Milton H. Erickson

Milton H. Erickson (1901 to 1980) was an American psychiatrist and psychologist who specialized in medical hypnosis and family therapy. Born in a mining camp in Aurum, Nevada, and raised on a farm in Wisconsin, he had dyslexia and contracted polio at seventeen, and later studied psychology and medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He resolved to bring hypnosis out of the hands of entertainers and into scientific evaluation and medical practice, and he became the founding president of the American Society for Clinical Hypnosis. He is noted for treating the unconscious mind as creative and solution-generating, and his approach influenced brief therapy, strategic family therapy, family systems therapy, solution focused brief therapy and neuro-linguistic programming.