It has been over twenty years since I first encountered The February Man. At the time, it struck me as extraordinary. Even now, it remains a fascinating, singular piece of work: the only verbatim case study we have of Dr. Milton Erickson conducting hypnotherapy with a client, over multiple sessions.
First documented in 1945, and later re-examined by Ernest Rossi alongside Erickson in 1979, a year before Erickson's death, it continues to provoke discussion, reverence, and questions.
Recently I chanced upon a copy in a bookshop and decided to take it on holiday. Something I didn’t pay much attention to the first time I read this book was the introduction and the relevance of the small cast of characters involved, so keen was I to get to the heart of the work. This time I decided to devour it more slowly, I was on holiday after all. To sip it like a fine wine, and that included the forward and introduction. I’m so glad I did, as their relevance to what then ensues and the conclusions drawn fundamentally change how I now think of this work.
If anyone really understands what it means to be ‘Ericksonian’, it is the two experts who contribute the forward and the introduction. The foreword is written by Sidney Rosen, a board-certified psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, is a prominent figure in the field of Ericksonian hypnotherapy, known for his work with Milton Erickson. He is the author of “My Voice Will Go With You: The Teaching Tales of Milton H. Erickson” and the founding president of the New York Milton H. Erickson Society for Psychotherapy and Hypnosis. Rosen is also a recognized teacher and practitioner of Ericksonian techniques, having trained extensively with Erickson himself. Then comes an introduction by Ernest Lawrence Rossi, co-author of the book, a renowned therapist and psychobiologist, who collaborated with Erickson for eight years. Rossi co-authored three seminal books with Erickson on therapeutic hypnosis, and he also edited numerous volumes of Erickson's writings, including his collected papers and seminar recordings.
Rossi describes The February Man as a fascinating case study illustrating the use of profound age regression in the treatment of a depressed young woman. He highlights that, in addition to chronic depression, the woman had a severe and dysfunctional water phobia, which Rossi attributes to a deeply repressed and traumatic memory. We’ll return to these ideas later.
The book also includes some charming interviews with key figures who were present during the sessions. One is Miss Cameron, a secretary who had worked closely with Erickson. The sessions were recorded verbatim in stenographic notation by Miss Cameron and typed up with only a few unimportant omissions. Also of special interest is Dr. Jerome Fink, a medical intern at the time. Fink had worked with Erickson since his sophomore year, eventually delivering lectures on hypnosis under Erickson’s supervision.
Fink provides unique insight into the background of the subject, known only as Jane or Miss S. He describes her as a highly intelligent 19-year-old student nurse with a keen interest in psychiatry, who had been invited to a small gathering at his home to observe hypnotic phenomena. When as he puts it “she expressed strong transference and a desire to be hypnotised”, she was chosen as the subject. Fink induced a profound trance using a hand levitation method and guided her through automatic writing and other hypnotic phenomena. She later returned with questions, especially about a period where she had amnesia. Fink interpreted this as a possible unconscious plea for psychotherapy. I found it a nice touch that Fink was likely using the induction method he had learnt from his teacher, Erickson. However, the assumptions about transference and the deeper meaning of her questions and responses strike me as psychoanalytical projections.
Since he was still an intern, and possibly found himself out of his depth, Fink brought Erickson into the situation for the second session. From that point, Erickson assumed the lead, and the now-famous therapeutic sequence began.
Fink's reflections, recorded many years later, offer a fascinating meta-commentary. He questions whether some of the interpretations that appear in the book—especially those offered by Rossi—reflect Erickson’s actual intentions in 1945 or are simply post hoc rationalisations. He notes that Erickson often responded vaguely to Rossi’s interpretations with a simple “uh-huh,” or the infamous “That’s right,” leading Fink to wonder whether Erickson had thought through the psychodynamics in the way Rossi later articulated them.
He also notes that Rossi himself was skeptical of some of the interpretations he was proposing, even expressing disbelief in one of his interviews with Erickson. Fink makes an astute point—that it’s tempting to attribute deep intention and clinical precision to every move in hindsight, but this may not reflect the spontaneous, intuitive nature of what was really going on.
Interestingly, Fink also shares that he himself had a block when it came to entering hypnosis. Erickson had made serious attempts to hypnotise him, but he never succeeded, possibly due to Fink’s own resistance and disbelief. Yet, he acknowledges Erickson's extraordinary intuition and suggests that even if Erickson wasn’t always consciously tracking every dynamic, he often “just knew” what to do.
This interview adds an important layer to the reading of The February Man—reminding us of the limitations of retrospective case analysis, and the mythologizing that often follows the careers of master clinicians.
A small but intriguing example of this tension between myth and method occurs early in the transcript. Erickson asks the subject: "I would like to have you be unwilling to answer this question. Is there something about those flowers you don’t like?" Rossi later reflects on this, wondering if it is an example of Erickson’s incredible intuition. As the case progresses, we learn that the subject has a fear of flowers she was not consciously aware of—flowers that became symbolically linked to her primary presenting issue: a fear of water.
Rossi, writing in 1979, asks Erickson directly: Did you plan this? Did you know this would lead to uncovering a traumatic memory? Erickson’s reply is revealing. He says, “No, I was just searching.” Pressed further, Rossi asks if Fink had informed him about the root of her problem ahead of time. Erickson answers emphatically, “No, Dr. Fink did not know what the problem was. He just sensed there was something wrong with her. She was a nurse on his staff who seemed depressed every now and then. She was not a regular patient.”
This casts doubt on some of Rossi’s retrospective conclusions. For instance, Rossi repeatedly refers to the client’s chronic depression, but there is no confirmation from either Fink or Erickson to support that diagnosis. If anything, the data in the transcript suggest uncertainty, not diagnostic clarity. This ambiguity challenges us to separate the therapeutic events as they happened from the interpretations layered on top decades later.
Another point of interest, especially for those familiar with Erickson’s reputation for indirect and permissive methods, is the sudden use of a direct, traditional induction—and not by Erickson, but by Fink. After a series of deliberate, confusion-inducing conversational techniques that seem to prime the subject's associative processes, Fink unexpectedly issues the command: "Go sound asleep. Deep down sound asleep. Continue to sleep. You may even close your eyes and go deeper, deeper. Continue sleeping deeply and sleep soundly, very soundly, very deeply and very soundly. To enable you to go even much deeper asleep you may block out everything except the voices of Dr. Erickson and myself and you."
This is followed almost immediately by Erickson echoing, "And keep sleeping very deeply, very deeply, soundly asleep. And you will sleep deeply so that you can hear only Dr. Fink and me."
Rossi comments on this apparent contradiction in style. After elaborate and indirect preparations, this abrupt shift to the language of “sleep” seems paradoxical. He reflects that perhaps the term “sleep” should be seen not literally, but metaphorically—as a means of reducing intentional awareness and increasing associative processing. That said, Erickson himself continues to use direct sleep-related language throughout, which complicates the popular view of his work as purely indirect.
What is curiously absent from the transcript and Rossi’s reflections is any consideration of the social and psychological context the subject is embedded in. Miss S is sitting with her senior and her senior’s mentor. Doctor’s are present. The session is being recorded. The power dynamic is considerable. Comments from Fink and others present continue even after Erickson takes over. From a modern social-psychological perspective, we know that this type of high-status environment strongly encourages performance—subjects often try to do what they believe is expected, say the “right” things, and seek approval by conforming to the implied agenda.
Later moments in the case suggest exactly this dynamic. There are instances where the subject appears uncertain, seeking cues about how to respond, or trying to “get it right.” This is not unusual in hypnosis, particularly in contexts that emphasize compliance over collaboration. And it invites a more nuanced reading of the transcript—not as a magical unfolding of deep unconscious material, but as a socially and suggestively constructed interaction between individuals playing roles in a charged therapeutic theatre.
In fact, before Erickson even introduces the idea of the February Man, another voice in the room—Dr. Moore—shares a story that may have influenced the direction of the case. Moore interrupts the session to say: "Is that what I did when I played the role of Mr. August for one of my patients several years ago? Her father had died when she was eight, so I introduced myself during age regression in hypnotherapy as Mr. August. Mr. August told her how she could dream about the two of them going to the zoo, going to the playground, going any number of places, how she could dream about Mr. August buying little things for her, doing little things for her, showing her the attention that she craved as a child after her father was gone. But it was all her own dreams and her own ideas of what Mr. August would have done with her and for her."
Erickson replies, "Her own ideas." Moore continues, "But she would have done some additional thinking too, in her dreams that she no longer wanted to face the other way consciously." And Erickson agrees: "Yes."
This exchange precedes the actual introduction of the February Man technique and may well have catalyzed Erickson's development of it in this moment. It also highlights the collaborative and improvisational nature of the environment—an often-overlooked aspect of this case that further challenges the notion of it being a precisely premeditated therapeutic strategy.
What Happens in The February Man
The client—a young woman—presents with a fragile sense of identity, low self-worth, and a history of feeling unloved and unsupported. Rather than take a conventional psychoanalytic approach, Erickson offers something radically different. He creates an imaginary character, "The February Man," a benevolent presence who appears repeatedly throughout key events in the client’s reimagined early life.
This fictional figure supports her, affirms her, and guides her, appearing in re-scripted memories that are conjured under hypnosis through a combination of regression, time distortion, and deep imaginative absorption. The therapeutic intention is to change her sense of self by changing the story of how that self came to be.
Most of the encounters with the February Man take place in the same session. There is later a follow up.
Milton Erickson's Genius
Even then, this approach was ahead of its time. Rather than trying to dig for buried trauma or repressed insights, Erickson builds a new emotional history. He doesn’t analyze—they co-construct. His tool is hypnosis, not as a state, but as a context for vivid imaginative experience.
For the client, these experiences can feel real. They matter. And the change appears to last. You get a sense of it undoing itself encounter by encounter.
It’s theatrical, yes—but it’s also deeply personal. Erickson places himself in the story—quite literally—as the February Man. It’s a therapeutic move that raises eyebrows now, but at the time was a bold act of clinical artistry.
Looking with Modern Eyes
Returning to this transcript now, I find myself reading it not through the lens of trance or speaking to the unconscious, and reject that the subject regresses or experiences time distortion.
Erickson was operating in a time when Freudian and Jungian models still held sway. Concepts like regression, unconscious material, and symbolic healing were widely accepted. Yet what he does in this case can be better understood through mechanisms we now recognise: expectation, belief, imaginative involvement, role enactment, social modeling, and narrative construction.
Take age regression, for example. What appears to be a return to the past may instead be a voluntary enactment of childhood behaviour and perception, driven by suggestion and imagination. The client isn't uncovering the past—they're reconstructing it. Likewise, the time distortion Erickson evokes isn't a mystical stretching of time, but a subjective reorganisation of imagined experience. The same applies to the creation of the February Man. This isn't the installation of a an actual figure from her past, but an imagined symbolic figure who acts as a social model, enabling the client to internalise new relational experiences.
Phenomena Without Mysticism
Erickson uses hypnotic phenomena like amnesia, regression, and time distortion to great effect in this case. But none of these require a belief in altered states or hidden unconscious material. They can all be explained as effects of imaginative suggestion—a person's ability to experience suggested events as real, even when they know, intellectually, that they're imagined.
In modern terms, this is about our ability to voluntarily experience involuntary effects, especially when motivated, absorbed, and given a clear framework for doing so.
That’s what Erickson was brilliant at—creating those frameworks. His language, tone, pacing, and narrative skill gave clients permission to respond fully, without resistance. He created believable worlds for people to inhabit, even briefly. And in doing so, he allowed them to inhabit new versions of themselves.
Not Just a Relic, But a Provocation
Some hypnotherapists treat The February Man as a historical—something to admire but not emulate. Others see it as a blueprint for regression-based therapy or symbolic transformation. I believe it is something else entirely: a provocation.
It challenges us to think beyond the technicalities of induction or deepening. It invites us to stop chasing trance depth and start crafting experiences that change meaning. It pushes us to see hypnosis not as a state to induce, but as a means of engaging belief, attention, imagination, and suggestion to reorient a person’s felt sense of self.
The Ethical Dimension
Any modern reading of this case must acknowledge the ethical questions it raises. The client was never, as far as we know, told the February Man was fictional. Erickson guided her into memories that might have never happened, yet never explained they might be false. In today's practice, this would raise concerns about informed consent and potential memory distortion.
But we can still extract value from this method without inheriting its blind spots. We can work symbolically and imaginatively with transparency. We can encourage clients to simulate new experiences, rehearse new ways of being, and test out new internal relationships—without making truth claims or imposing our own narratives.
What We Can Learn Today
So what can we as contemporary hypnotherapists take from The February Man?
We can take the principle that experience changes people more than insight does. That a new false memory—imagined with sincerity—can reframe the emotional residue of the past. That a client’s self-story is fluid and can be reshaped in hypnotic contexts that prioritise autonomy, respect, and creativity.
And that hypnosis, when stripped of myth, remains one of the most powerful tools for helping people imagine—and then live—new realities.
Final Thoughts
Looking back, The February Man still dazzles. Not for its mystique, but for its utter confusion at the beginning of the transcript (you’ll know what I mean if you read it), and therapeutic clarity at the end. Erickson didn’t wait for a static past to emerge—he created a new one. And in doing so, he anticipated much of what we now understand about the psychology of change.
What matters today is not whether we agree with every move he made. What matters is whether we can learn to do what he did: invite clients to take part in meaningful, believable, life-enhancing performances—and know that they are performing. Not deceived. Not passive. But actively participating in the art of becoming.