Milton H. Erickson promoted several approaches to psychotherapy using hypnosis. In the last decades of his life, his work moved away from the use of redundant suggestion and a predominance of direct suggestion in favor of indirect suggestion. In addition, he frequently employed a type of storytelling (that has come to be called therapeutic metaphor) to indirectly convey learning. Another change that occurred during the last decade was his definition of the cause of a symptom. However, there were two important areas of his work that he did not change during his career. These two components of his work he did not change were his definition of a cure and the importance of a naturalistic induction. This article concerns his naturalistic approach to hypnotic induction and especially his use of conscious/unconscious dissociation in the induction process and how indirect suggestion and therapeutic binds can be used to facilitate that type of induction and a cure.
Keywords: Erickson; conscious; induction; unconscious.