Varies

Be aware that Erickson's approach depends on the reassociation of experience. He was a strong believer that suggestions were not the essential aspect (his disagreement on this put him at odds with current thinkers of the day such as Clack Hull, in fact). So, his reliance on activities, assignments, and so on came first or augmented the verbal portions of therapy very often. In that way of looking at it, your question seems to be a bit too narrow in simply associating Erickson's work to the 'verbal patterns' such as those written of in some NLP books. If Erickson intended to regress someone to preverbal there is little doubt that he could succeed...however one would either have to provide for a dissociated verbal portion to interpret what was 'said' from the therapist or deal with experience retrieval with other than words. The former might have reduced impact with a bit of energy used for the dissociated purpose and the later would look like regression work such as that done by Jaqui Schiff (in a sub-school of TA) I imagine.

Finally, the dissociated aspect can work to limited degrees depending upon the extent of the difficulty. I successfully aided a patient in stopping a shockingly apparent paralysis of her feet and one hand that left her in a wheel chair prior to treatment. We can assume it was learn pre-verbal since the condition was observed in childhood at the age of around one year. It seemed to be related to the child's wish to aid/control/calm the tensions in the household (and gain care, no doubt) before she was verbal.

We were very successful and the entire matter was to be on 48 Hours once a few years ago....but production schedules and client and therapist availability did not coincide (the insisted on filming the week of the International Brief Therapy Congress when I was out of town and the client had a wedding for her daughter as well....and they simply would not reschedule). So, that episode filmed Yvonne Dolan instead and that was that...48 Hours did it's therapy piece and time marches on!

But anyway, the case was very interesting when we could see that the client could and did respond to the atmosphere and words around her. Now....were this to be even earlier in life, like birth, a large difference would certainly be present. In my client, the social environment largely contributed and attention to it was already learned...hence my input could be attended to in some way apparently. But if the birth or near birth moments were the traumatic environment I suspect this factor of social attention would not be present, and what I did would not apply in the fashion I delivered it.

Finally, what makes you even think that your assessment of the etiology is correct in placing the origin of the problem at birth.....or is your question just hypothetical?

Replies:

Re:Varies, by Joe the grateful , 03/11/02 Re:Varies, by Joe the too quick typist, 03/11/02 Re:integration, by Steve Lankton, 03/12/02

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