INTRODUCTION

I. Milton H. Erickson is one of the most admired, least understood, psychiatrists of this century. His work was truly original and seemingly unavailable to technical contrivance. Those who have attempted to conceptualize his work concluded they were unsuccessful, or only partly correct in their formulations. Erickson’s work had a living quality unforgettable to those who learned in his presece. It broke barriers and took unexpected forms as Erickson used techniques and resources that were close at hand. His work had a living quality that simply had to be seen and heard and felt to be understood.

This "living" aspect is the hallmark of Erickson’s unique contribution to psychotherapy. It is the delight and wonder of his work. It is also the aspect of his work that we are most in jeopardy of losing. For it is the very quality that is most intractable to written language and formulaic contrivance. Writing and formulation are the methods by which psychology is learned today. If we do not find a way to conceptualize this living quality of Erickson, we run the risk of not passing it on.
The living aspect of Erickson’s work could be seen in how he constructed his approach from the beliefs of his clients. It was present in the way he held sway over a roomful of students with the tone of his voice. It was how his words melted into tones to impart private meaning to those who cared to listen and even to those who did not listen. The living Erickson is seen in his laughter about the human predicaments he found and, at times, created. It was the way he sought information by engaging the listener and explored using a multitude of discrete tonal word choices and gestures to form direction. This is the Erickson I fear will be lost to future generations.

This performed quality is essential to the Ericksonian approach. It is also the aspect most intractable to methodological formulation and written text; the common vehicles of current psychological training. Thus the essential quality of Erickson’s work is incompatible with the primary methods of clinical education.
This incompatibility sets up a problem for the Ericksonian author. The author must provide a fundamental theory or framework that is useful to the learning clinician, but does not preclude the living performance that is the essence of his approach. A concise reduction of Erickson’s technique, while conceptually marketable, usually loses the lived, situational quality of his work. On the other hand, attempts to conceptualize the living, situational aspects of Erickson’s work begin to take on the form of koans, maxims, or vague principles, and fail to constitute a theory.

The ambition of this project is to develop a framework that includes and clarifies the living performed aspects of Erickson’s approach-a framework that will gather a greater number of his seemingly anomalous traits under a unifying singular concept. Such a concept will allow the psychological community to teach Ericksonian therapy from a solid conceptual foundation. This, I believe, will preserve and promote his teachings for future generations of therapists.



Review of Literature

This review of literature will encompass four major areas- three pertaining to oral studies and a fourth that addresses literature on Milton H. Erickson’s work. The first area has been created by my synthesis of an unrelated group of authors who have theorized a direct relationship between the evolutionary development of human communication, hypnosis, oral performance, and poetry. Taken together, the works of these authors form a coherent whole that unites these disparate areas of study and clearly situates them in the broader context of the social sciences. This review will briefly outline the works of these authors and provide an initial survey of their relatedness to one another.
The second area reviews the various approaches devised to study and represent oral tradition. All of these approaches involve some sort of analysis, categorization, and reduction. Such operations are incompatible with the oral mode, which tends to be holistic. Therefore, investigating the oral tradition from a Western literate mind-set presents a unique type of problem to be solved- the problem of interpreting and representing oral tradition in literate form. A few of the prominent approaches will be reviewed along with the unique pitfalls and issues these studies have made clear.
A third area of review concerns the contrast of orality and literacy. These contrasts should be read with the knowledge that literacy is an outgrowth of orality and therefore cannot be viewed as an entirely distinct cultural behavior. Additionally, the act of contrasting orality with literacy is itself a literate activity. Therefore the act is fundamentally biased against apprehending true oral experience. There are arguments that cast these two worlds far apart and others that show they are quite interdependent. Both will be reviewed.
Finally, there are the various publications, formulations, and descriptions of Milton Erickson's approach to psychotherapy. Although many publications on Erickson will be used, selected examples will be reviewed as examples of the oral/literate framework.


Common Origins of Poetry, Music, Oral Tradition, Hypnosis, and Social Bonding

One part of this thesis argues that oral tradition, hypnosis, music, and social
bonding are forms of interpersonal communication that share a common developmental ancestry. They appear to be expressions of innate interaction patterns that are somewhat determined by our neurological organization. Understanding the common developmental origin of these forms of communication imparts a greater understanding of hypnosis and the oral tradition, which in turn sheds new light on the work of Milton H. Erickson.
Connections between poetry, orality, hypnosis, and evolution were first recognized by Julian Jaynes (1976) in his book, The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bi-Cameral Mind. His linking of these diverse activities came about when he attempted to construct a theory of the origins of human consciousness. Jaynes believed human consciousness was a recent event in the evolution of Homo sapiens. His theory argues that consciousness developed only 3000 years ago. Prior to its development, people functioned without insight or self-perception. Thoughts were automotons responding to internal voices and visions that were not experienced as their own thoughts, but as gods who directed them. They were attributed to gods, says Jaynes, because the mind at that time had not developed a synthesis of the left and right hemispheres. The mind functioned in two separate chambers: it was bi-cameral.
For Jaynes, consciousness is what happens when the left and right hemispheres of the brain synthesize. This synthesis gives consciousness certain characteristics found to be missing from oral traditional literature:
1. It creates a sense of internal space and time.
2. There is a personification of ourselves in this internal space, which Jaynes calls "the analogue ‘I.’"
3. This personification participates in or with our actions and perceptions.
4. It allows us to compare and assimilate experiences. (Hampden-Turner, 1981, p.90)

Jaynes argues that these traits were non existent in Greek oral epics, such as Homer's Iliad. In such oral epics, there is no evidence of subjectivity, interpretation, or comparative thought. Everything is presented in terms of physical actions, bodily experiences and commands. Jaynes cites this as evidence of a nonconscious bi-cameral mind.
Jaynes also argues that hypnosis is a resurgence of bi-cameral mentality. It involves commands from the hypnotist who functions like the bi-cameral god. Hypnosis is experienced in terms of bodily experiences and psychomotor responses. There is also a suppression of the "analogue I," or observing self. In its place the hypnotist functions like an external bi-cameral voice.
Jaynes also argues that rhythmic poetry is a product of the same bi-cameral origin. He notes that Greek oral epics were sung. A large part of their effect was achieved through rhythm and meter (pp. 363-65). Likewise, poetry, which Jaynes notes was originally song, is an evolutional vestige of the bi-cameral mind. Poetry commanded the senses, it was associated with rhythm and repetitive pattern, and, as Jaynes wrote, "it felt good" (p. 363). As with hypnosis, much of the aesthetic experience of poetry was created by rhythm and repetition.
Poetry, song, oral tradition, and hypnosis are further connected by the fact that they all issue from the right hemisphere of the brain. Jaynes argues these human activities are evolved forms of the god-like bi-cameral voice. In his hypothesis, poetry, song, oral tradition, and hypnosis are linked together in an evolutionary scheme, which started in a bi-cameral neuronal structure. As the anterior commissure developed, it strengthened the synthesis of the two cerebral hemispheres. In much the same way as bi-focal vision creates the perception of depth, the binary synthesis of these hemispheres created our sense called consciousness.

What Jaynes correctly observes in his hypothesis is that these activities are highly similar, share a common social origin, and issue from the same cerebral hemisphere. It was not, however, because they were vestiges of a bi-cameral mind.
A major evidence for his thesis centers on Greek oral epic poetry as a record of bi-cameral perception- a form of awareness that was devoid of self-reference and interior thought processes. Oral literature, specifically The Iliad, is cited as evidence of that mental state because it contains no instances of self-reference and no evidence of internal dialogue. Jaynes is mistaken. The Greek oral epics do not lack subjective references because self-referential had not yet evolved. Greek oral epics lack subjectivity and self-referential speech because they were of an oral not a literate genre. The oral genre functioned by enrapturing the audience, by pulling it into the experience of the narrative. Oral poets did not convince their audience with objective explanations. Thus they did not use subjective declarations, nor do they in the present day. The Iliad was action oriented and physical because it was oral and not yet decontextualized through the use of writing. Only after print was "interiorized," as Walter Ong (1982) would state, did people have a metaphorical language about an interior space that held a "text" of sorts containing subjective content.
While Jaynes' bi-cameral hypothesis did not withstand later scrutiny, the evidences for his hypothesis are useful and provide a first glimpse of the evolutionary origins common to hypnosis, oral tradition, poetry, and social-bonding behavior. His argument for the unity of these human behaviors actually holds together very well. They are, however, more easily explained as forms of oral tradition than artifacts of a bi-cameral mind. It is the oral tradition that uses rhythm and verbo-motoric expression to communicate. The oral tradition teaches with aesthetics and influences by absorbing the listener in experience, as do poetry and hypnosis.

E. O. Wilson (1998) identifies this same unity in his work Consilience. He offers the idea that culture and genetic evolution influence one another. Culture is born of the minds of a given society; these minds are determined by the brain, which in turn is somewhat structured by genetics.
Wilson notes that culture functions like genetics. It can preserve information and shape behavior across generations. Cultural behaviors, such as art making and oral performance, are part of this co-evolutional exchange. Art and oral tradition can spread information rapidly through a culture, unlike genetics, which could take several generations of natural selection to create a change. Art and oral tradition serve an evolutionary function and enhance survival by conserving information and heightening the senses.
These cultural arts are also liable to a kind of natural selection. Cultural arts and traditions are recreated in each generation, allowing some forms to survive and reproduce more successfully than others. For example, some songs from the fifteenth century are still widely used today, while others maintain public interest for just a few months. The long-surviving cultural arts exert a counterinfluence upon the organisms that sustain it. They shape the behavior of the members of a culture. Sometimes the arts and oral traditions provide a central activity that bonds and unifies members of a culture. In this way, culture and genetics coevolve and enhance survival.
Wilson also discusses the reverse influence, that of our neurology on our sense of aesthetics, by citing particular repetitive patterns which arouse our interest and attention more than others. Such patterns seem to mirror our neurological makeup. They are found throughout the arts and arguably constitute a biological basis for a type of art criticism. He notes the work of Gerda Smets (1973), who found that abstract patterns with a redundancy of 20% evoked a sharp peak in brain arousal. The patterns seemed to create an optimal pattern of stimulation in the brain. Such patterns present an optimal amount of order-too much chaos becomes overwhelming, too little does not sustain interest. The preference appears to be innate and universal. Newborn infants prefer such patterns, which also appear to be similar to various abstract designs in numerous cultures. Wilson notes that Smets' high arousal designs bear resemblance to friezes, logos, colophons, and flags used throughout the world. It also appears that highly esteemed works of modern abstract art, such as Mondrian's "Oeuvre," reflect this same degree of order and organization (in Wilson, 1998, p. 250).
Wilson also cites storytelling and cultural imagery that may enhance survival by making us more aware of potentially harmful situations. The presence of snakes in a culture’s art and stories, for example, is proportionate to the number of snakes actually present in the environment. Wilson suggests that art and storytelling develop in symbiosis with the environment and serve an adaptive function.
Wilson shows a connection between the epigenetic rules that structure our perception and mother-infant bonding patterns. Infants are able to imitate their mother’s head movements and tongue thrusts within forty minutes of birth. In 12 days the infant can reciprocate complex facial expressions and hand gestures (p. 145). These patterns influence our patterns of communication, which in turn lend structure to our cultural traditions.
Wilson's ideas develop the genetic and biological connections between orality, aesthetics, and evolution. His ideas allow us to see that the phenomena Jaynes gathered to argue the bi-camerality hypothesis are more easily explained as biological functions that shape our habits of communication.

The place of hypnosis among oral tradition, aesthetics and evolution is made clear by Peter Brown (1991) in The Hypnotic Brain Hypnotherapy and social Communication. Brown maps the same territory as Jaynes and Wilson but with a focus on hypnosis. His book views hypnosis as a form of human communication. Brown traces hypnosis back to its roots in biologically determined patterns of social exchange. He examines the social communications of the great apes and the interaction patterns between mothers and their infant children. The first few chapters of the book follow a course of evolutionary development. Brown examines the neurological substrate of facial communication and gesture as well as vocal tone and rhythms of social exchange. For Brown, hypnosis is a special kind of communication that echoes the functioning of our neurological makeup. He discusses how hypnosis has its roots in oral performance and music, both of which use rhythm and sound to alter consciousness. Brown is also the first author to state that Milton H. Erickson was like an oral poet. His work illustrates how hypnosis is deeply situated in the matrix of orality, evolutionary development, and the arts.

There are three authors who’se work develops the connections traced by Jaynes, Wilson, and Brown. Ellen Dissanayake clarifies the overlap between the arts and social communication in "Antecedents of Musical Meaning in the Mother-Infant Dyad" (in Cooke & Turner, Eds., 1999). John Miles-Foley looks at learning and adaptive significance in oral performance. And Fredrick Turner examines the connections between oral performance, the arts, biology, and adaptation.
Dissanayake (1999) argues that music has meaning because it builds upon and echoes the rhythmic patterns of interactive play developed in the infant-mother relationship. Citing much of the same research as Peter Brown, Dissanayake demonstrates that such interactions are essential for brain development and socialization. Where as Brown discusses similarities to hypnosis, Dissanayake argues for a likeness to music. Both Dissanayake and Brown note patterns of mother-infant interaction that typify Ericksonian hypnotherapy- namely, flexibility, rhythm, and reciprocity, all of which alter the physiology of the participants.
Foley's work (1987) looks at the use of oral performance as a way to guide psychological development. Oral traditional stories model stages of development and the tasks that accompany those stages. The live narrative format of the oral tale enraptures the attention of the listener by building upon the innate interactional strategies previously mentioned. This enrapturing quality is aesthetic and entertaining; thus it draws members of the culture together and enhances their societal connections. Foley's article further develops the ties between oral tradition, aesthetics, and human development.
All of these connections are woven together in the work of Fredrick Turner (1991), who insists that aesthetics are biologically based and that aesthetic experiences help us evolve. His work traces the influence of our biology on the arts and argues that aesthetic rules are highly determined by our innate, patterned tendencies of communication.

Taken together, the work of these authors form a picture of human development-one that unites the underlying commonalties between orality, evolutionary development, hypnosis, and aesthetics. Their work provides a theoretical ground for the Erickson/orality hypothesis. It postulates that these human activities are intimately related to one another in form and function, and that they work together to promote our development as a species.


Approaches to the Study of Orality
Studies of oral tradition are primarily works of ethnography. When studying orality some researchers focus on the performance of the spoken word, others on situational aspects of the oral event. Still others make an issue of the interaction between speaker and listener. When writing about orality, a researcher must first conceptualize the oral event in some way and then attempt to represent the findings. The findings are usually published in text form, which leaves the researcher with the problem of conveying the totality of the oral experience in the non-oral medium of print- a transformation Tedlock (1990) calls "textualization." There are a number of ways the medium problem can be solved. These will be discussed after a review of some of the ways orality has been conceptualized.

Concepts of Orality
After centuries of literacy, Western scholarship encountered oral cultures and became aware of orality. From their thoroughly literate perspective Western researchers observed the communicative style of these oral cultures and noticed a unique, motoric, rhythmic way of exchanging information. Marcel Jousse (1925) published his Le style oral rythmique et mnemotechnique chez les verbo-moteurs after studying a craft-literate (semi-literate) culture in the Near East. In his foreword he writes, "Experimental psychology is beginning to make contact with ethnology, linguistics and experimental phonetics" (p. 3). His concept of orality combined these disciplines. Comparing the oral culture to his own highly literate mode of thought, Jousse recorded the unique styles of their communication. He observed the structure of their language to be intimately geared to their physiology and gestural patterns. The bilateral symmetry of the human body was reflected in the phrasing they used, and the gestures and movements that completed the messages of their speech appeared to synchronize their conversation. In Jousse we have the first notion, however indirect, that oral cultures think and communicate differently from literate cultures.
About six years after Jousse published his findings on the verbo-motors, neuropsychologist Alexander Luria began his studies in Uzbekistan. The Soviet Union was undergoing radical changes at the time and Luria was under political pressure to demonstrate the positive effects of Soviet modernization. Uzbekistan, in the south of the continent, was a thriving rural region with a mix of schooled and unschooled citizens. Luria and his colleagues brought standardized intelligence tests to the region in hope of quantifying their progress. The tests, however, were literate constructions based on principles of formal logic. They required the subject to solve problems using hypothetical information devoid of a context. The primarily oral Uzbeki culture circumvented these logical questions in the oddest of ways. Their answers were contextual, situational, and entwined with direct experience. They did not give the abstract answers the test was designed to measure. This led Luria to suggest, as part of a Marxist psychology, that literacy allowed people to think logically. It was the first instance of what Daniel Chandler (1998) has called the "great divide theories," namely, that orality and literacy are dichotomous with orality as "pre-logical" or "primitive" and with literacy as "analytical" or "advanced." In agreement with Chandler, later studies have shown the assumption to be specious (Cole and Scribner, 1981).

Walter Ong (1982) sees clear distinctions between orality and literacy but does not hold either as superior. He proposes that orality has its own psychodynamics and draws on the work of Luria and Jousse to substantiate his claims. These oral psychodynamics form habits of thought and behavior that are reliably seen throughout the world’s oral traditions. Ong demonstrates that oral thought moves and constructs itself by adding image upon image. It tends to group things in wholes rather than deconstruct them. It expounds by the layering of multiple versions and descriptions. It functions by building upon or utilizing preexisting patterns of thought, language, and behavior, and in doing so, it revitalizes and preserves those patterns. Ong states that oral thought remains close to the human life-world; it thinks in context with the situation and resources immediately at hand. It is empathetic and participatory, rather than objectively distanced. Ong's psychodynamics of orality are central to the hypothesis that Milton H. Erickson worked in oral mode. They can be seen throughout Erickson’s work and form an accurate description of his approach to psychotherapy.
Ong sees writing as a technology that restructures consciousness. Writing allows the mind to be free from the task of memorization. It is a visual object that can be read silently, which promotes an interiorization of thought. Writing also has an inherent linear, sequential quality, which fosters similar tendencies of thought. Although Ong makes explicit statements that neither orality or literacy is superior, he seems to conceptualize them as widely different modes of thought and appears to champion orality as the more vital of the two.
In a later publication Ong (1995) appears to have a less dichotomous view of orality and literacy. Instead, he shows that the two coexist in the realm of interpretation. There can be oral interpretations of an oral event, as in everyday conversation; there can be written interpretation of oral events, as in Luria's report of the Uzbekis; and there is the handwritten interpretation of text, as when one takes notes while reading a book. This dissertation uses Ong's fourth stage of hermeneutics, the print-to-print interpretation of oral utterance. By and large, I have relied upon printed reports of oral cultures and compared them to print representations of Milton Erickson's work. Ong goes on to include tape recordings, and video as higher forms of media used in the interpretation of oral events. The essay provides a clear stratification of hermeneutics by level of technology and shows how any two may interface and yield a unique result.
Dichotomies between orality and literacy can be seen in Ong's work. This may be more due to the ubiquitous nature of dichotomies, however, than to Ong's actual view on the matter. A Jesuit priest, Ong has a long history of listening to and delivering oratory. Shaped so deeply by his tradition, Ong knows the power of the spoken word and champions it in his writing. His work biases orality as the more living of the two media. For Ong, the voice is alive, sound is alive, and text is merely a technology, a series of ink symbols on a page. He writes these thoughts with a full acknowledgment of the irony that he is communicating in print. In part, Ong biases orality because he knows he is writing to a literate audience. He must celebrate orality to its fullest, to convey even a glimpse of his point of view, so immersed are we in the certainties of the literate world.

An objection to Ong's psychodynamics of orality comes from Peter Denny (Olson & Torrance Eds., 1991), who argues that Ong's various differences between oral and literate thought are actually just one difference. Denny states that although literacy has had a great effect on the world, it is not the source of complexity, abstraction, and logic that it is reputed to be. The only difference between oral and literate cultures, according to Denny, is that literate peoples think about things without the need for a context. Oral peoples think within a context.
Denny writes that the Uzbekis, for instance, are not pre or nonlogical; their logical reasoning is simply bound by context in a way that obscures it from the Western literate observer (Hutchins, 1980). Like Daniel Chandler (1998), Denny wishes to preserve the notion that literate cultures hold no real supremacy over oral cultures by arguing that we are all alike. His idea that literacy only differs from orality by its use of decontextualization is compromised by Ong's highly descriptive work on oral/literate differences.
To address this compromise, Denny claims that Ong's contrasts of oral and literate thought are false. Ong states that oral thought is additive rather than subordinate, aggregate rather than analytic, empathic and participatory rather than objective and distanced, and situational rather than abstract. Denny feels Ong is merely seeing contextualization and decontextualization in different forms. For Denny, each of the oral/literate pairings can be explained as instances of decontextualization. Ong demonstrates additive and subordinate styles in a comparison of Biblical passages from Genesis 1. The more oral Douay version from 1610 appends each phrase to the last by use of the word and, while the 1970 New American Bible has a subordinate structure with use of when, while, then, and thus (p. 37). Denny argues that additive sentences are context bound and subordinated sentences decontextualize by separating the phrases. He goes on to refute each of Ong's contrasts with this same argument in an attempt to reduce the differences in cognition they imply. While Denny's work clarifies an important and central feature of literacy-decontextualization-it adds little to our understanding of orality. The argument does not actually refute Ong's contrasts, nor does it provide a competing explanation for them it merely places them in a more general category. It is like hearing someone make distinctions between oranges, lemons, and limes and saying the differences are specious because they are all actually citrus fruit. It is a true statement but as an argument it does little to enhance our understanding.
Denny fails to address the distinctive style and experiential power of orality that Ong illuminates in his work. While each of Ong's oral/literate contrasts may include contextualization or decontextualization, they are not necessarily limited to that single dichotomy. Take for example Ong's point that oral structure is additive and literate structure is subordinate. The real insight of this contrast is in the recognition that the additive structure builds one thought upon another through the use of the conjunction and. Each thought is equally present and adds to the meaning and momentum of the last. Through this method, the additive style creates a rhythm. That rhythm tends to engage the body, creating a kinetic presence that is an expressive dimension of the phrase itself. This is quite different from a literate structure that organizes the phrases in subordinate relationship to one another. Such an organization makes the sentence its own object of reference. The sentence becomes an object unto itself and the mind must lend itself to experience it on those terms. One could argue this is simply another example of contextualization verses decontextualization, but that would be a highly literate insistence that misses the distinct experience evoked by the two styles. Ong's oral/literate contrasts capture all the subtle differences between orality and literacy, and herein lies its value.

The question of literacy as a cause for cognitive differences has been long debated. Jousse, Luria, and Ong concluded that orality and literacy have distinct dynamics of thought after observing oral cultures. Other researchers came to the same conclusion based on observations of literate culture. Marshal McLuhan (1962), in his book The Gutenberg Galaxy, demonstrated how the media directly shapes the content of communications. Printed text, he claims, created a constricted and linear consciousness as it was internalized, over hundreds of years, in the minds of European readers. Modern broadcasting media, which was more comprehensive than print in its ability to convey information, ameliorated this narrowing of consciousness. Its audio-visual media capability resulted in a broader range of experience for the recipient. McLuhan claims that the limited medium of print narrowed people’s thought and thereby curbed the experiential range of their consciousness. A second implication in McLuhan's work is that changes in consciousness reflect the physical form of the media responsible for the change.

This implication raised discussion about technology and human change. Does human consciousness change over time or is it constant? If changes occur, of what do they consist and how are they caused? Orality/literacy studies are haunted by these issues and there seems to be no end to the various terms and positions applied to the topic.
For McLuhan, technologies produced changes in "consciousness." McLuhan uses this term to indicate general levels of awareness and qualities of experience. Observing the same phenomena, Luria concluded that "literacy" creates a different type of mental organization, one that is less individual and more collective. For Luria, changes took place in cognitive processes, not consciousness, and these changes were cultivated by reading ability, not by the impact of the print medium.
Ong (1982) uses the term "psychodynamics" when describing oral/literate differences. The term is more specific than McLuhan's "consciousness" and more general than Luria's focus on "cognitive processes." These changes in psychodynamics occur as the result of an "interiorization of print" (pp. 52, 56, 81). As printed text is read and remembered over many years, people begin to conceptualize their own thoughts as a kind of text. As they do this, thought takes on the inherent logic and organization of text. This interiorization is evident in our metaphors. People are "open books," things are "written on hearts and minds," or "all over the face," allowing others to "read you like a book." People in disagreement are "not on the same page," and inattention to social cues is an inability to "read between the lines." In much the same way that our current society "cybermorphizes" mental functioning with all manner of computer metaphors, early literate cultures "textualized" mental thought through metaphors about print and script.
Olson (1994) in turn argues that it is not literacy in and of itself that creates changes in consciousness. It is the effect of cultural institutions made possible by literacy. Olson argues that literacy has an impact on cognition because it enables a person to have access to literate institutions and their resources. It also affects cognition through the ways it is taught and used in a culture. He notes that institutions such as law and science operate through certain "rules of order" which are bound by text. They operate with written contracts, methods of interpreting text, professional journals, and massive compilations of written records. The learning of this reality and the subsequent immersion in it has its effects.
The effects of literacy are borne out in a number of studies. Scollon and Scollon (1984) show that class and ethnic differences affect classroom learning, particularly when they reflect oral and literate styles. A classroom study found that white middle-class children asked and responded to questions to which they knew the answers. They were able to engage in a schoolroom exercise that was suspended from any context beyond the exercise itself. Black children, however, did not ask questions to which they already knew answers and did not expect others to ask them questions if other’s already knew the answer. Thus when the white teacher asks, "What day is it today?" the white children thoughtlessly respond "Monday." The black children wonder why the teacher doesn't know what day it is. The "rules of order" are familiar to one set but not the other, creating different levels of institutional access.
Scribner and Cole (1981) also provide evidence that social use of literacy had a greater impact on cognition than literacy alone. In studies of the Vai people of Liberia, Scribner and Cole found members who knew only the Vai script remained oral in their mind-set. Significantly, the Vai script was not used in an extensive bureaucratic system, nor was it used to manage societal affairs. Furthermore, the Vai script was not taught through formal schooling. However, Vai people trained in English grammar schools demonstrated consistently higher scores across all domains of cognitive testing. Categorizing, memory, logical reasoning, encoding/decoding, semantic integration, and verbal explanation were all tasks performed better by the English grammar-school students than those trained in other forms of literacy. This suggests that the institutional use of literacy has a distinct role in changing cognitive style.

Finally, we must ask if there is actually a change in cognition or simply a change in the use of cognitive skills. In this area it seems that the evidence argues for merely a change in use. Jerome Bruner's work (1978) seems to bear this out. In review of Luria's assumptions he writes:
Most of what has emerged from studies of Africans, Eskimo's, aborigines, and other groups shows that the same basic mental functions are present in any culture. What differs is the deployment of these functions: what is considered an appropriate strategy suited to the situation and task. (p. 88)

Although Bruner states there is no actual change in cognition, he still notes a change-one of strategy and deployment of cognitive skills based on the context and culture of the person.

Whether there are changes in cognition or consciousness, habits of thought, or psychodynamics, it can be said that there is a distinctive difference in the way oral and literate cultures live. The differences appear in the ways we socialize and problem solve. Literacy does make changes in they way we communicate, whether it is through print media, the institutions that form around that media, or the internalized learnings we accrue from mastering that media.
These differences play an important role in the work of Milton H. Erickson. It is evident that Erickson was raised in a primarily oral culture, and that he maintained much of his oral style throughout his life. When his work was encountered by Western-educated literate minds, a phenomenon similar to the literate study of oral cultures was produced. Descriptions of oral/literate differences provide a framework for understanding Milton H. Erickson's work. The following section reviews some methods of investigation that consider these differences.



Interpretation and Representation of Orality

Oral and literate differences create problems of interpretation. If a researcher takes field notes on an oral performance, brings them home to her desk, and writes a published paper, the reader of that published paper is far removed from the original field experience. The oral performance is an event entirely woven from the context in which it was created, and context imbues the story with meaning. If removed from the context, much of that meaning is lost. Furthermore, the performance is dramatized with hand gestures, prosody, and the living presence of the speaker. Reduce this live event to handwritten notes on a sketchpad and it suffers a loss of its essential qualities. Write about them in the solitude of an office and they lose much their drama.
Attempts at interpretation must negotiate this impasse in some way. When interpreting and representing oral tradition there is always a compromise between concise conceptual modeling and accurate representation of the oral event. Accurate representations usually portray the oral event in a more orally aligned format. Concise modeling, arguably a literate endeavor, usually fails to convey a true sense of the event from which it was derived.
This thesis borrows from two methods of interpretation: one which represents the original oral performance in a most preserved form, called the ethnography of speaking/ethnopoetics school and another that provides a good conceptualization of orality, known as oral-formulaic theory.
The ethnography of speaking/ethnopoetics school seeks to understand and interpret oral traditional performance by entering the experiential ground of orality. It is, as Tedlock states, "ethnography as interaction" (Tedlock, 1983, p. 285). The ethnopoetics school is interested in the live event of oral performance, the context of the event, and the meaning of the event in the culture of the surrounding listeners.
Oral-formulaic theory is the more textually biased of the two. It interprets oral performance as a type of impromptu composition aided by the use of rhyme and meter. Oral-formulaic theory was in part a response to questions of how epic poems were produced and remembered without the aid of writing.

Oral-Formulaic Theory
Oral-formulaic theory started with the work of Milman Parry, an American classicist who shed new light on Homeric verse. The Iliad and The Odyssey, highly regarded examples of early Western composition, were something of a troubling presence among the classics of Western literature until Parry's thesis was published. They contain strange repetitions and odd plot structures compared to later works of Western literature. Discussion about these oddities became known as the "the Homeric question." The Homeric question concerned itself with how The Iliad and The Odyssey were composed, if it was the work of a single author or multiple authors and whether or not writing was involved. In his "Essay on the origin of languages," Jean-Jacques Rousseaus (in Havelock, 1986, p. 36), addressed the issue of Homer's literacy and concluded that Homer likely did not write. Flavius Josephus, perhaps the earliest on record to raise the question, claimed that Homer did not know how to write (in Ong, 1982, pp. 18-19) Robert Wood (c. 1717-71) believed that Homer was not literate and that he produced his works, somehow, from memory.
Parry solved this question in his work The Making of Homeric Verse, published in French in 1928 and translated to English in 1971. Homeric verse, he suggested, was constructed in performance from memory. It was not a primitive form of literature as the classicists assumed, but a traditional style of spoken word improvisation. Parry demonstrated that the words and phrases of Homeric verse were chosen largely because they fit within a hexameter line. This hexameter structure functioned like a rhythmic carrier wave that pulled the performer from one phrase to the next. The use of stock phrases and epithets that possessed various numbers of syllables maintained the hexameter line.
Parry's discovery was that Homeric verse was not crafted in the way a writer works out a script on paper; it was improvised from set phrases, which Parry called "formulas." These phrases were not the only stock clichés in Homeric verse. Phrases were organized around stock "themes" that also repeated throughout the epic. Parry demonstrated that nearly every distinctive character of Homeric verse was due to the exigency of its oral composition. Much to the shock of literary scholars of the classics, Homer turned out to be more of a "rapper" than a writer. The term "rap" has its etymology in the word "rhapsodize." This vernacular description becomes all the more fitting when we hear Walter Ong comment: "Careful study of the sort Milman Parry was doing showed that he [Homer] repeated formula after formula. The meaning of Greek term 'rhapsodize', rhapsoidien, 'to stitch song together' (rhaptien, to stitch; oide, song), became ominous: Homer stitched together prefabricated parts" (1982, p. 22).
The textual bias of the classicists had prevented them from seeing what Parry had discovered-that Homeric verse was a distinct (oral) use of language, not an antiquated genre of writing.

Albert Lord (1960) furthered Parry's work with "The Singer of Tales." This study of Slavic oral poets fleshed out Parry's initial work with the Slavs. Through countless field interviews Lord demonstrated how the Slavic themes were constructed out of formulas, how the song varied according to context, and how the structure of these epic songs can be found in other oral performance.
Lord developed the idea that parallel, additive structures could be found throughout Homeric verse and were a universal structure in oral tradition. Lord saw parallelism as a way oral poets retained their songs in memory. The metered structure was a constant rhythm against which the content of the song could be poured forth "like trained reflexes" (1960, p. 58).
Despite insights into orality, the presence of a textual mind-set can be seen in the Parry-Lord thesis. The theory discusses lines of song as objects or units that are assembled together like tiles in a mosaic. There are of literary-styled terms, such a verses, themes, and lines. In the true oral culture, even as Lord himself indicated, there is no object-like concept of words (Foley, 1995, p. 2). It is also true that the germinal idea of the thesis was originally produced by an examination of written text. In this sense, there is something about the Parry-Lord thesis that misses the center of the oral reality, favoring instead a conceptualization that leans toward literate concepts.
Two other authors, Eric Havelock and John Miles Foley, have contributed to this vein of inquiry. Havelock's "Preface to Plato" (1963) took the Parry-Lord discovery of oral/literate differences and used it to interpret changes in Greek culture produced by the alphabet. Where Parry and Lord focused on improvised composition, Havelock focused on the oral poet’s ability to preserve and recall information on behalf of their culture. This ability to conserve and recall information was being replaced in Plato's time by writing technology. Havelock surmised that Plato thought as he did because he and his culture had recently internalized written text. Plato would not allow poets in his idealized republic because their thought continued to be traditional, conservative, and repetitive. His new world of thought, arguably produced by writing, was decontextualized, abstract, and novel. It was world in which the old style of rhythmic remembering would simply get in the way. For Havelock, oral tradition was a way in which societies passed knowledge from one generation to the next. It was at once entertainment, education, storage of data, and a way to bond a community (Havelock, 1986).
John Miles-Foley (1990, 1991, 1995) extended the Parry Lord thesis from its original text-oriented form to one more inclusive of performance and context. Foley recognized the textual bias of the Parry-Lord thesis. He noted the irony of this bias since both Parry and Lord had set out redirect the attention of literate-bound classicists toward orality. Foley recognized that the reduction of Homeric oral epics to "sets of hackneyed phrases" was an operation still bound up in the limitations of text (1995, p. 4). Such reductionism was an operation that ultimately robbed the oral epic of its poetry, and the performer of his artistry. Foley sought to refocus the Parry-Lord thesis on the surrounding context that imbued meaning on the phrases and formulas used by the poets.
Foley pointed out that each Homeric epithet, such as "wing-footed Achilles" functioned as a symbolic encapsulation of the hero's total character, as well as a mnemonic trigger of all the hero’s previous escapades. When the traditional audience heard the phrase "wing-footed Achilles," all the past actions of the hero were evoked. In Foley's words, the formula's were not simply metric aids to on-the-fly composition, they were symbolic referents of the entire tradition. These formulas were spoken to an oral traditional society. The meaning they imbued to the formula drew from a long, intergenerational history of use. The more the formula was used, the more history it accumulated and the more evocative it became.
A modern-day example of this phenomenon is the use of "spotting" in film sound tracks. Spotting is the use of a certain musical score to mark and augment moments of a film. Each time a certain character or emotion is depicted, it is paired with a specific musical score. After several of these pairings the score alone will evoke all the emotional content of the previous instances in which it was used. John Williams’ plodding musical score in Jaws came to evoke the total emotional experience of all the previous shark attack scenes in the film. Bernard Herman’s string section in Psycho is another noteworthy example. Both of these uses of spotting are still widely referenced today, and with great effect.
Later, in his Immanent Art (1991), Foley took a more contextualized view of oral tradition and emphasized the contribution of the listener. For the history of use and the meanings triggered by the formulas live in the memories of the traditional audience- those peoples who have gathered and listened to the stories for countless generations. The oral phrase functions in partnership with this mass memory by evoking its history. The oral performer uses these phrases to create implied connections, which the listener must resolve. She may also tell a series of stories with related themes from which the listener draws his or her own parallels. Both the arrangement of the phrases and the referent tradition give meaning to the work of the oral poet.
In his 1995 Singer of Tales in Performance, Foley attempted to unite the Parry-Lord theory with the ethnography of speaking/ethnopoetics school. Here Foley extended the ideas from his Immanent Art to include the presence of the performer and the performance situation. These later two elements of oral tradition are the main focus of the ethnopoetics school. Foley explored the ways words become incredibly powerful in the oral tradition with a theory he called "word-power." Word-power is the specific potency of meaning bestowed on a word by its history of use in a tradition and by the way the oral performer expresses it. Foley called the performance the "enabling event" and tradition the "enabling referent" (Foley, 1995, p. 1).
These ideas were conceptualized in three domains: the performance arena, the register, and the communicative economy. The performance arena is the setting in which the oral performance takes place. It is a location that lends meaning to the performance. A ghost story told around a campfire will have a different impact when told in the community room of the library, especially if the story is about ghost who lives among the trees. Traditional oral cultures may have special locations where their stories are told. Simply gathering there may initiate a special mind-set. Likewise, a psychotherapist's office can be seen as a traditional performance arena that loads meaning on every comment and every word.
The register is a style of speech associated with a certain recurring situation (1995 p. 50). The hypnotist, for instance, may use a certain voice or phrase to indicate that he is starting an induction. The listener becomes conditioned and readily enters trance at the first signs of this special trance register. A register is a culturally agreed upon set of signals designed to collect and focus participants on a certain disposition such as when a priest standing at a gravesite (the arena) says "We are gathered here today.…" Such a phrase, heard repeatedly in a culture, echoes the numerous times it was heard in the past. In doing so it collects the minds of the listeners and sets the register or tone of the event, which is ritually familiar to the listeners.
The final component of Foley's word-power theory is the communicative economy. Communicative economy denotes the efficiency communication takes on when used in a close group over time. Words and phrases become like shorthand, with a single utterance indicating an entire story or an entire event.
Keith Basso clearly depicted the vital importance of communicative economy among the Apache Indians. The Apache can recite the names of specific places found in the geography around their reservation. These names are poetic, physical descriptions of the locations. Each place is a site where some real or legendary event took place. The stories of those events are moral teaching tales that are used as interventions for immoral behavior. The communicative economy is such that evoking the name of the place will help a person to live correctly (Basso, 1983). Communicative economy is not simply the implied meanings of the words, but the ways in which those words are used and exchanged in the surrounding culture.
Singer of Tales in Performance is an example of Parry-Lord theory that has become dynamic. In it Foley joined the live-event emphasis of the ethnography of speaking school with his own lineage of structure conscious theory. The resulting theory is a powerful model that that conceptualizes orality while at the same time preserving some of its dynamic, situated vitality. This model provides a basic frame through which I will reexamine Milton H. Erickson's work. It provides a solution to the conceptual impasse many Erickson scholars have encountered in their attempts to produce a model of his work. The concepts of register, communicative economy, and performance arena will be applied to Erickson's work.



Ethnography of Speaking/Ethnopoetics School

Keith Basso said, "Grasping other people's metaphors requires ethnography as much as it does linguistics" (1983, p. 51). In the same passage he quotes Samuel Johnson, who wrote "To inhabit a language is to inhabit a living universe, and vice-versa." This, it seems to me, is the crux of the approach of the ethnopoetics school. The interpretation of culture, including its performances and stories, must be conducted while immersed in the culture. The ethnopoetics school, more than any other preserves the living quality of orality. Proponents of this school offer accounts of oral cultures, which are never disembodied from stories of their own experiences within the culture. Their approach to the interpretation and representation of orality realizes the necessity of "being there." Much of their work captures the dynamic forces at play in the live oral event and seeks to capture something of this quality in the accounts they publish.
The contributors to the Ethnography of speaking/ethnopoetics school are too numerous to review in full. Among the major contributors are Richard Bauman (1977), who did much of the early work on conceptualizing the dynamic, situational components of oral performance; Dell Hymes (1974) who developed the "speaking model," which analyzes discourse on the basis of various rhetorical components such as setting, action sequences, participants, modes of speech, and traditional norms in the culture; and Roger Abrahams (1968), who applied rhetorical theory to folklore and suggested three evocative universals in oral performance: (a) Overstatement and understatement, (b) concrete and specific language, and (c) translation of idea and emotion into action and symbol. Various concepts from these models will be used to examine Milton Erickson's work and to demonstrate its oral traditional character.
In addition to these contributors, there is the work of Dennis Tedlock (1971, 1983, 1990) and Keith Basso (1983). These authors will be reviewed in more depth as their work has provided some central insights into my study of Milton H. Erickson.

Dennis Tedlock calls his approach "ethnography as interaction" in chapter 13 of his work The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation (1983). He notes that the more a fieldworker knows and is known, the less he can avoid becoming part of the action he is investigating. Likewise, the less he knows and is known, the greater his inability to interpret the culture. For Tedlock, immersion in the culture gives the investigator the proper understanding. He is well aware of the reductive effects of textualizing oral communal events. Much of his work seeks to raise awareness of this textual blind spot, to provide theoretical grounds for an interactive approach, and to promote ways in which oral events may be more preserved in text.
For Tedlock the textual blind spot is never quite so evident as when literate scholars study oral stories from a book as though they were a collection of short stories. The written short story is a final thing, a work in print that was originally born of that medium. The author has worked out its final form knowing precisely that her exact presentation will remain as she put it on the page. With this as an unwitting model, many collectors of oral stories have gone into the field and copied down the words of traditional storytellers as though it were an act of preservation. Tedlock notes that Franz Boas and Levi Strauss worked under this bias and tended to focus on the content of the story as though the content "enjoyed independence from [oral] style and translation" (1971, p. 120). Tedlock demonstrates that this is not the case.
The Quiche Mayans, for example, function in such continuous awareness of the present context that they may reject an audio recording of one of their own stories as a definitive version (1990, p. 142). The tape, it seems, is now a new form in a new context, which gives it a very different meaning. Of working with the Quiche Mayans, Tedlock says, "We seem to have entered a world where every act of representation is also an act of interpretation. (These days, of course, it has been dawning on a lot of us that we have been living in just such a world all along)" (p. 142).
The Quiche Mayan, in a sense, have no text. The meaningfulness of a story is utterly contingent on the moment and context in which it is told. The telling itself is woven from the emergent threads of the existing dialogue making it coexistent with the context. Attempts to convert this phenomenon to a short story in print sometime after the fact is confounding.
Tedlock also shows how the performance itself creates content and that in the oral world the hypothetical boundary between content and process quickly collapses. The act of telling the story creates immense meaning in and of itself. This meaning or "content" is communicated through changes in volume, pauses, tone of voice, hand gestures, and eye contact. He points out how the silence of a speaker informs us just as much as his speech. That silence is lost when the performance is converted to text.
To preserve some sense of this performance data in translation, Tedlock has devised a special form of notation. He prints louder words in bold type. Changes in pitch may be represented by raising and lowering the letters of a word above or below the line of type. Held vowels are draaawwwnnn out in the spelling of the text. Pauses. . . are depicted. . . with periods or spaces between letters. In this way, something of the live performance of the oral event is indicated and some of its dramatic meaning is preserved.
It is of note that Tedlock was forced to write the text this way by the demands of the oral performance. Milton Erickson's work, also oral in style, has demanded a similar style of text. As will be seen in the main body of this dissertation, several authors have adopted a similar style of print in an attempt convey the performed effect of Erickson's speech.
Another key insight Tedlock has contributed is the idea that a representation of an oral story must be told in a way that avoids a finality of meaning. Oral performances are designed to proliferate with meaning. Textual interpretations of these performances often halt this proliferation by defining the content of the story in some specific way. This act of defining stems from the literate concept that there is (or should be) an authoritative version of a traditional story. When an oral event is presented in this way its meaning becomes defined. The story delivers one moral or one message and the process stops there.
Tedlock states, "The trick [of translation] is to tell the story of what performers have said and done while at the same time letting their performances go on telling a story" (p. 141). Tedlock accomplishes this in his presentations of oral stories by giving a narrative account of his experience of the performed event. He enters the situation and reports not only the content of the story, but the way it was told, how it made him feel, and how others present responded to the story. This approach expands the interpretive scope to include the environment in which the story lived. In so doing, it allows the story to go on telling a story.
Some scholars who have written Milton H. Erickson have used a similar approach. Sidney Rosen's My Voice Will Go with You (1982) is one such example. His presentation of Erickson's work includes not only the content, but the context in which the story was told. Rosen sometimes includes his personal reactions to the story-event. Although he sometimes defines what the stories are about, these comments are kept to a minimum and serve only to give the reader a starting orientation to the story.
Lynn Hoffman identifies this approach and its effect in her insightful foreword to the book. She describes Erickson as a poet and bard, and mentions that the written word is an obstacle to Erickson's work. Hoffman comments that Rosen resolves the problem by weaving his accounts of Erickson's stories with his own associations to them, or by conveying information about his personal experience of the circumstances surrounding the story. Sometimes Rosen tells how he has used the story in his own clinical practice.
Hoffman remarks that Rosen's "commentary is the relational field in which the stories are suspended" (p. 14). If we were to create a taxonomy of interpretation based on oral studies, Rosen's would certainly belong to the Ethnopoetics school. He expands the written text by including some ethnography so the stories "inhabit a living universe." This added dimension seems to compensate for the loss of vocal delivery and interpersonal presence which occurs in written presentation of Erickson’s work.

Keith Basso's (1983) work emphasizes immersion in the living context of the culture as an important key to understanding metaphor. He argues that linguistic competence in grammatical rules is simply not enough. Basso states, "The ability to interpret even the most simple forms of grammatical speech cannot be accounted for with grammatical rules alone" (p. 50). He demonstrates this in his account of Apache moral narratives, which he came to understand only through an increasing familiarity with Apache culture. The meaning and power of Apache narratives are completely interwoven with the environment, history, current social circumstances, customs, and beliefs. Thus Basso must learn the names of mountains, creeks, and other geographical features before he can understand the stories.
The Apache have names for places around the reservation. These names were descriptions of the actual geographical features, and also the names of various stories that are said to have taken place there. These stories serve the function of correcting people's behavior. They are told, indirectly, to people who trespass Apache moral codes. Once a story is told to a person, that person feels the impact of the story whenever he see’s the geographical feature associated with it. Thus the social fabric is maintained by the careful performance of the stories and by their resonance with the landscape.
Similarly, Milton Erickson had a way of sounding out a person's cultural beliefs and then working within them to create change. His work is in many ways remarkably similar to Basso's account of Apache oral tradition. It is of further interest that the site of Basso's field work was the Cibecue reservation, just outside Phoenix, Arizona, where Milton Erickson lived out the latter period of his life. Basso's work provides a method of inquiry and a functional description of oral culture, which can used to illuminate Erickson's work.

Concepts of Erickson As Incidents of Textualization

To present the oral tradition outside the social context in which it lives
one must have a means of representing the oral event in text. This transformation from oral to written is referred to as "textualization" (Tedlock, 1990). The transformation of oral event to written text also requires an interpretive stance. The interpretive stance and the printed format shape the representation.
Erickson scholars struggled with this interpretive problem in much the same way field researchers in orality did. Erickson's work was highly contextual. It was often contingent upon nonverbal aspects of communication, sociocultural behavioral patterns, content from previous sessions, and other extratextual forces that cannot be fully realized in a written representation of his work. The Ericksonian author had to choose a representational strategy, which best conveyed a sense of these oral elements.
Many of Erickson's associates assumed they could examine his work and decipher an underlying principle that would be easily suited to written form. Most of these authors soon abandoned that task when faced with the seemingly endless diversity of his interventions. Forced into a descriptive mode of representation, various methods were employed in attempt to capture something of Erickson's style and presence. The most common forms are the anthology, the palimpsest, the transcript, the formalist reduction, and the collection of proverbs.

The anthology approach conceptualizes the oral event as a short story. It focuses on the content of the story and attempts to provide the reader with an authentic translation of the originally spoken words. Sidney Rosen's My Voice Will Go with You The Teaching Tales of Milton H. Erickson, resembles an anthology. Rosen collected over one hundred of Erickson's teaching stories and placed them together under general categories. Together the stories convey a sense of the way Milton H. Erickson practiced. As I have noted above, Rosen extended the anthology format by adding commentaries before or after each story. These commentaries sometimes include something about the context in which the story was told, at other times they contain Rosen's personal reactions to a story.
In most cases, Rosen is careful not to depotentiate the stories with definitive explanations about their content. Instead, he points the reader back to the story with general comments, such as "This story is a beautiful example of indirect suggestion, applied symbolically" (p. 81). He gives no indication of what the symbols are, how they worked, or how Erickson knew to use them. The comments goad the reader back to the story for such discoveries.
The anthology approach has thematic strength. By presenting a number of related stories, various gestalts become possible and the range of meanings expands. In this way, the anthology accurately reflects the wondrous complexity of Erickson's work. Certain oral qualities are still lost, however. Meaning in the oral performance builds heavily on the progression of themes as they emerge from speaker-audience interaction. This progression is lost in Rosen's text. The stories are a collage made from different moments of Erickson’s work. A new contextual meaning is made from their juxtaposition, but the original force of the oral story as it was performed is lost. That force is lost because the stories were not originally self-contained compositions as are the short stories of modern literature. The modern short story is composed and reworked in print until the author is satisfied with a final version. To present the oral performance as such an item is to obscure a significant aspect of its contextual meaning.

Representing oral performance as a collection of quotes or proverbs has similar strengths and weaknesses. They have great potential to generate a manifold sense of meaning and can be organized into categories, which amplify specific topics. Ronald Havens (1985) approached Erickson's work in this way after a concerted effort to find an "underlying conceptual perspective" had failed (p. xxii). Havens organized quotations from Erickson's lectures and dialogues under categories such as "the conscious mind" and "the goal of psychotherapy." Each section has a short introduction, then the quotes are left to speak for themselves. As Havens discovered, the format forces the reader to form her own gestalt from the vast array of quotations, thereby avoiding singular and therefore erroneous conceptualization of Erickson's work. Havens’ text is one for contemplation. Its germinal content slowly changes in the mind like leaven. Reading it one gets a unique glimpse of Erickson's mind-set, one composed from a vast sampling of his thoughts. It is perhaps the best text for gaining a sense of the Ericksonian disposition.
Yet in terms of a representation of contextualized oral performance, the book is perhaps the most fragmented. Dismembered even from the surrounding verbal content, the words of Erickson's highly situated approach are stripped of any sense of process. Thus, while Haven's strategy of textualization generates a strong sense of the Ericksonian attitude, it does little to convey the dynamic flow of his interactions with others. That sense is conveyed in formats preserving a higher degree of context.

One textualization strategy that preserves a sense of the dynamic progression of Erickson's work is the direct transcript. The usual method for this strategy is to record the session on audiotape and transcribe it. Few words are changed and editing is kept to a minimum. Jeffery Zeig's A Teaching Seminar with Milton H. Erickson (1980) is a direct transcription of a weeklong seminar conducted by Erickson in the last years of his life.
Parts of Zeig’s text read like a script. Erickson's dialogue with his students is printed out in sequence. His actions or vocal inflections are sometimes inserted in parenthesis, such as (Erickson laughs). Pauses are represented with periods or dashes between words. Erickson's exchanges with his students are recorded comment by comment. The text preserves this dynamic process and gives the reader a sense of what it may have been like to sit with Erickson for hours or days on end. Themes from the morning session spill over into the evening session and echo throughout the week.
The sequence and context of the transcript allow the reader to become absorbed in the flow of the performance. One tale melds into the next, meaning builds upon meaning. The reader is suddenly lost the mesmerizing virtual world of Erickson's stories, occasionally resurfacing into the setting of his office where the recording took place.
This transporting effect is in part created by the textualization of the seminar. The original seminar took place in two settings. The actual place where Erickson conducted the seminar and the virtual places created by his descriptions and stories. When transcribed into text, distinctions between these two worlds collapse and both are represented in the same medium-the printed page. Thus the reader is pulled from one world to the next in a sometimes-startling fashion.
The transcription format also provides a narrative that goes on long enough, without interruption, to entrance the reader. Where the short story approach dismembers the stories as though they were units unto themselves (a content-focused literate notion), the direct transcript preserves the contextual weave of the stories as they were presented across the span of a week. In this sense, it is one of the purest presentations of Erickson's work.

What this format gains in accuracy, it loses in conceptualization. It retains much of the generative power found in the oral tradition by leaving the connections and concepts for the reader to synthesize. In doing so, it forfeits the conceptual accuracy most literate, academic readers have come to expect in a psychological text. A Teaching Seminar does not provide stages of therapeutic progress or steps of intervention. It does not outline a handful of special techniques or show schematics of the feedback process. Thus, to someone uneducated about oral traditional learning the text runs the risk of becoming merely a work of fiction and not a text on method, when in fact it is a superior example of both. The major weakness of A Teaching Seminar lies not in the text, but in the readership it must teach.
Jeff Zeig addresses this problem by providing the reader with clues to Erickson's use of anecdotes before presenting the transcript. He challenges the reader to be vigilant for implied meanings and other oral performance features of the language. He also provides a commentary on the transcript in the book's appendix. The commentary is a dialogue between Zeig and Erickson as they review the seminar on videotape. It remains true to the oral style in that it does not purport to be the definitive explanation of the seminar. It is an implied amplification of the seminar that remains highly contextualized. Erickson is not so much articulating an appendix for the book as he is teaching Zeig right there in the moment. The stories and slight-of-hand phrases again begin to flow.
The literate-minded reader who requires explicit explanations of Erickson's method in order to understand his approach will be disappointed by Zeig’s book. The reader is again required to do the interpretive work expected of the oral traditional listener. Without an understanding of the oral traditional learning process, most pass this challenge by. The transcript format is misunderstood as a concept that is not yet distilled.

Another approach to textualizing Erickson's work is to place the annotations alongside the text in a separate column that mirrors the transcript. Annotations may also be placed between the lines of the transcript every paragraph or so. Tedlock (1990) refers to these as the mirror and the palimpsest (p. 138). Hypnotic Realities (Erickson & Rossi, 1976) uses the palimpsest format throughout. A Transcript of a Trance Induction With Commentary (Erickson, Haley & Weakland, 1959) (in collected works Vol. I ) uses the mirror format. These formats are readily accessible to the literate-minded reader.

In Zeig's format the commentaries are reserved for the appendix. The reader happens upon them only after completing her reading of the transcript. If the reader wishes to integrate the transcript and commentary she must flip back and forth between the front and back of the book while reading small sections at a time. Since the commentaries are relegated to an appendix, they may not do this at all. The palimpsest and mirror formats minimize this problem. Annotation and transcript occupy the same page and allow for a more immediate exchange of information. This proximity allows for easy incorporation of the "original" text with the commentary, thereby assuring that the reader will do the work of combining them.
Although these annotative methods can amplify a transcription, they cannot be considered in any way similar to the original experience of the oral performance. Tedlock points out that only one interpretation is traditionally placed in the annotation. If five or six different commentaries come to mind for a certain passage, as is often the case with Erickson's work, only one is chosen. Once in place the annotation can actually limit the reader’s associations by providing a single interpretation as if it were the only interpretation. Likewise, the transcribed content is only a fragment of the original situation, which likely included two or more people interacting.
The palimpsest found in Hypnotic Realities does not enjoy the absorbing flow of Zeig's uninterrupted format. The reader must continually bounce from the reality of the induction to that of the commentary. This fragments the text causing it to lose its entrancing effect on the reader.
The mirror format suffers less in this regard. The mirroring column of text may compete for the reader’s attention, but the reader may easily cover or ignore the facing column if he wishes to read the transcription alone. Yet at times even this format loses its absorbing flow because two pages of commentary may be juxtaposed to a single word of original text (see page 221 in Erickson for an example of this). This creates a transcript with only two or more words or phrases per page. The constant turning of pages interrupts the flow of the reader.
With the right commentary some aspects of the spoken word are preserved. In
his discussion of trance induction with Haley and Weakland, Erickson makes frequent note of how he used inflection, pitch, and volume to influence the listener (in Erickson, Rossi (Ed.) 1989, pp. 209, 221). The commentary gives a sense of how the words were said and the rationale behind their specific delivery. Instead of leaving the reader on her own to discover Erickson's multifarious devices, the annotated format provides a specific explanation of them.

Bandler and Grinder (1975, 1979), who have interpreted Erickson’s work in the frame of structural linguistics provide a final approach. Their concepts include a cognitive-behavioral framework made slightly more complex by the introduction of computer metaphors. The cover of their 1979 publication frogs into Princes contains the inscription "Richard Bandler and John Grinder live." In an apparent nod to oral performance, the word live is tacked onto the authors’ names. The book is a direct transcript of a spoken presentation, yet it is entirely different from Erickson's performance in Zeig's teaching seminar transcript.
Bandler and Grinder are not giving a performance in the oral traditional style. Theirs is a spoken delivery of literate ideas and concepts organized in a literate fashion. There are clearly defined steps, definitions of concepts, and explicit topical categories. The complex flow of human interactions is reduced to three perceptual "channels": auditory, visual, and kinesthetic. A singular metaphor, computer programming, is found throughout their work. Therapeutic interventions are described as though the patient where a computer or software program and the therapist were the writer or operator of that program. Many oral traditional behaviors are encouraged: observation of feedback, modeling the client's behavior, becoming immersed in the process, flexibility, timing, etc. These behaviors are encouraged, however, as ways to "gain access" and have control over the therapeutic outcome. The outcome in NLP is a very direct, almost mechanistic result of the "programmers" actions.
In the true oral tradition there is no such assumption. Its power is in its ability to generate thoughts in the listener. Those thoughts have their own creative course and are largely left to develop on their own. The true oral traditional speaker knows that these thoughts are created together with the listener. In NLP the client is more like a patterned code that is read and manipulated. Thoughts are cut, pasted, and deleted by the therapist for the client, whose hand is sometimes used like a keyboard or mouse. NLP assumes an operator/subject relationship that literacy was instrumental in creating (Olson, 1991, p. 153). In doing so, it obscures the mutual creation process that so typifies orality and Erickson's work. NLP is the least accurate of all the explanations of Erickson's work, primarily because it is the least oral. Its concepts are highly permeated with the artifacts of literacy. Computer programming is an extension of written language. To use it as a metaphor for therapy is to carry its literate certainties into the therapeutic process.
NLP also uses structural linguistics as an interpretive frame for Erickson's work. Structural linguistics became possible when words were transformed into code that could be analyzed on paper. Prior to writing, words were not even thought of as individual units and therefore could not be pulled apart and categorized for analysis (Saenger, 1991).
As a literate model, NLP naturally fails to incorporate oral traditional elements. Erickson's way of being entertaining and humorous are omitted. The sense of the aesthetic is bypassed in favor of a notion of operational control. The client’s generative thoughts are seen as reactions triggered by the therapist. There is no notion that the client will independently come to his own sense of the intervention at a later time. In the oral tradition and in Erickson's work this is a central notion.
NLP has immediate appeal because it translates Erickson's work into a form that is familiar to the literate-minded reader. Many who might have passed Erickson's work by due to its complexity have been drawn in by this conceptual reduction. They would be hard-pressed, however, to re-create Erickson's sense of style given the tools of NLP alone.

Summary
In this literature review, I have shown that hypnosis, oral tradition, social bonding, and music share a common origin in the evolution of social communication. An understanding of this common developmental ancestry enhances our understanding of each of these behaviors by making each of them a reference for the other. Music can be a model for hypnosis, hypnosis a model for oral performance, and so on. Such comparisons also imply that human development has long been intertwined with these processes, which makes them fit and powerful tools to improve human life. This common social ancestry also provides a wide background for understanding the work of Milton H. Erickson.
Orality plays a central role in this Ericksonian framework. To understand the difficulties in conceptualizing orality is to understand the difficulties in conceptualizing Milton H. Erickson. Early researchers saw oral culture as distinct from literate culture. Oral culture had a unique mode of interpersonal communication that was integrated with verbo-motor skills. For some researchers this implies that oral cultures were more context bound, closer to the life-world and less involved with formal logic. For others, these distinctions are merely artifacts of literate investigation. They claim that oral and literate cultures have the same cognitive abilities, but use these abilities in a different way. Each camp however, concedes some difference between oral and literate culture.
When Western literate peoples investigate oral culture, an interpretation must transpire. Oral-formulaic theory interprets oral performance by analyzing the content of the performance in text form. It focuses on the patterns of the content and the method by which the oral epic is composed in performance. This approach was later expanded to include the social context of the performance. Special attention was focused on the ability of the oral traditional audience to bring its own history of personal and group associations to the repeated patterns of the oral formula.
The ethnography of speaking/ethnopoetics school interprets orality by entering into the social milieu of the oral performance. Personal associations and experiences become part of the interpretive process. This school is the most proficient at preserving the vocal delivery of the performance as well as the cultural ambience at the time of the telling.
A second stage of interpretation entails representing the results in text. Literate assumptions abound in this phase of interpretation. The use of abstraction, linear organization, explicit categories and stages are inherently literate and inherently absent from oral modes of communication. As orality is conceptualized, this discrepancy creates a core problem for the interpreter.
Ericksonian scholars have addressed this problem with various formats of textual representation. Some have broken Erickson's talks down into single line quotes. Others have assembled anthologies of his stories or created reductive models of his work. Some use transcription with various methods of annotation. In each there is a compromise between conceptual precision and authenticity of oral presentation.

Discussion of Research

The Prior Research: Its Strengths and Weaknesses
It is a tribute to Erickson that so many diverse and useful models of psychotherapy have been inspired by his work. He has been a primary influence in the development of brief-strategic therapy, family systems therapy, communications and problem-solving therapy, neuro-linguistic programming, and modern approaches to hypnosis (Bandler and Grinder, 1979; Budman & Gurman, 1988; Haley, 1985; Zeig, 1994, 1982). Most of these schools of psychotherapy were the product of attempts to conceptualize Erickson’s work. While all of these approaches have contributed to the field, they have failed to find within the wide range of Ericksonian innovations a single, unifying concept.
Elegant scientific reductions of his work have been attempted. Bandler and Grinder, for instance, attempted to capture the minute subtleties of Erickson’s work by reducing it to linguistic substructures and story patterns. In doing so they produced a model of Ericksonian work which was very consciously conducted and directed. The aesthetic quality of Erickson is excluded in this model. The aesthetic being his curiosity, his generative ambiguity, and his willingness to allow his unconscious mind work in ways he did not need to know about. In the end, Bandler and Grinder’s efforts produced a therapy so far from Erickson’s original intent that it prompted Erickson to say, "Those people in NLP, they think they got whole nut, they just got the shell" (Bucholtz, 1982).
Steven de Shazer also attempted to find a concise underlying pattern in Erickson’s work. Convinced he could "decipher" the underlying principle of Erickson’s work, he found that his constructs failed to include large amounts of Erickson’s material. When he widened the scope of his formulation to include all types of Erickson’s cases, he had a concept too general to be of any use. de Shazer’s concept became "therapist ingeniousness," which is no longer a method or formula but highly generic description. He admits the concept is totally useless for teaching or research. After some struggle, de Shazer was forced into a description of Erickson based on a literary critique and recommends against creating a formal theory (Zeig, Ed. 1994, pp. 240-253).

The most useful writings or conceptions of Erickson’s work are not theories but descriptions. Stephen Gilligan describes Ericksonian psychotherapy as an aesthetic endeavor, which involves the expansion of the therapist’s and client’s mind from a circumscribed conscious mind-set to an expanded, fluid mind-set, which includes the unconscious. He produces one of the best descriptions of the Ericksonian therapist’s internal process. Gilligan (quoting Bateson) states that Erickson "worked in the weave of the total complex" (Zeig, 1994, p. 84) when doing psychotherapy. The "weave" is an aesthetic terrain formed of tone, texture, numinosity, and contour. It is a pragmatic, aesthetic sensibility centered in the body. Here Gilligan captures the essence of what Bandler and Grinder’s model inadvertently negated: the aesthetic nuance of Ericksonian work.
In a similar vein, Erickson’s daughter Betty Alice conceptualizes her father’s work by choosing a set of behavioral descriptors. She comments on the need for a precise vocabulary and knowledge of other people’s definitions of words. Observation is listed as the indispensable source of that knowledge. Hypnotic trance is recommended to enhance observation and foster "joining" with the client in a healthy way. Goals of therapy are always realistic and attainable.
Betty Alice then lists metaphors. Metaphors activate associations, draw on the client’s life experience, and provide alternate perspectives. Betty Alice also cites rapport as an indispensable requirement. She notes that rapport is most easily attained through development of a trusting relationship in which the client experiences the therapist as competent and concerned about the client’s welfare. Her final statement is that there is no adequate theory of Erickson due to the vast uniqueness of people and Erickson’s ability to model that uniqueness (Zeig, 1994, pp. 147-162).
These are both very useful and helpful descriptions, yet they do not explain how Erickson arrived at such ideas, why he used people’s beliefs so consistently or why these ideas are so at odds with the theory and practice of psychotherapy in general. Such descriptions merely point out unique aspects of Erickson’s work. They do not coherently unify and explain the aspects of Erickson’s techniques, life, and teaching style. Thus they lack a common thread that can be applied to research, teaching, and comparative studies.
Catherine Walters and Ronald Havens also provide a description of attributes.
They see Erickson as future oriented, positive, altruistic, and hardy. Again, these insightful descriptions of Erickson’s work contrast with a traditional psychotherapy, which is often pathology centered, historically oriented, and objectively removed. Walters and Havens note that Erickson rejected psychological theory as a "procrustean bed," a preconceived standard to which a client was conformed. They resolve the Erickson/theory problem by likening his work to another existing paradigm: wellness psychology. Here Erickson’s positive, forward-looking, pleasurable approach to therapy is matched to those same values and goals found in wellness psychology. The likeness is obvious and the wellness paradigm does provide much empirical support for the usefulness of Erickson’s attitudinal stance. Yet, again, it explains only a limited facet of Erickson’s work. There is nothing in the wellness paradigm that demands trance, metaphor, or indirect communication.

Unresolved Issues
The above review of Ericksonian concepts and descriptions is by no means exhaustive. Other attempts to conceptualize Erickson are reviewed elsewhere in the dissertation. The unresolved issues can be clearly seen in this selection of concepts.
1. Attempts at elegant theoretical modeling represent Erickson’s work the least
because they are inherently static and removed from any surrounding context. Erickson’s work was context specific and therefore constantly changing.
2. Precise models focusing on detail miss the nuance of Erickson’s work. Models
wide enough in scope to capture all of Erickson’s approaches cease to be models and become vague descriptions or operating principles.
3. Descriptive approaches to Erickson are clearly more valuable. They capture his
values, attributes, and techniques of working. Yet each description of Erickson describes a true but incomplete set of attributes.
4. The conceptualizations are all different. Each concept is somewhat true and
accurate, yet no single one captures the whole phenomenon in a way that supports all the descriptions and unifies them under a single theoretical idea.
5. Without a unified conceptual base for Ericksonian work, the entire approach is
at risk of being lost to future generations of psychologists. I reiterate that the basic modus operandi of psychological training insists upon the use of written texts and marketable theories suitable for classroom consumption. Without such a configuration, the Ericksonian approach finds itself relegated to a second-class status along with other "theoretically weak" approaches that cannot compete for academic appeal in the profession.

This thesis is in part a taxonomy, for in it I attempt to classify Erickson’s work. I also will articulate a conceptual framework that unifies the major descriptions of Ericksonian work, including Erickson’s attitudes, beliefs, techniques, methods of teaching, and personal life history. I will explore how:
(a) The problems authors have had when describing Erickson’s work stem from oral/literate differences.
(b) The strategies authors have used to textualize Erickson point to an oral mode of operation.
(c) Erickson’s strategies for problem solving, communicating, teaching, and healing are oral in character.
(d) How an oral framework provides a way to understand and conceptualize Erickson while preserving the "living" aspect of his work- the qualities of aesthetic nuance, situational specificity, vocal performance, bodily expression, experimentation, and honor of personal beliefs.

Research Question and Thesis
Why is there, despite various scholarly attempts to conceptualize his work
over the twenty years since his death, a recognition of theoretical incompleteness surrounding Erickson’s work?
Thesis: Erickson was working in an oral mode. His students were viewing his work from a mind-set structured by literacy. The conventional concepts and mental organizations instituted by literacy are unable to depict orality. An understanding of orality provides a conceptual field that joins the two.

Methods

The Use of Oral Studies to Create a Frame
The highly contextual, improvisatory nature of orality demands a research approach that can conceptualize oral performance without obscuring its dynamic, experiential quality. Fortunately, a number of researchers have developed interpretive approaches in response to the demands of oral traditional performance. This study of Milton H. Erickson’s work will draw upon two interpretive approaches to the oral tradition. One has been chosen for its ability to describe the dynamic experience of orality, the other for its superior conceptual modeling of oral performance.
The first approach was developed by what is now called the ethnography of speaking/enthopoetics school. (Miles-Foley, 1995) This method of interpretation captures the experience of orality by participating in the social, environmental, and cultural aspects of oral performance. The ethnography of speaking school is especially sensitive to nuances of the spoken voice and interpersonal relationships in oral cultures. Their descriptions include subjective commentaries as a method conveying the experience of the orality. The ethnopoetics school has developed special methods of transcribing oral traditional speech as well as detailed descriptions of various oral cultures.
Milman Parry (1930) and his successors developed the second approach, known as oral-formulaic theory. While the development of oral-formulaic theory has involved considerable fieldwork, it is at heart an analysis of text. Parry’s initial insights about the oral epic stemmed from his analysis of textualized oral epics. This analysis of print is at the heart of the Lord-Parry thesis and it influences all subsequent efforts in the oral-formulaic school. Oral-formulaic theory examines repetitive themes and phrases in oral epic poetry and demonstrates how they aided memory and improvisation. It also examines how the oral style creates meaning with its unique grammatical structures and flexible organization of thematic elements.
Foley (1995), a Parry-Lord theorist, has broadened oral-formulaic theory to include elements of rhetorical analysis. Foley’s interpretive approach includes the effects of the setting, audience, and the speaker’s mode of address. His work argues that meaning in oral tradition is not only created by the arrangement of themes, it is also amplified by the ritual history of the performance that is evoked in the memories of the participants as they listen to the performance. Foley’s work combines elements of the ethnography/ethnopoetics school with oral-formulaic theory to conceptualize orality as a social-semantic system.

These two schools of approach have been used to clarify and describe the characteristics of orality as they appear across different cultures. These descriptions, composed of ethnographic and oral-formulaic research create the frame that will be used to examine Erickson’s work.
It will examine general characteristics of Erickson’s work including his use of body movement, experiential learning, ambiguity, flexibility, and reciprocity. The oral framework will also be applied to the textual content of Erickson’s speech, his sentence structure and his therapeutic use of themes and phrases.

Reasons for a Text-to-Text Interpretation of Erickson’s Work
Despite its argument for an orally based understanding of Milton H. Erickson’s work, this dissertation is presented in written form. Furthermore, it does not examine Erickson in a living condition; it examines books, textualized versions of Erickson. In short, the present work is an example of the very paradox it seeks to unfold. It asks the reader to imagine something living and dynamic, but provides only static print. It argues literate forms cannot truly capture orality, and then attempts to capture orality in literate form. The reader may assume that to the extent the present work succeeds in capturing orality, it functions as evidence against its own thesis. There is, however, a distinction operating in this work that was not operating in the literate Ericksonian frameworks it criticizes- the distinction between orality and literacy. Awareness of the oral/literate difference removes the viewer from their position behind the literate lens and causes them to see both from a new perspective. The perspective can be described in writing, therefore it pulls the reader from her literate confines despite its own literate form. In this sense, the success of this thesis lies in its ability to familiarize the reader with orality by virtue of its commentary on oral/literate differences and not by presenting itself in oral form.

Awareness of one’s interpretive position is the basis of hermeneutics. Walter Ong (1995), in his discussion of oral/literate hermeneutics describes several possible stages of interpretation existing between speech and text.
There is the oral interpretation of oral utterance, a type of hermeneutic that exists in oral cultures and in everyday conversation. In an oral interpretation of oral utterance all data eludes recovery. It fades into silence moment by moment never leaving the present context of the dialogue. Ong points out that verbal interpretation is curiously self-propagating. It can never completely exhaust itself because each new interpretation creates more data to interpret. Interpretations appear to draw ever closer to the truth, but in reality they create an asymptotic progression which never reaches a final meaning. It seems that all interpretation does this, written or spoken. Oral interpretation, however, appears to be the epitome of this in that it always leaves itself open to another final word. Its fleeting quality disqualifies it for use as the approach to the present thesis.
Ong’s second stage is textual interpretation of oral utterance. This type of interpretation is performed by oral cultures that use writing, or by literate people who study oral cultures. It occurs when field researchers take notes on an oral performance or when an oral culture creates a written version of their spoken tradition. Ong points out that this stage is at once far removed from the initial stage of oral interpretation because one cannot possibly rid oneself of the textual mindset required to create a text. Oral-formulaic and ethnographic fieldworkers have used this approach. It is not used in the present work because many textual interpretations of Erickson’s speech were produced when he was alive. These serve as a foundation for the present thesis.
The third stage is the chirographic interpretation of written text, as when one takes handwritten notes or copies a text by hand. Handwriting, although not as deeply corporeal as the voice, is still fairly infused with the body. To make a representation of a written text, a scribe had to read each word, and therefore it became liable to his subjective experience. Handwriting fluctuates in response to this experience, encoding it in the expressive style of the lettering. Ong notes that scribes would often introduce mistakes or alter phrases when rewriting manuscripts. Later stages of interpretation become less liable to the vagaries of subjective experience as they become more distanced from the body. Although chirographic interpretation (i.e., handwritten notes) was used throughout the preparation of this thesis it is not discussed or presented in its final form.
The fourth stage, the one used in the present analysis of Erickson, is the printed interpretation of printed text. This is the first stage where both the interpretation and the ‘original’ manuscript are stabilized in print. In text form, they can be viewed as objects and examined in an objective quasi-scientific manner. The text becomes a thing that exists apart from the spoken, and apart from the body. Ong argues that this very objectivity gave rise to hermeneutics. Hermeneutics, says Ong, is "interpretation grown self-conscious" (p. 13).
As the reader of this dissertation becomes more conscious about her own literacy, and about Milton H. Erickson’s orality, a new perspective on Erickson’s work is created. Ong’s fourth stage of oral/literate interpretation, is used in this study because it is the only level sufficiently objectified to support an in-depth analysis. As Ong states, "There is no oral treatise on orality, no oral ‘study’ of orality, and there cannot be, for there can be no oral treatise on anything" (p. 15).
It is the text itself that allows the current conceptual analysis, even if that analysis concerns the definitively nontextual elements of orality. Ong again: "The widespread and ultimately indispensable use of writing and its sequels, print and electronic text, ultimately established our present and longstanding textual bias, but it also enables us to correct our bias, at least to a degree, even though we seldom do so" (p. 15). And this is what the present thesis hopes to accomplish, to use text to correct the current textual bias, "at least to a degree."
The textual bias is an inextricable part of the Ericksonian conceptualization problem because all those who have analyzed his work have had their thinking formalized by the same language community. Furthermore, the audience they address belongs that language community as well. The key difference between these previous conceptualizations of Erickson and the present one is lies in the hermeneutics. The present textual interpretation is one that has ‘grown self-conscious’ of the medium through which it is created.

Data Collection
The data- Erickson’s legacy of publications, audio tapes and films, have already been collected. For the past 10 years I have read and studied this literature in an attempt to understand Erickson’s work. I have also practiced and taught Ericksonian approaches to psychotherapy, so I have had a subjective experience of his approach. This constitutes the body of data to be analyzed.
Two texts will be used perhaps more than all others. The first text is Ericksonian Methods: The Essence of the Story (Zeig, 1994). This is a collection of papers addressing the methods of Ericksonian work written by the preeminent practitioners of Ericksonian psychotherapy who studied directly with Erickson. The papers seek a conceptualization of his work. The second text is a transcription of Erickson teaching graduate-level professionals in a weeklong seminar. It is what I consider to be his crowning achievement. It is the culmination of his life’s work, completed toward the end of his career and published in 1980, the year he died. The seminar captures Erickson at full maturity when his work was highly refined to its essential qualities.
These and other examples of Erickson’s work will be reexamined within the framework of orality. Orality studies combine a number of disciplines. They draw on anthropology, linguistics, comparative literature, and historiography, to name a few. These oral studies will be used to construct a frame that will be applied to Erickson’s work.



Method of Analysis
The first step in the process of analysis is to review the current body of literature produced by oral studies to find common characteristics. There are already several published descriptions of common or universal oral traditional traits. These characteristics are clearly shaped by the behavioral necessities of oral communication and found across different oral cultures. In addition, firsthand, anecdotal accounts of oral performance or oral culture will also be included, as this is the primary form of data produced by the ethnography of speaking school. The characteristics and firsthand accounts will then be sorted into categories of sociological function, general character qualities, compositional structure, and performance techniques. Each of these categories will form a small set of descriptions that typify a certain aspect of oral communication or oral culture. A category on "performance techniques," for instance, will be comprised of subtle behaviors used by oral performers, such as eye contact or pauses in speech. A category on "compositional structure" will be comprised of techniques of composition and sentence structure. Each of these categories will then be juxtaposed to similar instances of use Erickson’s work. The resulting text will introduce a discussion of his work in terms of oral culture.
A second aspect of oral studies, the methods used to convert speech into print, will also be applied to Erickson’s work. Ethnographers of oral culture have long struggled with the paradox of transforming oral performance into print. They have devised various techniques of textualization designed to preserve and convey oral performance. These methods will be used in an evaluative discussion of Ericksonian publications and as a means to demonstrate the Erickson/orality hypothesis.

Examples of Prior Research With This Method
There are a host of publications that interpret written texts as examples of orality. One is "The Narrative Presentation of Orality in James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake." (Erzgraber, 1992). The paper uses a mix of historical data, publications on Joyce, and textual analysis to substantiate its argument. This paper clearly demonstrates application of the oral framework. It makes note of the social context in which Finnegans Wake was created and made public. It incorporates historical knowledge of the political context, as well as the author’s life and community. There is also an analysis of rhythm, diction, and the collective knowledge of the Joyce’s audience. Erzgraber also examines the effect of the text on the