Answers to questions

• 3 question on Ericksonian Therapy by Michael Burns, 2/15/99
  
  

Very thoughtful questions. I wish you the best of luck with the project. (You only asked 3 of your 9, you know?) - Autonomy vs. Dependency - The client is expected to do a great deal of work and not be passive. A person uses the therapists words, sounds, pauses, inflection, etc., to retrieve experiences and associate them in the context in which they are needed. The client is not dependent and therapies that "need" that are not Ericksonian in their approach. - Emotion vs. Cognition - Given this forced choice...for the large majority of cases, cognition could probably be seen as dominant. In a case where a conditioned fear was evoked in an accident, say, the emotion may come independent of other imagery. Otherwise, the imagery association, the interpretation, the meaning (I assume these are what you mean by cognition) - these are certainly primary targets. But remember, getting the client moving, using perception, and urges, and sensation, etc., too -- these are all part of the gestalt and they should all be assessed, addressed, and used by the client in building the experiences needed for change. Your forced choice is arbitrary and says more about the paradigm you are using than it may about the object of your study. - Monism vs. Dualism - You can't correctly talk about either disease or malfunction when speaking about Erickson. Talk about degrees of having the desired resources in the contexts in which they are needed. Desired resources consist of having perception, cognition, interpretation, valuation, emotion, meaning, observable behavior or all kinds, expectations, intent, will, etc. Be careful to avoid getting locked into the "given" categories of human experience...sometimes they cut off clients legs so they will fit into the beds that were made for them. Once again, thanks for the wonderful dialog these questions represent.

• The other 6 by Michael Burns, 2/21/99