Advancing Psychotherapy: Transforming Conversations in Dialogue with Milton Erickson, Jay Haley, and John Weakland

Abstract

Jeffrey Zeig opens this book with an epigraph from Jay Haley, “In every profession there is an occasional man who can be called an ‘original,’ because he works within a profession while deviating markedly from the ways of most of his colleagues” (Haley, as cited in Zeig, 2022, p. vii). This book consists of transcripts from conversations in 1955 among Milton Erickson, Jay Haley, and John Weakland. These conversations give us a glimpse into a remarkable historical moment, at the dawning of interrelated movements, which we know as strategic psychotherapy, brief therapy, and Ericksonian hypnosis. Each of the participants in these conversations fits Jay Haley’s description of an original. Each developed outside the usual educational pathways of professional therapists, and each contributed insights on therapeutic change from a multidisciplinary and iconoclastic perspective.