Jay Haley and strategic therapy

Jay Haley’s strategic therapy is characterized because The therapist has great initiative and has to identify a series of key aspects. From identifying solvable problems, to designing interventions, setting goals, offering feedback and evaluating.

Jay Haley intended to overcome what the moment could dictate and not focus on symptoms, mental or mood states. What really What he proposed was to work in social situations and not focus on individual work.

Jay Haley’s postulates of strategic therapy

Jay Haley intended to offer the vision that The problem of the client who comes for consultation not only lies in him, since human beings are social and therefore our entire environment is involved.

Therefore, the client is not the unit of intervention, so is the nuclear family, other relatives, and/or the peer group. Within your proposal also includes professionals who are in contact with the problem in one way or another.

Inside to the family, Haley analyzed the hierarchies that are established, as well as the rules and statuses or power roles within it. There are roles and rules that are more primary than others and analyzing them helps to better understand the client’s life.

Sometimes the complaint, inappropriate behavior or the reason for the consultation arises from confusion or imbalances in the hierarchy that disturb adaptation to the cycle of family life. If, for example, in a family the daughter is in charge of trying to mediate her parents’ conflicts, there will be a great imbalance that does not fit into the adaptive role that corresponds to her as a daughter.

The history of the strategic-communication model

The anthropologist Gregory Bateson was the first great systemic theorist, and his objective of study was human relationships. To do this, he applied some theoretical paradigms, such as General Systems Theory (TGS) and Cybernetics.

Following Bateson’s work, the Mental Research Institute (MRI) was created in Palo Alto (California). Through it, they pass important theorists framed in the systemic approach: John Weakland, Don D. Jackson, Virginia Satir, Jay Haley or Paul Watzlawick.

The early work of authors such as John Weakland and Jay Haley are greatly influenced by the ideas of Erickson, a very successful American psychiatrist of the mid-20th century. The history of family therapy was initially known as Strategic Therapy following the model developed by Haley, but because The postulates of the Mental Research Institute (MRI) and those of the model developed by Haley were very similarboth are usually presented together.

Jay Haley’s vision of the person

Systemists like Jay Haley understand people’s behavior within their interactional context, which is more relevant – with greater explanatory power – than any other personality variable. The general theory of systems and the theory of human communication are the starting models to understand and analyze the functioning of human groups. and how the interaction is above all communicational.

On the one hand, a system is made up of a series of elements and rules that determine their relationships. On the other hand, these relationships can be observed in a circular way, the interactional pattern phenomenon, where A produces B and B maintains A.

The complementarity between MRI and Jay Haley’s strategic therapy

What differentiates systemic models from other modeling carried out from other theoretical frameworks is that understand maladaptive behaviors as the product of an interaction and not only as a result of personality variables.

At the Mental Research Institute (MRI), they understand that problems appear because people automate maladaptive interactional sequences that are repeated. Strategic therapy observes that problems appear when there is a particular distribution of power within the family system.

Another difference between strategic therapy and MRI is that the latter understands that the solutions tried that do not work are those that maintain the problem. Therefore, the problems are partly the result of failed resolution attempts.

However, Jay Haley since his strategic therapy understands that symptoms serve a function, although it is not adaptive. That is why the symptoms can be understood as a dysfunctional way of communicating something.

In short, it is about considering that We live in a social context and therefore we influence and are influenced by it. Focusing psychological therapy on the exclusion of its social environment is like trying to study an animal without knowing its environment.

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