then closes his eyes, and she falls back in a swoon where, I would guess, her hearing, insight and peacefulness are considerably improved.
Erickson, as usual, asks for questions, and I say, “Yes, how do you put someone in a trance who doesn’t want to go into a trance, and, number two, how do you treat headaches?” I tell him about the migraines I’ve had for the past thirty years.
He starts another series of stories: about a guy in the Wisconsin prison system who was a five-time loser, and then one about Sam, the alcoholic, who needed a place to stay, and so Erickson said that he could stay in his back yard, but he would have to give up his boots. The stories go on all day, and as I watch him, I think how amazing he is. He has people vying to spend a day with him. He is the acknowledged master of “reframing” and hypnotherapy. Under most circumstances, this old man would be put away in some home for the aged and crippled — but he has a force that has carried him on his own for eighty years, and he is still going (they say he only recently gave up his Sunday sessions). “I’ve been living on borrowed time for forty-five years,” he’s fond of saying. “And I don’t have to pay it back.”
He has carved out a system of therapy all by himself, out of himself, and has taught himself to work with all types — depressives, manic-depressives, schizophrenics, juvenile delinquents, suicides, families (he is considered to be one of the earliest, and most original, practitioners of family therapy). He has mastered some of the most diverse methods for establishing rapport with patients. He found, for one, that he could work with autistics by breathing in rhythm with them. He created rapport with what he calls “kinesthetic” patients by speaking their language (a kinesthetic will say things like, “How does that grab you?” or “It was a real gut-wrenching experience.”). He learned to speak to patients in what they call “the back wards” of mental hospitals by accepting their anti-social behaviors, and then redesigning them — on their terms — so that the cycle of depression, say, can be broken. He is one of the few to communicate successfully with schizophrenics who speak something called “Word Salad.” The method is to repeat the gibberish back to them — changing only the vowels. It is said that after awhile they can’t stand it anymore, and do anything to shut you up — even putting an end to their psychotic behavior patterns.
At 2:45, he turns to me, and says: “Do you understand?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
“When did you know that you were going to ask me those two questions?”
“This morning, in the hotel, about ten.”
“When did I know you were going to ask me those two questions?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
“When I saw you sitting in that chair,” he says. “Close your eyes,” he says. He makes a ring of thumb and forefinger with his one good hand, puts it about my wrist, raises my arm — and I am gone.
Now don’t ask me what happened. I wasn’t there, remember? I do recall a voice coming at me, and my hand moving up toward my face, stopping when it got to the halfway mark. I remember him whispering to me about pain, and about taking a cool drink, lying out in the sun. Then I hear him talk about “the devil looking over your shoulder,” and I have this powerful vision of a gargoyle, a big fat one, with big lips and tongue, looking right at me, hovering there in front of my face, looking right at me.
When I come to, he and all the others are back in his office. He’s signing their books and asking the ladies for a kiss on the cheek. I stagger up and go to the bathroom for some more Aim, and there, right next to the sink, is a black spider, and I turn on the light and look closely and sure enough, there are those red triangles on the spider’s belly or abdomen or whatever you call it. I go out to his office and announce, “There’s a black widow spider in the bathroom and I was scared he was going to bite me.” Lorna corrects me, “You thought she was going to bite you.” Erickson goes on signing books.
Cathy and Lorna and I fly back to California that night. The next morning I develop the most wrenching pain in my back right under the shoulder blade. It stays there a full month. I can scarcely get out of bed for the first week. It would wake me at night, and it made my days a misery.
I didn’t have any headaches, though. For the first time in thirty years, I didn’t have a single headache. Not for a full month. “How in God’s name did he do that?” I wonder. “What did he say to me when he had me in that trance?”
He never gave me a chance to come back and question him about it. The old pokeweed son-of-a-bitch died a year or so later, a week before we were to go back for another visit.
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