ABSTRACT

This chapter is a part of Kay Thompson’s Collected Works. Kay Thompson was a dentist who was one of Erickson’s first patients; she was also a noted therapist who worked with Erickson’s techniques and wrote about them. She was one of Erickson’s primary students and teachers of his techniques. From a broad perspective, Rosen notes that Kay Thompson talked as if we are always in a trance of some kind and she tried to change that trance from one that could be symptomatic to one in which more positive responses could emerge. Further, the chapter discusses Kay’s extensive use of interspersed suggestions within a common everyday conversation to utilize the evocative power of language to recognize that hypnotherapy is fundamentally a process of healing with language.