My Voice Will Go with You: Teaching Tales of Milton H. Erickson

Milton H Erickson, Sidney Rosen

Paperback: 256 pages

4/5

The subtitle of this book pretty much says it all. Milton Erickson was renowned for his use of stories and metaphors in facilitating therapeutic change and educating his students. In this volume Sidney Rosen (a close colleague of Erickson) has collated a good number of these stories under the following 13 sub-headings:

Changing the Unconscious Mind
Motivating Tales
Trust the Unconscious
Indirect Suggestion
Overcoming Habitual Limitations
Reframing
Learning by Experience
Taking Charge of Your Life
Capturing the Innocent Eye
Observe: Notice Distinctions
Treating Psychotic Patients
Manipulation and Future Orientation
Teaching Values and Self Discipline


While this book is certainly essential reading for those with an interest in the Ericksonian approach to change, it is by no means a manual for this approach. Sidney Rosen provides insightful commentary, but there is little attempt to draw the material into a coherent framework (and, depending upon your view, this may be no bad thing).

Overall I would like to have found this book more exciting and inspiring than I did, so I would give it perhaps 3 out of 5. However, I do have the sense that when I get around to re-reading it, it will yield a good deal more than it did on my first visit, so for this reason I am giving it 4.