The Handbook of Constructive Therapies: Innovative Approaches from Leading Practitioners

A guide to the use of treatment approaches known as constructive therapies The leading teachers and practitioners in this powerful handbook represent a variety of schools of therapeutic treatments that all share an optimistic view of people as resourceful individuals who construct their own realities. Emphasizing a collaborative approach, the therapies focus on the strengths and resources of the clients and look to where people want to go rather than where they have been.Hoyt should be commended for bringing together in one volume diverse voices that bring alive the exciting possibilities that mark and define this new era of psychotherapy. ?Steven Freidman, author of Time-Effective Psychotherapy

Table of Contents:
Introduction. THEORETICAL PERSPECT. Redecision Therapy: Through a Narrative Lens (J. Allen & B. Allen). Generative Conversations: A Postmodern Approach to Conceptualizing and Working with Human Systems (H. Anderson & S. Levin). Adlerian Psychotherapy as a Constructivist Psychotherapy (J. Carlson & L. Sperry). How Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy Belongs in the Constructivist Camp (A. Ellis). Setting Aside the Model in Family Therapy (L. Hoffman). Ericksonian Emergent Epistemologies: Embracing a New Paradigm (S. Lankton & C. Lankton). Possibility Therapy: An Inclusive, Collaborative, Solution--Based Model of Psychotherapy (W. O'Hanlon). Strange Attractors and the Transformation of Narratives in Family Therapy (C. Sluzki). CONVERSATIONS AND SONGS. Constructing Therapeutic Realities: A Conversation with Paul Watzlawick (P. Watzlawick & M. Hoyt). Honoring Our Internalized Others and the Ethics of Caring: A Conversation with Karl Tomm (K. Tomm, et al.). Interviewing Fear and Love: Implications for Narrative Therapy (R. Doan). Master of Faster and The Problem Talks Back (J. Goldfield). SPECIFIC CLINICAL APPLICATIONS. Children's Stories, Children's Solutions: Social Constructionist Therapy for Children and Their Families (J. Cha). Minimizing Hierarchy in Therapeutic Relationships: A Reflecting Team Approach (S. Cohen, et al.). Escaping the Lost World of Impossibility: Honoring Clients' Language, Motivation and Theories of Change (B. Duncan, et al.). Solution--Focused Couple Therapy: Helping Clients Construct Self--Fulfilling Realities (M. Hoyt & I. Berg). Solution--Focused Ideas for Briefer Therapy with Longer--Term Clients (J. Kreider). The Narrative Solutions Approach for Retelling Children's Stories: Using Preferred Views to Construct Useful Conversations (T. Lund & J. Eron). 19. A Narrative Approach to Anorexia: Discourse, Reflexivity, and Questions (S. Madigan). Internalized Other Questioning with Men Who Are Violent (D. Nylund & V. Corsiglia) (with commentary by Alan Jenkins). Using--Therapeutic Splits to Construct Empathic Narratives (H. Omer). From "Either--Or" to "Both--And": Treating Dissociative Disorders Collaboratively (R. Schwarz).

About the Author :
MICHAEL F. HOYT is a senior staff psychologist at the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Hayward, California, and serves on the clinical faculty of the University of California School of Medicine, San Francisco. An expert clinician and an internationally respected teacher and lecturer, Hoyt is the author of Brief Therapy and Managed Care (Jossey--Bass, 1995), editor of Constructive Therapies, Volumes 1 & 2 (1994, 1996), and coeditor of The First Session in Brief Therapy (1992).

Review :
"It is a singular pleasure to welcome the first Handbook of Constructive Therapies into existence. A volume on the construction of meaning, its very existence is itself a vital entry into our contemporary dialogues." (Kenneth J. Gergen, from the Foreword) "Call them competency-based, strength-oriented, solution-focused, poststructural, narrative, postmodern, social constructionist--the approaches exemplified in this book offer the reader fresh perspectives and novel ideas for working with people in a respectful and collaborative manner. Michael Hoyt should be commended for bringing together in one volume diverse voices that bring alive the exciting possibilities that mark and define this new era of psychotherapy." (Steven Friedman, author of Time-Effective Psychotherapy, coauthor of Expanding Therapeutic Possibilities, and editor of The New Language of Change and The Reflecting Team in Action)