Customer Reviews

Strategies of Psychotherapy

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To excessively summarize and perhaps engage in slight hyperbole, this text is about how therapy is, even in therapies that espouse total neutrality, an attempt, conscious or not, to semi-consciously convince the client to change through influence. The text concentrates more on paradoxical interventions and on communication theory than on hypnosis (there is not much hypnosis, if I remember correctly), but the idea is that therapy is a form of benevolent, partially conscious influence. Essential to the thesis is that every behavior is a communication, and that different styles of communication can get tangled up. The therapist's job is to sort them out and then come up with communications that the client cannot help but obey, even if they think they are disobeying (paradoxes). This one goes along very well with the book by Beier that I have reviewed, but is much more focused on directive client influence than Beier's book. Definitely worth a look.