The unexpected jogs people out of their setting and in this way Erickson was able to dislodge erroneous conscious sets that were causing problems for his clients. Erickson was able to help people free themselves from mistaken beliefs and false assumptions that they had made. After inducing confusion, Erickson would give clear-cut suggestions or definitions that were easily grasped so that the client who was striving for meaning, could seize upon it. People who are especially uneasy with confusion have an urgent need to have that confusion clarified and a suggestion that can be readily accepted is easily acted upon. The rapidity, insistence, and confidence with which a suggestion is given serves to prevent clients from making any effort to bring about a semblance of order.

This is especially true of George Banks. He was constantly confused by Mary Poppins and because George truly disliked any disturbance of his routine, well-ordered life, George would readily accept Mary’s suggestions and take her lead, in order to escape this uncomfortable state.

Erickson relates that the patter of a magician was not intended to inform but to distract (Bandler & Grinder, 1975, p. 137). Through the use of indirect suggestions and by keeping the conscious mind distracted or confused, the client's conscious mind was thus prevented from intruding unhelpfully. Confusion essentially unstructures things, and Erickson used confusion to unstructured a client’s usual frame, so that he could then restructure where needed. Sounds a bit like bricolage, especially if one also considers Erickson's notion of utilzation.

Mary Poppins Uranianly uses unusual and unexpected actions to induce confusion. Doing unexpected things causes moment of chaos and confusion or transderivational search (TDS) in NLP parlance, out of which a new order can arise. A few examples of confusion occur during Mary's arrival; Mary magically flies using an umbrella, which the children witness, and are awestruck. When she meets with George to discuss the position, Mary's behavior is so unlike the usual interview protocol, along with the fact that she has answered the children's advertisement and not his, this puts George into a state of confusion that he will be in for most of the movie. Mary's introduction to the children occurs after something else unexpected, she slides up the banister, and the following scene in the nursery, provides even more surprise, which one could call the Disney version of "shock and awe," which I for one prefer.

Meandering Messages—Indirect Suggestion

Much of Erickson’s work was based on indirect suggestion. In order to reduce resistance, suggestions were given in a form that the client could easily accept and not argue with. Erickson did not want his suggestions to be rejected and so he would often offer them indirectly, and in this way Erickson was able to lead a person from one suggestion to another. Erickson often used the word "perhaps," and which would allow a person to consider something provisionally. Being indirect facilitated a client’s ability to accept an idea and respond accordingly.

Being an acute and careful observer, Erickson was a master of non-verbal communication, which accounts for 93% of communication. Because only 7% of communication is conveyed through words, the remaining 93% is nonverbal, and consists of body language—55%, while vocal qualities such as intonation, pitch, and tempo make up the other 38%. Erickson found that these modes of communication are not as conscious, and thus provide good means of indirectly communicating with another person. Working directly with the unconscious allowed Erickson to help a client transform without being hampered by reluctance of the client's conscious mind. Erickson (1980) notes that indirect suggestions allow a client "to go through difficult inner processes of disorganizing, reorganizing, reassociating and projecting of inner real experience to meet the requirements of the suggestion" (p. 39) without their ego interfering with the process.

Essentially, Erickson was using the same pattern that we have been exploring. Through trance, Erickson would separate the person from the outer world, causing disorganization to occur, which would create a liminal space where reorganization could occur. Erickson would then reassociate the person to the outside world again and project the change into the future.

One way of creating indirect suggestions is known as "embedded commands," which are similar to placing things in italics when reading. By subtle changes in voice tones or other nonverbal cues, Erickson would "mark out" what he wanted a person to unconsciously pay attention to. The idea of embedded commands is similar to putting something in italics, because it is different from the surrounding text, you pay special attention to it. For example. You can easily see the change in George’s behavior as a result of Mary’s using confusion to induce a trance, a holotropic nonordinary state of consciousness.

By placing simple messages within what you are saying, which are marked out in some way, using either voice tones or physical gestures, the unconscious mind can more easily grasp them, while the conscious mind will seldom recognize them. (O’Connor & Seymour, 1990, p. 119). Negatives fit into these patterns, too, because negatives exist only in language, not experience. Negative commands work just like positive commands, since the unconscious mind does not process the negative and simply disregards it (p. 120). Mary uses embedded commands in “Stay Awake,” when she gives the children a string of embedded commands: “don’t rest your head, don’t lie down upon your bed, you’re not sleepy, as you seem… don’t nod and dream… don’t close your eyes.” ∆RC[mp16]

Presto-Chango— Changing Meaning Through Reframing

One Erickson's most important techniques is reframing. The meaning of things depends on the frame in which you put them, and reframing transforms meaning because

when you change the frame, you also change the meaning. When the meaning changes so do your responses and behaviour. The ability to reframe events gives greater freedom and choice . . . . Metaphors are reframing devices. They say in effect “this could mean that . . .” Fairy tales are beautiful examples of reframes . . . . inventors make reframes . . . . Jokes are reframes. Nearly all jokes start by setting events in a certain frame and then suddenly and drastically changing it. Jokes involve taking an object or situation and putting it suddenly in a different context or suddenly giving it another meaning. (O’ Connor & Seymour, 1990, p. 127)

Reframing breaks out of limiting preconceptions to broader understanding of human possibilities. Watzlawick, a colleague of Bateson’s, mentions that the "essence of brief therapy is the gentle art of reframing" (Lankton & Lankton, 1983, p. 336) O' Connor and Seymour, in discussing reframing note that reframing is not akin to looking at the world with rose-colored glasses and seeing everything as "really good." They explain: “Problems will not vanish of their own accord, they still have to be worked through, but the more ways you have of looking at things the easier they are to solve . . . . reframing gives you room to manoeuvre.” (O'Connor & Seymour, 1990, p. 128). Advertising and politics are nonpsychological fields in which reframing abounds.

The song “A Spoonful of Sugar” is a metaphor and lesson in reframing. Along the way, reframing occurs in the visit to Uncle Albert’s, at the fireplace before the rooftop adventure, and when Bert talks with the children after the bank run. As we will see in the “I Love to Laugh,” section of the scene-play, reframing is the essence of jokes.

Now that we have got a taste of Ericksonian magic and have been alerted to its occurrence in Mary Poppins, let us take a last look at how Mary’s Ericksonian magic applies to George, who we can perhaps consider to be the ego, or conscious mind. George Banks is rigid, like the ego, which is structured in a certain way, and not very open to new things. It would not be useful to confront George directly, because then he would become defensive, which would increase his resistance and rigidity. Mary works her magic by dealing directly and indirectly with the children— representing the unconscious, while Mary repeatedly confuses the conscious mind, George. George however "gets" all of the lessons in the end, because the children have shared them with him along the way. Even though George consciously resisted them at the time, he unconsciously assimilated the lessons due to his constant state of confusion and also due to the fact that they were not directed directly at him. Play deterritorializes the ego in a similar fashion. Through play and nonordinary states, we can transform, using the same archetypal pattern with which we have been playing. And speaking of archetypal patterns, let us take another look at laughter in this light. Laughter, too, deterritorializes the ego as we will see in our final excursion of the dissertation, the laughter excursion. Let us go there now.

Laughter Excursion

Laughter is an important element in Mary Poppins, it occurs at three specific places during the movie, and its appearances signal the different stages of van Gennep’s (1908/1960) rites of passage—separation / liminality / incorporation. George himself, surprisingly enough, is the first person in the Banks household to laugh. Just after he hires Mary Poppins, Winifred asks George whether Mary will be everything that they hoped for. Replying that he does think that Mary will work out, George surprises himself, and laughs, while joyfully grabbing both of his wife’s hands—most uncharacteristically. This represents a break or separation from George’s old routine way of being.

Although Michael does chuckle when Bert mimics a tightrope walker at the park entrance, the next time of actual laughter is during the visit with Uncle Albert, and the “I Love to Laugh” song. This song shows laughter’s liminal side, and the song appropriately takes place in mid-air.

The next time we hear laughter, it is again George who laughs. After being dressed down and "sacked" George begins to laugh; he is “cracking up,” literally and figuratively, his old way of being is no more, it has become brittle and broken, and dies, releasing him to a new way of being. Still laughing, George tells a joke to the bankers on his way out. The elder Mr. Dawes, in a delayed reaction, gets the joke and laughs wheezingly, and then floats up to the ceiling. We later find out that he died laughing. This last laughter at the bank is liberatory. Now let us take a longer look at laughter and see what it is all about.

Historical Perspectives

Many great minds have looked at laughter, from Plato and Aristotle to Descartes, Darwin, and Freud, and yet laughter remains a bit enigmatic (Provine, 2000). Plato “frowned upon” laughter, and saw it “as weakening the character and confusing the mind” (Morreall, 1983, p. 102), and Plato feared laughter's power to disrupt the state (Provine, p. 13).

Aristotle said that “of all living creatures, only man is endowed with laughter.” Although Aristotle was wrong about this, since other creatures also seem to laugh, such as chimpanzees and possibly dolphins, Aristotle saw laughter as “man’s highest spiritual privilege, inaccessible to other creatures . . . . According to Aristotle, a child does not begin to laugh before the fortieth day after his birth; only from that moment does it become a human being” (Bakhtin, 1963/1968, pp. 68-69). Laughter was thought of as a gift from the gods by the ancients, and was considered to have divine origins. In a footnote, Bakhtin notes that the creative power of laughter was known not only to the Greeks and Romans but to the Egyptians as well, where according to Egyptian alchemists:

The creation of the world is attributed to divine laughter:
when god laughed seven gods were born to rule the world… when he burst out laughing there was light, he burst out laughing for the second time the waters were born, at the seventh burst of laughter the soul appeared.” (p. 71)

Thus, we could all be the result of a cosmic joke! “Laughter has a deep philosophical meaning,” according to Bakhtin (1963/1968), who summarizes the renaissance view of laughter:

It is one of the essential forms of truth concerning the world as a whole, concerning history and man; it is a peculiar point of view relative to the world; the world seen anew, no less (and perhaps more) profoundly than when seen from a serious standpoint.” (p. 66)

Bakhtin (1963/1968) also explains that laughter is a universal principle that heals and regenerates. Appropriately, laughter is seen in this transformational light in Mary Poppins. Tricks often accompany transformation, and there is a trickster side to laughter, too, revealing its disruptive and dual qualities. Henri Bergson wrote a famous essay on laughter at the turn of the Twentieth Century and Hanson (2001), quoting Bergson, notes:

‘It is a transitory state of unstable equilibrium where the balance of both emotion and thought is disrupted . . .’ [Bergson] defined a situation as creative and comic if it belongs simultaneously to two independent series of events and is capable of being interpreted in two entirely meanings at the same time.” (p. 60)

Syncronisitically concurrent with Mary Poppins, Koestler’s theory of “bisociation” in 1964 posits that the humor experience involves a sudden shift between, or combination of, different interpretive frames. The set-up creates one frame of reality or interpretation. The punch line achieves its humorous effect by suddenly shifting to another, equally coherent, but competing frame. (Glenn, 2003, p. 20) Laughter is also a primary frame maker for play, and has a metacommunication function, and can both ratify and bring about play.

A Special Kind of Laughter

The laughter of George, Uncle Albert, and the Elder Mr. Dawes is what Davis (2000) would call “kairotic” or “shattering” laughter, that is the kind of laughter that we cannot help. Kairotic laughter is irrepressible, we laugh it in spite of ourselves, and often against our will, or more accurately we are laughed by it. Kairotic laughter is “the co(s)mic ‘rhythm that laughs you,’ " which Davis describes it as “an affirmative laughter, arising out of the overflow, the excess, and capable of momentarily and instantaneously catapulting us out of negative dialectics by negating negation itself.” This is an allusion to Nietzsche’s “‘great sweep of life’ which never cease to overflows our categories” (p. 2). Irrepressible laughter, Davis relates, causes us to “crack up” although we do not want to:

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