Stories & Encounters
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The Sceptic Who Saw a Fishpond
She was sure hypnosis was nonsense. Then Milton Erickson pointed at a filing cabinet and asked her friends whether they could see the fishpond. Within minutes, the sceptic was watching students walk past…
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The Busboy Who Kept Filling a Full Glass
Milton Erickson shifted his saucer an inch, and waiters came to refill his cup without knowing why. He also kept a locked drawer of sealed predictions to test his own intuition. What his…
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The Rock That Wasn’t
Milton Erickson strained to lift a heavy rock, then threw it at a 6-foot-6 psychiatrist. It was made of foam. The lesson stayed with Carl Hammerschlag for life, and science explains why his…
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Snikewin, CC0, via Wikimedia CommonsThe Soldiers Who Didn’t Want Morphine
In 1944, badly wounded soldiers at Anzio told their doctor they didn’t need morphine. Years later, a little girl invented a way to divide her pain until it disappeared. Both reveal how much…
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A Feeling of Hypnosis Coming Gently Over You
Jane Cameron didn’t live near Phoenix, and she couldn’t just drop by Erickson’s office when the pain flared. She was one of the many people who wrote to him from a distance, describing…
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Saved by Silence
Surrounded by a gang in New York, a former mime couldn’t run, fight or talk his way out, so he went silent. What happened next reveals how threat works, why some people are…
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George du Maurier, “An Incubus”, from Trilby (1894). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.Hypnosis and Crime: Famous Cases and Controversies
In 1894, a novelist drew a hypnotist as a spider in a web, and the world has feared hypnotic crime ever since. From a Paris murder trial to a Copenhagen bank robbery, here’s…
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CIA, “Hypnotic Experimentation and Research, 10 February 1954” (Document 00428251)MKUltra and Hypnosis: The CIA’s Search for a Programmable Mind
This article looks at MKUltra, a secret CIA program that studied drugs, suggestion, and hypnosis during the Cold War. It explains what is known from declassified records, how hypnosis was explored, and why…
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Tommy, the Monster Slayer
Tommy was eight, terrified, and about to be hospitalised for schizophrenia. Then a team of therapists behind a one-way mirror asked him to draw his monster, and gave him the power to destroy…
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The Cactus Cure
Milton Erickson sent a man with a drinking problem to look at cactuses. Thirty years of research on craving, attention and if-then plans suggests he was onto something.
