Biographies
Born in 1901 in Aurum Nevada, Milton was the second of eleven children of Albert and Clara Erickson. The silver mine high in the mountains where Albert worked was a full day’s mule trek from provisions or even from the railroad that eventually came along a few years after the family had departed. Albert’s mining provided a sparce living for the family. The entire family learned to endure barren conditions and to make do with what little resources they had.
When Milton was five years old and had two sisters, his mother Clara announced that the children needed proper schooling. The family sold their holdings and departed in a covered wagon traveling east. After an arduous trip, they found their way to eighty acres of farmland in Wisconsin where they settled near Beaver Dam to be closer to Clara’s family. The family grew to nine daughters and two sons. The standards of the day meant that Milton and his younger brother Clarence were depended upon for the outdoor labor while the girls assisted with indoor work. Sometimes the family swapped intervals of labor with neighbors who had extra sons and fewer daughters.
Milton’s curiosity, creative problem solving, and passion for ongoing learning was apparent from his earliest years. He and his siblings were educated in a one room schoolhouse, and he set his sights on college and medical school. In his free time, he read and re-read the few books in the home while performing his own “experiments” with teaching and learning in inventive ways.
Though health issues, including polio, compounded circumstantial limitations, Milton remained focused on his desire to contribute to science while embarking on his chosen path to bring hypnosis into the practice of medicine. He never deviated from this commitment and used his health challenges to explore creative avenues of rehabilitation. He maintained an interest to work with seriously ill individuals so they could recapture a quality of life.
Milton and his wife, Elizabeth, settled in Phoenix, Arizona, after an interval of time in Michigan where he had dedicated himself to clinical research. In Arizona he set up a private psychiatry practice in the family home. He continued to teach, contribute to the literature, and inspire a new generation of innovative therapeutic approaches.
Recognition of the magnitude of Erickson’s contribution was not fully realized until after his death. Now approaching half a century since his passing in 1980, the uniqueness of his thinking, expansive ideas, and the prescience of his understandings about the ways life experiences affect thoughts, feelings and behaviors have brought the field of psychotherapy back to the ideas that he taught through his lifetime.
Roxanna is the seventh of the eight children of Milton and Elizabeth Erickson. With a lifelong interest in health services, she started her career as a registered nurse practicing in a variety of settings ranging from pediatrics, emergency room, intensive care, and home hospice. Fifteen years ago, Roxanna returned to school to study counseling, a decision based on her desire to be a contributing member of the health care community despite physical and age limitations.
The family commitments to work hard, to seek higher education, to be a contributing member of the community, to conduct one’s life in an ethical and considerate manner, and to continue growing and learning over one’s lifetime imprinted Roxanna with values she then passed along. She and her husband, Alan, married in a backyard ceremony in Phoenix in 1974, now have five adult children of their own. Each child has embarked on their individual and diverse career paths.
As a child in the Erickson household, topics of ordinary conversation frequently included hypnosis, trance, and conscious awareness. Day to day discussions provided a deep foundation about the process, potential, and the multiple ways hypnosis can contribute to healing. Throughout her life, Roxanna has integrated the hypnotic principles that were naturally learned throughout her upbringing. Her father delighted in using family members as demonstration subjects for teaching professionals and at times with demonstrating to patients in his home practice. It is of note that Roxanna and her siblings enjoyed a front row seat to many of the cases included in these Works. It is heartwarming to reflect on fond memories of patients who sat with us in our living room and initiated conversations with family members. Today professional communications have changed dramatically limiting communication with patients outside standard office encounters. While confidentiality and privacy are clearly important yesteryears richness of interacting with seriously ill patients as people is lost in today’s world.
Roxanna continues to publish her own ideas, teach, and maintain a private practice. She donates a considerable amount of time and resources to advance clinical hypnosis. Central in this mission, and in her work are preserving the primary writing and educational principles of the creative genius of her father.
Ernest Lawrence Rossi was a fantastic and unique human being with many gifts, the greatest was his kindness. He knew no limits of what was possible even as a young boy. His parents spoke Italian at home so his first exposure to English was at school. The school did not know what to make of his free spirit and they categorized him as “retarded.” This designation provided him the freedom to develop his own curious mind. He circled encyclopedias around him in the hallways to cross reference anything that was interesting. This childhood research experience offered the bandwidth to put together the Collected Works over one weekend in his Malibu living room years later, an achievement that others had found to be overwhelmingly complex. Ernest knew Erickson’s papers so well that he simply put them in piles according to his understanding. If one pile was too tall, he shifted papers to another volume.
Luckily, in the 3rd grade he took an achievement test. Much to everyone’s surprise he read at the 6th grade level! He went to regular school from then on. He registered to go to trade school, but a pretty girl he had a crush on headed to the high school and Ernest followed her right up the hill! He worked as a delivery boy for local pharmacists, and they recognized Ernest as gifted, so they arranged a scholarship for him to attend university specializing in pharmacology. It was there he discovered Freud and Jung, continuing his higher education in psychology. Ernest was proud that all his higher education was through scholarships.
How did Ernest discover hypnosis? As a boy one day he asked, “Ma, what color are my eyes?” She replied, “shit brown.” He was horrified. He noticed green specks within his brown eyes and wondered could he change their color? He began repeating, “Ernie has green eyes.” Years later his first date said, “Oh Ernest, you have such beautiful green eyes!” He could hardly wait to get home to look in the mirror and find out it was true. From that moment of discovery Ernest was open to all possibilities of mind.
Fascination for learning and contributing to science continued through his life. Together with his wife and professional partner, Kathryn, they founded the field of PsychoSocial Genomics. Their contributions integrate chronobiology, the 4-Stage Creative Cycle, quantum, chaos theories, and more. Ernest knew how to ask interesting questions whose answers then went through the lenses of emerging science. The Collected Works reflects this ever-emerging integration.
As the youngest of three children, and the only girl, Kathryn Lane Rossi had the luxury to develop her mind in her own way without too much interference or insistence to comply. Her parents encouraged her to seek truth internally and not through their dictates. Even with spiritual matters her parents encouraged her to choose her own beliefs. She became a vast, global, universal thinker integrating scientifically based fields into how to live a satisfying life.
Kathryn came to the world of trance and hypnosis unusually early in a non-conventional and nonverbal manner through sense memories of being in an incubator after her premature birth. Preemies shake and she liked this movement. The mobile above her crib entranced her with different shapes. She wondered, “Should I live, or should I die?” She chose life as the possibilities are so interesting to explore and develop, and isn’t that what life is all about?
In meeting her husband, Ernest Rossi, she had no idea about his contributions to the field of hypnosis and beyond. She simply loved his vast mind and kind spirit. Early on Ernest said, “Erickson would have loved you” when she described healing from a neck fracture. The pain, nausea, and dizziness were intense and unrelenting. It was time once again to choose life or death. She chose life and looked each morning, afternoon, and evening, for five minutes without pain. She believed if she could experience these 5 minutes without pain, she could then experience a lifetime without pain and did. In other words, she looked for what was not there, and blessedly found it after 9 grueling months. It took 3 1/2 years more to become pain free which lasts to this day.
Creating brief psychotherapies has been her passion since beginning Graduate School that eventually led her to a PhD. She often says to her clients, “Life is fullest outside my office. How soon can we get you there?” She wondered about the possibility of creating a psychotherapy without words, or at least the bare minimum of words. Indirect therapeutic hypnotic trance described by Erickson, utilizing minimal cues, indeed can offer a template for the unconscious mind to work its magic for transforming physical and emotional pain with few or no words. While she did not meet Erickson personally, she got to know him quite well through his writings and his many curious, wise and delightful students.