In Jay Haley’s strategic therapy, the therapist has a great initiative and must identify a number of key aspects, starting with identifying soluble problems when planning interventions, setting goals, feedback, and evaluating.
Jay Haley intended to overcome what the time might dictate and not focus on symptoms, mental states or moods, what he was really proposing was to work in social situations and not focus on individual work.
- Jay Haley intended to suggest that the client’s problem with the consultation should not be his sole responsibility.
- Because human beings are social and therefore our entire environment is involved.
Therefore, the client is not the unit of intervention, it is also necessary to intervene in the family nucleus, other family members and / or group of pairs. In its proposal, it also includes professionals who are in contact with the problem in one way or another. .
Within the family, Haley analyzed the hierarchies that were established, as well as the rules and roles of status or power within the family, there are roles and rules that are more primary than others, and their analysis allows a better understanding of the customer’s life.
Sometimes the complaint, inappropriate behavior or cause for consultation arises from confusion or imbalances in the hierarchy that transcend the adjustment to the family life cycle If, for example, in a family, the girl is responsible for trying to negotiate the conflicts of her parents, there will be a great imbalance that does not correspond to the adaptive role that corresponds to her as a daughter.
Anthropologist Gregory Bateson was the first great systemic theorist and focused on human relationships, for which he applied certain theoretical paradigms, such as General Systems Theory (TGS) and Cybernetics.
Following Bateson’s work, the Mental Research Institute (MRI) was established in Palo Alto, California, through which important theorists have passed corresponding to the systemic approach: John Weakland, Don D. Jackson, Virginia Satir, Jay Haley or Paul Watzlawick.
Early works by authors such as John Weakland and Jay Haley were heavily influenced by the ideas of Erickson, a highly successful American psychiatrist in the mid-20th century. The history of family therapy was originally known as strategic therapy, whose model had been developed by Haley, but as assumptions from the Mental Research Institute (MRI) and the model developed by Haley were very similar, they usually come together.
Do they understand systematics like Jay Haley the behavior of people in his inter-sectional context, which is more relevant?With greater explanatory power than any other personality variable. General systems theory and human communication theory are the initial models for understanding and analyzing the functioning of human groups and how interaction is primarily communicative.
On the one hand, a system consists of a series of elements and rules that determine its relationships, on the other hand, these relationships can be observed circularly, in the phenomenon of the interaction pattern, where A produces B and B maintains A.
What sets systemic models apart from other models created from other theoretical frameworks is that they understand incompatible behaviors as the product of an interaction and not just as the result of personality variables.
At the Institute of Mental Research (MRI), they understand that problems occur because people automate poorly adapted interactive sequences that are repeated. Strategic therapy indicates that problems arise when there is a particular distribution of power within the family system.
Another difference between strategic therapy and MRI is that it understands that the proven solutions that don’t work are the ones that underpin the problem, so the problems are partly the result of failed resolution attempts.
However, Jay Haley, with his strategic therapy, understands that symptoms play a role, even if they are not adaptive, so symptoms can be understood as a dysfunctional way of communicating something.
In short, it is a question of considering that we live in a social context and therefore influence and are influenced by it. Focusing on psychotherapy excluding its social environment is like trying to study an animal without knowing the environment in which it is located. is inserted.