ABSTRACT
This chapter was written following Dr. Rosen’s first encounter with Milton Erickson and underscores how that meeting reinforced Dr. Rosen’s feelings about the importance of experiencing the past in the present and led to change his approach and led to his developing different techniques for evoking experiences from the past, not simply as memories but as re-experiences. This new experimentation was done within gestalt, encounter group and hypnotic frames and illustrated that with our without formal hypnosis that going into a trance in a group can be very helpful, as a notional response can be experienced as the goal of all these techniques isn’t just for patients to relive experiences, it’s to have corrective experiences. Recalling a memory is one thing. But by looking at a memory differently than when we first had the experience, we can recall things we’ve learned in the meantime, and incorporate those learnings into a corrected experience.
