In today's rapidly changing health care environment, more is being asked of therapists than ever before. Mental health practitioners were once able to learn one particular approach, work only with appropriate clients who actively sought therapy, and treat them for however long it seemed necessary. Managed care has changed all that. Professionals must be: ready to use a variety of approaches; skilled in brief therapy techniques; prepared to deal with a range of clients representing different classes and ethnicities; and flexible enough to adapt to each particular case, including those involving violence, abuse, and court-ordered clients. What is required is a consistent ideology to frame the variety of ways of doing therapy and an ability to draw what is best from each approach. Bringing the seasoned professional up to date with the tools needed to thrive in the field today and providing students with a solid grounding in actual practice, this book explores new ways to think about therapy and creatively apply them in practice. Topics covered include:
*Essential elements of effective therapy
*Dealing with a broad range of clients
*Making the most out of a training program
*Adapting clinical approaches to specific situations
*The merits and disadvantages of live supervision
*How to recognize and build upon a therapist's unique skills
* Selecting a supervisor for training
Written in clear, concise language and enlivened by Haley's trademark wit, chapters are filled with case examples and verbatim transcripts of therapy interviews that bring the issues to life.
Table of Contents:
1. Teaching Psychotherapy
2. Selecting a Supervisor and Other Important Matters
3. Who Should be Allowed to Learn?
4. The Client
5. What to Learn, What to Teach
6. The Best Theory
7. Controversial Issues
8. Live Supervision
9. Beginning
10. More on Directives
11. Compulsory Therapy
Epilogue: How to be a Therapy Supervisor Without Knowing How to Change Anyone
About the Author :
Jay Haley, one of the founders of family therapy, is former Director of the Family Therapy Institute of Washington, D.C. He has served as a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at a number of universities and was a Research Associate at Stanford University. He was Director of Family Therapy Research at the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic and Director of the Family Experiment Project at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto. The founding editor of Family Process, Haley is a prolific writer who has authored, co-authored, or edited 19 books and numerous articles.
Review :
An extremely well-conceived, lucid, and comprehensive guide to the practice and teaching of psychotherapy. For the past 30 years, Mr. Haley has made an original and enduring contribution to a significant change in the way therapy is conceptualized, practiced, and taught. Learning and Teaching Therapy, a distillation of 30 years of experience and wisdom, should be a fundamental text for all teachers and trainees. --Neil P. Schiff, Ph.D., Center for Brief Therapy, LLC, Chevy Chase, MD
In this age of managed care, everyone is suddenly espousing a brief therapy orientation, and there is a proliferation of literature and new books on the subject. But there is little being published to address the problem of how to teach therapy supervisors to teach such methods to therapists. Jay Haley's book is written to answer many such questions, and he poses the dilemma so well when he asserts in the book that Supervisors who were not trained in brief therapy are being required to teach such an approach since this is the kind that fits the limits imposed by insurance companies' (p. 26). Jay Haley has been, for more than 30 years, a pioneer and a purist who believes in such approaches; has written volumes about how to do brief, problem-focused therapies which yield 'positive outcome' and therapeutic change; and he has been, is, and will always be a master teacher of brief directive therapy. Competent therapists and supervisors will appreciate and value this latest work of Jay Haley. Those who are either unable, unwilling or uncomfortable with making the prerequisite 'paradigm shift' to brief therapy (they may even view it as unethical) will find a great deal of 'consensual validation' and comfort in maintaining their approaches reinforced by Jay Haley in the final chapter of the book entitled How to be a therapy supervisor without knowing how to change anyone. --J. Patrick Dorgan, Ph.D., Middle Peninsula-Northern Neck Counseling Center, Gloucester, Virginia; Licensed clinical psychologist and family therapist in Virginia (Supervised by Jay Haley 1978-79)
In Learning and Teaching Therapy, Jay Haley has successfully incorporated the wisdom of decades of supervision, guiding countless trainees. I know--I was one of them. Therapists and supervisors now have the opportunity to expose themselves to a large dose of the knowledge I spent years training with Jay to learn--and many things I heard for the first time when I read the book. --Jerome A. Price, M.A., Director of Michigan Family Institute, Oak Park, Michigan
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