How did Erickson choose interventions?

• Ericksonian Therapy and NLP by kendavis@erols.com, 9/3/97
  • Specifying Interventions by Stephen Lankton, 10/4/97
    
    

Your reply goes to the heart of my original question. I am new to the practice of psychotherapy and I am slowly reading my way through the large body of literature about Erickson and his (intellectual) progeny. What I like about NLP is that it seems to be a prescriptive form of some of Erickson's (and Satir's) techniques. This makes it easier to learn and easier to know how to use. In my previous career, I was an engineer and a mathematician, and one thing I know from those fields is that intuition is not intuitive, it is learned. (It is probably what NLPers call unconscious competence.) Maybe Erickson was just so creative that his mental processes have yet to be fully understood or codified, but this raises the question, how does one learn to do what Erickson did? As a specific example, how does one learn how (and when) to construct paradoxical interventions? (I know these are big questions, but I might as well take full advantage of this opportunity to ask experts)

• Chosing Interventions by Jeffrey K. Zeig, Ph.D., 11/4/97
• Change your mind by Stephen Lankton, 11/7/97