Ernest Lawrence Rossi - Genius and joy

This Special Issue of AJCH is a celebration and commemoration of a life extraordinarily lived. The way in which the name Ernest Rossi resonates in each of our personal spheres will be just that – personal. Yet, in this seemingly dispassionate venue of an academic journal, the contributing authors seek to share with you their personal connection, engagement, and relationship with Ernest Rossi through their expression of thoughts and ideas. It is an almost impossible task to represent Ernest Rossi in a single journal issue. It’s like trying to take in the 360 degrees of Monet’s Water Lilies in the dark with a penlight. Yet each contribution exposes something of his magical mind, his adventurous journey, and his numinous wonder that continues to inspire even through the very grief that fell upon us at his passing.

In his role as guest editor, Laurence Sugarman has ensured that this was a communal engagement of linked hearts and minds. He hosted online meetings during which we –

Kathryn Rossi, Roxanna Erickson-Klein, Laurence Sugarman, and myself – shared our favorite memories of Ernest Rossi. Roxanna Erickson-Klein, one of Milton Erickson’s daughters, remembered a deeply emotional experience at her father’s funeral. As the fourth speaker, Ernest Rossi followed a collection of heartfelt and somber eulogies. She recalled, “With a broad smile, Ernest sang a most jubilant happy song. My mother and siblings laughed as they wondered whether Ernest was dancing a jig, singing an Irish limerick, or ad-libbing a dream that had come to him at the moment. His unexpected serenade brought a feeling of joyful healing and calm restoration that resonates through time and still carries healing energy” (personal communication, 22 March 2021).

From our gatherings, an order of contents emerged that tells a story. Everyone wanted an Ernest Rossi paper from the AJCH to open and close the issue. What could be better than a paper that he coauthored with Kathryn Rossi and Roxanna Erickson-Klein and received the Hilgard Award for Best Theoretical Paper in 2008: “The Future Orientation of Constructive Memory: An evolutionary perspective on therapeutic hypnosis and brief psychotherapy”? The next page of the story became clear. Roxanna Erickson-Klein’s contribution, “Onward: The future orientation of constructive memory,” continues and updates the breakthrough thinking of their 2008 paper.

One of my favorite moments with Ernest Rossi was the extraordinary experience, in 2016, when we reconstructed the electromagnetic field measurement experiments of Dr. Leonard Ravitz from the second half of the 20^th century. Ernest Rossi spoke of the importance of these experiments because they could lead to an electronic signature of hypnosis. Ravitz’s research was the basis for the first paper directly concerned with hypnosis to be published in Science (Ravitz, 1950). Jan Dyba and Marzena Żurek, from Poland, along with Ernest and Kathryn Rossi review the fascinating work of Ravitz in “Electrodynamics of Clinical Hypnosis: A reconstruction and analysis of historic data.”

Ernest Rossi has always had a fascination for science as a key to unlock doorways of understanding. He looks for springboards to propel him beyond the growing edge into what is not yet known. This has led to many prescient propositions and proposals. He encouraged this in me during our apprenticeship by constantly challenging me to explore new fields of study. When he was satisfied with my neuroscience, he said, with an almost magical twinkle in his eyes, “Now, what do you know about genes?” A few years later he raised the bar again, “Let’s see if we can figure out quantum mechanics!” Just as he would say about Milton Erickson, Ernest Rossi was more than just a teacher to me, he was a father to my developing mind.

There are numerous opinions about what is the most important revelation to come from Ernest Rossi’s thinking, but almost everyone agrees that his ideas about what is happening at the genomic level has been and continues to be revolutionary. Mauro Cozzolino and Giovanna Celia from the University of Salerno, Italy, are leading the world in research in the field of Psychosocial Genomics, a term formally introduced by Ernest Rossi in 2002. Their contribution to our story is a report on their ongoing research: “The psychosocial genomics paradigms of hypnosis and mind-body integrated psychotherapy: Experimental evidence.”

Ernest Rossi invites us all to question, test, wonder and, most of all, to be fascinated by the possibilities within creative moments. He encourages us all to consider how hypnosis can further the pursuit of higher consciousness. When Laurence Sugarman was first visiting the Rossis, he brought his banjo. Though he had been playing it for 50 years, Laurence admitted to Ernest that he was intimidated by freestyle improvisation. On their last evening together, after three days of conversation about hypnosis and changing minds, Ernest Rossi said, “I’m turning the tables on you,” and requested that Laurence perform an impromptu concert of freestyle banjo improvisation on the academic and professional questions they had been discussing. Surprising and fascinating music emerged that took Laurence out of his comfort zone – beyond his growing edge. Laurence is improvising still. In the paper he contributes to this issue, he wonders about the co-evolution of hypnosis and consciousness. Laurence asks whether their linked futures involve improvising beyond our fundamental security of “doing hypnosis.” He wonders, does it mean, “Leaving hypnosis behind?”

In our conversational reveries, Kathryn Rossi brought us all back to the very essence of Ernest Rossi. Like Pulcinella, the funny clown that comes from his Italian heritage in Naples, Ernest Rossi loved to laugh, but at the heart of his work and his life, he was a study of the opposites. Kathryn Rossi spoke of how his parents wanted him to be a shoemaker, which was an honorable trade, but while he was working as an apprentice, he was also visiting the local library to learn. The book Ernest Rossi chose to study, out of everything in that library, was Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Kathryn Rossi has engaged with an exploration of the opposites to help her work through her grief in ways that raised the questions, the wondering, and the fascination of what else grief might be and how she was experiencing it. From this emerged Kathryn Rossi’s extraordinary contribution: “Transforming Grief into Peace: The normal grieving mind – Memory construction, deconstructions, and reconsolidation.”

And now, how to close our story? Does it simply end? That doesn’t feel right. Ernest Rossi is connected to the present and the future in so many ways. In the words of T. S. Elliot (1943), “What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning.” So, we have chosen to end our story with the very first paper Ernest Rossi published in the AJCH in 1973, “Psychological Shocks and Creative Moments in Psychotherapy.” This was the first of many papers, and the first in which Ernest Rossi wrote about the Ericksonian approach.

From that beginning has come so much. Please revel in this tribute to Ernest Rossi through some of the minds he has inspired. As this introduction ends, it is only the beginning.