Neville Goddard and Milton Erickson: Where They Agree, and Where They Don't

In 1954 the psychiatrist Milton H. Erickson published a paper about a technique he had been using, from time to time, for fifteen years. He would put a patient into a deep trance, walk them forward in time by weeks or months, and then ask them, as if the date had already passed, to report on how things had turned out. One patient, a thirty-year-old clerk who had spent three years in doctors' waiting rooms with pains no one could find a cause for, looked into a series of imagined crystal balls and described himself asking his boss for a raise, telling off the man who kept blocking his car, taking a girl to the theater. Erickson then gave him amnesia for the whole session and sent him home. Eight weeks later the clerk came back in a new suit, with his car repainted and a secretary on his arm, and reported that one day at work he had asked for a raise before he could think about it.

Anyone who has read Feeling is the Secret will recognize the shape of that story. It is the technique Neville taught from lecture platforms for thirty years, run inside a psychiatrist's office with a case file.

That recognition is why I read Erickson's Collected Papers, all eight volumes of the Rossi edition, something over 2,200 pages, next to the Vault. I expected a few surface resemblances. I found a real overlap in method, and a set of disagreements that cut deep. The disagreements are the more useful part.

A word on who Erickson was, since most Neville readers will not have met him. Born in 1901, he was paralyzed by polio at seventeen. In the dialogue he recorded with his editor late in life, he describes asking his mother to angle a mirror so he could see one more sunset, and then relearning the use of his muscles by recalling, in fine detail, how it had felt to climb trees and swim as a boy. He became the most influential clinical hypnotist of the twentieth century and founded the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis in 1957. He and Neville were near contemporaries, one working in Michigan and then Phoenix, the other in New York and Los Angeles, and I found no sign that either read the other. The only Goddard in Erickson's 2,200 pages is Henry H. Goddard, a psychologist of intelligence testing. The Vault contains no Erickson at all.

Neville already spoke the language

This comparison is less of a stretch than it looks, because Neville used the vocabulary of hypnosis himself. The fourth chapter of Prayer, The Art of Believing opens with it:

"EVERYONE is amenable to the same psychological laws which govern the ordinary hypnotic subject." — Prayer, The Art of Believing, Chapter 4

The whole chapter runs on that frame: objective and subjective mind, suggestion, the operator, the "controlled reverie". That is the vocabulary of the hypnotism books of the 1890s, Thomson Jay Hudson's above all, and Neville took it over without apology. His definition of the hypnotic state is "simply being unaware, objectively". Erickson's, from a 1959 paper on pain in terminal illness, is that "There is nothing magical or mystical about it", only attentiveness to and absorption in an idea. The two men could have talked.

But notice where each of them puts the trance. For Erickson it is a tool you enter on purpose, with a hypnotist in the room. For Neville the trance is ordinary waking life. "To break this hypnotic spell of the senses you are told, 'Go within and shut the door,'" he writes in Your Faith Is Your Fortune. The senses have you under already. The nightly practice is the counter-suggestion.

Erickson did once glance at Neville's corner of the world. In a 1932 paper on the possible harms of hypnosis he mentions Christian Science as a religion "based fundamentally on the principles of self-hypnosis", whose philosophy rests on "a denial of the difference between reality and unreality", and then notes drily that its adherents seem to suffer no confusion from this, "as the material prosperity of the church and its members attests." That is about how he would have read "consciousness is the only reality": a self-hypnotic premise, harmless, held by people who were doing fine.

Where they agree

The end, treated as already done

The 1954 paper is called "Pseudo-Orientation in Time as a Hypnotherapeutic Procedure". Erickson says the method rests on the everyday understanding "that deeds are the offspring of hope and expectancy", and that its purpose was to let the patient respond to the goals of therapy "as actualities already achieved". He used the same device with a student who was an excellent trance subject except in front of an audience: she rehearsed the public demonstration in fantasy, was moved several weeks ahead in time, and could then regard the fantasy "as an actual successful accomplishment of the past". She gave the demonstration the same day. And to a patient named Mary, who was looking into an imagined crystal ball at an image of herself, grown up and happy on a diving board, he said: "This is only June, but that girl up there is going swimming in August." Mary went swimming in August.

Neville's version needs no introduction on this site. "Use imagination masterfully and not as an onlooker thinking of the end, but as a partaker thinking from the end," he writes in The Power of Awareness. The Living in the End guide covers the practice. What is striking in Erickson is not that a psychiatrist imagined the outcome for his patients. It is that he built the whole session so the patient would remember the outcome, as a past event, with feeling.

The bridge builds itself

Erickson's fourth patient in that paper was a woman stuck in therapy who refused every opportunity in front of her. In trance she saw herself, months ahead, happy at a friend's wedding. She then quit therapy, and over the next three months made her own bridesmaid's dress, got herself promoted to secure better hours, and took an apartment in town to save the commute. Erickson's comment: "She had no awareness that her preparations for the wedding constituted her recovery." Of all five patients he writes that their new behavior "was not in compliance with therapeutic suggestions" but was "experienced by them as arising within them". Unconscious fantasies of the future, he says, are not wishes but "actual intention at the opportune time".

Neville describes the same mechanism from the inside:

"When I know what the feeling would be like I then close my eyes and lose myself in that single sensation and my dimensionally greater Self then builds a bridge of incident to lead me from this present moment to the fulfillment of my mood." — Five Lessons, Lesson 4

Both men also noticed that the person forgets the link. In a 1941 paper on posthypnotic behavior, Erickson records that subjects carrying out an instruction planted in trance explained it as "a sudden impulse, I suppose". Neville, in Feeling is the Secret: "He thinks himself free because he has forgotten the link between himself and the event."

And both say to leave it alone once it is planted. Erickson, on his own pain: "I have the thought, 'I'd like to get rid of this pain.' That's enough!" If you know consciously ahead of time how it will be done, "you start to improve on it and ruin it." Neville: "It is a delusion that, other than assuming the feeling of the wish fulfilled, you can do anything to aid the realization of your desire" (The Power of Awareness, Chapter 21). The Letting Go guide is built on that sentence.

Feeling, and the body

In a 1952 lecture, "Control of Physiological Functions by Hypnosis", Erickson spent most of his time debunking famous demonstrations. The subject who could shrink the blood vessels in one hand and dilate them in the other turned out to do it wide awake, by imagining one hand in ice water and the other in warm water: "the hypnosis had nothing to do with it." His rule for colleagues was that any bodily change you can produce in the ordinary waking state "should not be credited to hypnotic suggestion." He meant it as a caution against hypnotists. Read from this side, it is a concession to Neville's premise: imagining alone moves the body, no trance required.

When Erickson himself wanted a bodily change, he prescribed feeling. To a devout twenty-year-old distressed about her figure he assigned a weekly reading of the Song of Solomon and told her "to feel with very great intensity the goodness of her body". Another patient was led to "the thorough conviction that she was growing breasts". Neville built a book on that word, and in it wrote that the subconscious "contemplates a feeling as a fact existing within itself and on this Assumption proceeds to give expression to it" (Feeling is the Secret, Chapter 1). He also, as it happens, reached for the Song of Solomon in the very next chapter.

The twilight zone

Erickson trained himself to prolong what he called the "twilight zone between going to sleep and waking up", and used it as a workshop for his own arthritic pain. With Aldous Huxley he spent a day studying a state Huxley called Deep Reflection: relaxed, eyes closed, withdrawn from the senses, absorbed, and still under the person's own direction. Neville's instruction for the state akin to sleep is close to a description of the same condition: "a drowsy state – but one in which you are still able to control the direction of your thoughts – a state in which you are attentive without effort" (Out of this World, Chapter 1).

One caution here. Erickson concluded that Huxley's Deep Reflection "did not appear to be hypnotic in character". He would probably have said the same of Neville's drowsy state. The resemblance is between two descriptions of a threshold, not between two things Erickson would have called hypnosis.

Nobody can do it for you

This is where the psychiatrist sounds most like the mystic. "I really don't think the therapist is important at all," Erickson said in a lecture. Hypnotists, he wrote in 1952, "can only guide, direct, supervise, and provide the opportunity for subjects to do the productive work". In a 1964 paper he describes having a patient state, with eyes closed, what he wanted from treatment, four times over, each time more firmly, and then pointing out that "every item in that regard had come from the patient himself". No suggestion was given. A year later the man reported he was well.

Neville, in Feeling is the Secret: "you have no one to change but yourself, and you have neither opponent nor helper in bringing about the change within yourself." And in Five Lessons: "There is no one to change but self."

Where they clash

Direct, or indirect

Neville's instruction is direct. "If, as you prepare for sleep, you assume and maintain the consciousness of success by feeling 'I am successful', you must be successful." Say it, feel it, repeat it nightly.

Erickson spent forty years arguing against exactly that. Direct suggestion, he wrote in 1948, "implies that the therapist has the miraculous power of effecting therapeutic changes", and produces at best a symptomatic response. "You don't do it by a drastic, driving technique because that can be rejected." His own approach worked by implication, stories, puzzles, and tasks with hidden purposes, on the principle that "the most effective aspect of any suggestion is that which stirs the listener's own associations and mental processes into automatic action". Erickson's editors contrast his method with that of the researcher T. X. Barber, who trained subjects to "think and imagine along with" a direct suggestion. Neville's method is Barber's, not Erickson's: the conscious mind chooses the scene and imagines along with it.

In fairness, the same editors admit that controlled comparisons have found no behavioral advantage for indirect suggestion over direct. The evidence does not settle this in Erickson's favor. But the disagreement about how to address the deeper mind is real, and it is the first thing a practitioner of Neville would trip over in Erickson's pages.

Whose subconscious

For Neville the subconscious is a faithful mirror. It "does not originate ideas, but accepts as true those which the conscious mind feels to be true and, in a way known only to itself, objectifies the accepted ideas" (Feeling is the Secret, Chapter 1). It has no preferences of its own.

Erickson's unconscious is a second party. "No way you can consciously instruct the unconscious!" he told a doctor who had come to learn self-hypnosis. It protects the conscious mind from what it is not ready for, sets its own timing, and rejects what the whole personality will not accept, turning an unacceptable suggestion into pretense. It has purposes, and they can include failure. Two of his paper titles could not appear in a Neville book: "Hypnotherapy: The Patient's Right to Both Success and Failure" (1965) and "Successful Hypnotherapy that Failed" (1966). In the second, a man who had gagged on dentures for thirty-five years wore them happily for months, was promoted, and kissed his wife on the mouth for the first time in twenty years of marriage. Then one morning he left them at home because it seemed like a good idea, went back to gagging, and was content. Erickson's last line: "The author has no understanding of the course of events with this patient."

Neville wrote about failure too, and honestly. The Power of Awareness, Chapter 24 names two causes, both the practitioner's: you did not persist, or the assumption never felt natural. (There is a post on that chapter on this blog.) Erickson allowed a third cause that Neville never does: the person's own purposes, which the person may not know. This is the deepest split between them. One treats the subconscious as a womb that forms whatever it is given; the other treats it as a partner whose consent you need and cannot always get.

Memory, or imagination

When Rossi described Erickson's recovery from polio as a feat of imagination, Erickson corrected him: "An intense memory rather than imagination." He had relearned his muscles by recalling how they had once felt. His clinical principle followed: "Hypnosis does not change people nor does it alter their past experiential life." Everything he did with a patient was built from what that patient had already lived.

This shows in the size of the wishes. Erickson's time-projected patients wished small. The clerk, in his words, was "pitifully modest in wishing for 'just fair' health", and Erickson approved: there was "no running away of the imagination, but a serious appraisal in fantasy form of reality possibilities". Neville pushes the other way. "Do not limit yourself to the past. Knowing that nothing is impossible to consciousness, begin to imagine states beyond the experiences of the past" (Feeling is the Secret, Chapter 2).

There is a bridge between these positions, and Neville built it himself. In the chapter on failure he writes that "the fact that it does not feel natural to you to be what you imagine yourself to be is the secret of your failure". Erickson's patients, wishing modestly, were wishing for what already felt natural to them. The same rule sits under both methods. Erickson made it a limit on what to attempt. Neville made it a threshold to be crossed by repetition.

Revise the past, or add to it

Neville's Revision is the technique that separates him from most of his tradition. "Revise the letter. Mentally rewrite it and make it conform to the news you wish you had received," he writes in Awakened Imagination, and "Revision results in repeal." The day is rewritten, and the rewritten day is the one that counts.

Erickson has one case that comes close, and it is his most famous. In "The February Man" a pregnant young woman, an unwanted child raised by an aunt, is afraid she cannot love her baby. Erickson regresses her to the age of four and appears inside the memory as a visitor, a friend of her father's, then returns at six, at twelve, dozens of times across many sessions, until she has a childhood with a kind adult in it. His own description of what he was doing could be Neville's: "You can add belief to something that does not exist if you repeat it often enough." And: "I'm adding reality to a nonexistent thing."

Now look at the limits he set. Rossi's gloss, which Erickson accepted, was "you cannot really change her past, but you can change her beliefs about her past." Erickson chose scenes that could take a visitor "without altering or falsifying the situation", and when a later regression contradicted an earlier visit he erased the visit and redid it. With a small boy's nightmare, in another paper, he added comforting details but "would not alter the historical reality". And at the end of the February Man case he gave the woman full conscious recall of every trance, in order. Asked why, he said: "Because I may have made some errors." Erickson added to the past and then showed his work to the person it belonged to. Neville's Revision replaces the day outright, and nobody checks.

Other people

Neville's fourth chapter of Prayer goes further than most readers remember. "Anyone not objectively aware of you is in a profound hypnotic state relative to you," he writes, and then: "Represent the subject to yourself mentally as though he had already done that which you desire him to do." Behind this stands the principle that "the whole vast world is yourself pushed out" (I Remember When), which the Everyone Is You Pushed Out guide explains.

Erickson's picture of other people is the reverse. In 1939 he published a long study, years in the making, of whether trained hypnotic subjects could be made to do things they would refuse awake: steal, hurt themselves, expose a friend, believe a planted lie. They refused, evaded, sabotaged the task, or turned on the hypnotist. His conclusion was that "hypnosis cannot be misused to induce hypnotized persons to commit actual wrongful acts against either themselves or others", and that suggestion "could not render the subject an obedient, unthinking automaton". He never tested influence at a distance; the one time the idea surfaced, he joked to a patient's physician father that he "was a variation of a Christian Scientist" who "healed from a distance". In practice he handled other people directly. He briefed parents in private, extracted promises from them, told them when to buy the puppy.

Neville's examples of imagining for others are benign, and Erickson's experiment tested a hypnotist and a subject in a room, not a mother imagining her son well. The two are not testing the same claim. But they begin from opposite pictures of what another person is. For Neville, another person is a state of your own consciousness made visible. For Erickson, another person is opaque, separate, and to be observed very closely before you say a word.

What Erickson thought of teachers like Neville

This part is not comfortable, and it belongs in the article anyway.

Erickson reviewed books on self-hypnosis for the journal he edited. Of a 1961 title, How to Use Self-hypnosis for Health and Wealth, he wrote that it was written "for the man Barnum referred to as 'One born every minute.'" A 1963 manual by a psychiatrist he condemned as a book that "recommends to the public resort to self-help, to charlatans and to quacks". His 1965 editorial put the analyst who demands six years of treatment "on a par with" the "lay hypnotist who may blithely promise a completely remade life in 10 easy lessons". The society he founded required a doctorate for membership.

Neville had no degree. He lectured to the public, and his books are called Your Faith Is Your Fortune, At Your Command and Five Lessons. Erickson would have filed him with the charlatans without reading past the title, and it is no use pretending otherwise.

Yet the same 1965 editorial says patients "are not properly to be squeezed into any ritualistic, traditional method of procedure", and that hypnosis at its best "serves to elicit and to release the actual patterns of behavior and response existing within the patient". Erickson's quarrel with the self-help shelf was about who may practice, and under what checks. It was not about whether the resources are already in the person. On that, he and Neville agree, and neither would have admitted it.

The unmailed letter

Asked, in effect, why time projection worked, Erickson declined to theorize. He wrote that to speculate on the why and how "is difficult", and offered instead an example from ordinary life. A man, after much indecision, writes a letter accepting a new job. Once it is written, even before it is mailed, there comes "a profound feeling that the die has been irrevocably cast", and from that moment his thinking and planning reorganize around the new position.

Neville had a name for that feeling. He called it the feeling of the wish fulfilled, and he made it the hinge on which everything turns. Erickson noticed the same thing, wrote it down in a clinical journal, and stopped. That is the whole difference between them in a single page: one observation, treated by one man as a law of consciousness and by the other as a fact he would rather not explain.

Read together they leave a practitioner with a method and a discipline. The method is Neville's: the scene, the feeling, the drowsy state, the persistence. The discipline is Erickson's: wish for what can feel natural, keep your hands off it afterward, and keep a record of the times it did not work.

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Sources. Erickson's papers are quoted from The Collected Papers of Milton H. Erickson, Neuroscience Edition, edited by Ernest Rossi, Roxanna Erickson-Klein and Kathryn Rossi (8 volumes). Papers are cited by their original titles and years; the editors' commentary on genes and neurons is theirs, not Erickson's, and is left out here. Every Neville quotation links to its passage in the Vault.