Milton H. Erickson

Milton Erickson was an American psychiatrist and the dominant figure in 20th-century clinical hypnotherapy. Working largely alone in private practice in Phoenix, Erickson developed an approach to hypnosis that rejected the dramatic stage-hypnosis tradition in favor of conversational, permissive language that bypassed conscious resistance. He worked successfully with conditions ranging from chronic pain to phobias to family conflict, often through brief interventions of one to three sessions.

Bandler and Grinder studied Erickson's work intensively in the mid-1970s, codifying his language patterns into what NLP calls the Milton model. The model gave NLP its hypnotic dimension and remains one of the field's most distinctive contributions. Erickson himself reportedly endorsed NLP's effort to codify his work, though he viewed the codified version as necessarily incomplete - his own practice depended on observational acuity that the patterns alone could not capture.