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Milton Erickson

Neuro-Linguistic programming (NLP) and the Solution Focused Counseling approach grew out of a study of a number of the most successful American therapists and lead-ers. Legends in their own time, they included Milton Erickson, after whom the College is named. It is widely acknowledged that those outside of a culture often make the most valuable observations and discern distinctions that do not occur to insiders. In many ways, the extremely brilliant and unusual Dr. Erickson was an outsider in his own cul-ture, making a life of insightfully inquiring into the nature of disease, and perception and healing.

Color blind, tone deaf, and with unusual muscle control abilities, he was acknowledged to have extraordinary powers of observation. His therapeutic successes made him a legend in his own time. In addition, he wrote many books.

His description of how to catalyze nature healing in others, combined with the o serva-tions of his students and of those who researched him, constitute a gold mine of key in-

sights into the human mind, psychotherapy and healing, that will be explored for decades by therapists and researchers alike.

His basic presuppositions that all behavior has a positive unconscious intent and must be respected caused a funda-mental paradigm shift in modern psychotherapy and forms the basis of Solution Focused counseling.Taking advantage, of an outside point of view, the unlikely team of a linguist, Dr. John Grinder, and a mathemati-cian-turned Gestalt-therapist, Richard Bandler came up with a wealth of insights into Erickson’s successes and went on to study other therapeutic wizards, such as Virginia Satir. Studies concerning which techniques work, and how people change and heal, inevitably led to a clear, higher-level understanding of how to catalyze healing. This led to the development of neuro-linguistic programming, which a reviewer in Psychology Today considered to be ‘the most powerful vehicle for change in existence’.

To date, aspects of the Erickson legacy, Accelerated Learning Strategies and NLP have been integrated into some of the most advanced models in the human potential movement and psychotherapy arenas. This integration has in-spired some of the richest insights available in the world today into the nature of the conscious and unconscious minds, hypnosis, psychotherapy and healing.