ABSTRACT
This was a young man's case. I even kept count of the sessions! As one grows older in psychotherapy, energy, idealism and the impulse to "make something happen" are tempered by other principles. If I had not been full of the spirit of adventure when I encountered this man, I would have missed the almost poetic softening of his character, as well as a synchronistic surprise at the end.
This is the only case I saved from an early phase of absorption with Milton Erickson's unorthodox methods and an attempt to achieve "prowess" in using them. It was first presented at the Fourth Annual San Diego Conference on Hypnotic and Strategic Interventions (1988), during the heyday of the Ericksonian movement. Its tone is admittedly a bit didactic and self-congratulatory. I include it, though, because the contact the two of us made in this therapy was truly surprising and my part of it did not feel manipulative or procedural in nature (as most of my work of that time, in retrospect, did).
"The New Covenant: Elements of Personal Contact in a Challenging Case of Depression" was finally published, minus most of the Ericksonian verbiage, in the May 1994 Psychiatric Times.
