Generative Trance: The Experience of Creative Flow

This major new work reveals how life can be lived as a great journey of consciousness. The author emphasizes that reality and identity are constructed by ourselves, and explains how generative trance is crucial in creating new realities and possibilities for clients. It is a view that differs markedly from the traditional hypnosis ideas of a client losing control, as well as from Ericksonian approaches that feature a benevolent hypnotist who bypasses the conscious mind to work with a client’s unconscious mind. Instead, generative trance stresses a “disciplined flow” process in which a person’s conscious and unconscious minds cooperate to weave a higher consciousness capable of transformational change.

The book offers a framework for developing this creative consciousness, including a step by step processes for creating it. Stephen Gilligan has been developing this work over the past thirty five years, first as a protégé of the great hypnotherapist Milton Erickson, and then as the originator of the post-Ericksonian approaches of Self-Relations and Generative Self.

William James used to say that ‘the unconscious mind is the horse and conscious mind is the rider: it’s the relationship between the two that is most important.’ This book shows you how to harness the relationship for a much more powerful and effective therapeutic intervention.