Learning and Teaching Therapy

Reviews / Votes

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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