Life Reframing in Hypnosis

This second volume of Milton H. Erickson’s seminars, workshops, and lectures is an incredibly rich presentation of his ingenious approaches to hypnosis and psychotherapy. It was during the time period covered by this volume that Erickson wrote some of his most original papers on the naturalistic and utilization techniques which are considered to be the essence of his approach. It was Erickson’s genius to find in the natural patterns of everyday behavior the secrets of each patient’s individuality which he then utilized for therapeutic purposes. The stories and anecdotes he tells about his friends, family, colleagues, and patients in this volume provide a delightful tapestry illustrating just how his creative mind went about the process of scientific discovery and hypnotherapeutic innovation.

As we update this volume integrating current scientific discoveries, we realize that for too long therapeutic hypnosis has been the stepchild of medicine and psychology. We outline a currently emerging view of consciousness creation and mind-body healing that integrates the classical hypnosis of yesteryear with modern neuroscience research on memory, learning, and behavior at all levels from the cultural and transpersonal to the scientific and molecular-genomic. We propose that modern therapeutic hypnosis is essentially a process of life reframing by facilitating the epigenetic bioinformatic pathways of information transduction between mind, molecule, and gene. This suggests a new perspective on the resolution of the classical Cartesian philosophical dichotomy between mind and body, as well as deeper insights into the ongoing evolution of neuroscience and genomic research on consciousness and behavior. From this broad perspective, the stepchild could be seen as the parent of a more promising theoretical integration of current consciousness studies with psychology, meditation, yoga, medicine, and rehabilitation as well as art beauty and truth in the future.