developments to unfold. Erickson was about as strange a person as I ever met, but also one of the happiest and probably the most creative. He was tone deaf (he couldn't hear music), color blind (he only could see the color purple), and dyslectic. He didn't realize the dictionary was alphabetized until he was 15; until that time, he would look up a word by starting on the first page of the dictionary and keep going until he found the word...And you think you're a slow learner! (Laughter)
When he was 17, he was paralyzed by a severe polio attack, which the doctors said he would never recover from. He learned to move and walk again by engaging in inner "experiments in learning"; he didn't know anything about formal hypnosis yet, but he did know that he had a great imagination and wonderful inner resources. So he would go inside and deeply hold the intention of rehabilitating his body and then notice different things happening. For example, he might find himself returning to a pleasurable childhood experience, say, of playing ball with his brother on the family farm in northern Wisconsin. He would become deeply absorbed in this pleasurable memory for long periods, sometimes weeks, until the muscle patterns in that memory would begin to reactivate in his present body. It was really quite an amazing thing he accomplished. And in doing so, he began to learn that generative trance is not a process of being programmed with scripts or direct suggestions, but an opportunity to access the amazing skills of the creative unconscious. When you have this confidence as a hypnotist in your own and your client's capacities, it makes things a lot easier and a lot more fun.
Guiding all these learnings was the utilization principle of accepting whatever was there and finding ways to creatively utilize what was there as opportunities for growth and change. One of the ways we sometimes describe this utilization principle is, "the problem is the solution." That is, a difficulty can be transformed into a resource by relationally engaging with it in different ways. Generative trance is a tradition for learning how to do this with yourself and others.
When Erickson became a psychiatrist, he initially worked with locked up schizophrenics and psychotics. He very quickly learned that the patients couldn't enter his reality, so that if communication was to occur, Erickson would need to accept and work within the patient's reality. There was one guy on the ward who believed he was Jesus Christ. This wasn't really a problem; after all, there's always one Jesus Christ on every ward. The problem occurs when there are two Jesus's! (Laughter). As the old psychiatric adage goes, never put two Napoleans in the same cell. (Laughter). Anyway, Erickson took an interest in this guy and approached him, asking him if he was Jesus. Jesus gave him a blessing and said, "yes,
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