ABSTRACT
I was a psychology Ph.D. intern at the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic in the early 1970s, studying with Salvador Minuchin, Jay Haley, and Braulio Montalvo. I was trained in structural family therapy (Minuchin, 1974; Minuchin, Roseman & Baker, 1978), intervening from the “outside,” and because of Jay Haley, I was introduced to the broad concepts of the “ecology of mind” (Bateson, 1972), both models that acknowledged that the family gets under the skin of the patient. I had been sneaking in trance inductions in my structural and strategic family therapy sessions, drawing upon case studies from Haley's (1967) collection of Erickson's papers, Advanced Techniques of Hypnosis and Therapy, like the sorcerer's apprentice, but without any map to integrate the unconscious and the systemic. Then one day—which changed my life—my mentor Sal called me in to a private showing of a videotape a colleague and friend of mine, Herb Lustig, M.D., had just produced, one of the first available studio produced demonstrations of Milton Erickson's current work (Erickson & Lustig, 1975/2000).
