Haley, Jay, 1923-2007

Haley was pivotal in creating psychotherapy's major paradigm shift from insightful, long-term therapy, to a brief, family-based and problem-focused strategic therapy. Haley argued for training therapists through live supervision, giving them the necessary tools for problem-solving through an active thoughtfully planned strategy. He pioneered the recording of therapy sessions, and created many training films.

Background

Jay Haley (1923-2007) was born in an oil town in Wyoming. He was a pioneer in family therapy, and his work traces its birth and development during half a century. He was a founder and first editor of Family Process, the first journal in family therapy. Haley was pivotal in creating psychotherapy's major paradigm shift from insightful, long-term therapy, to a brief, family-based and problem-focused strategic therapy. Haley argued for training therapists through live supervision, giving them the necessary tools for problem solving through an active thoughtfully planned strategy. He pioneered the recording of therapy sessions, and created many training films.

Jay Haley held degrees from UCLA, U.C. Berkeley and Stanford University. While at Stanford he met Gregory Bateson and as a young member of the Gregory Bateson Research Project, he participated in the early research in family therapy and schizophrenia. His work on leading medical hypnotist Dr. Milton H. Erickson in Uncommon Therapy: The Psychiatric Techniques of Milton Erickson M.D. (1973), influenced many people to become therapists. He elaborated and codified a brief strategic family therapy approach, which grew out of Erickson's work, and departed in many significant ways from the more traditional approach to therapy. It emphasized the present not the past, a positive unconscious not a negative unconscious, a focus on action rather than developing insight, and emphasizing the skills needed to solve problems rather than diagnosis.

In the mid 1960's Jay Haley joined Salvador Minuchin and Braulio Montalvo at the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic as Director of Family Therapy Research for ten years. They received a grant to train paraprofessionals in the community (poor African Americans and Latinos). This innovative training and live supervision is published in Problem-Solving Therapy, a text for learning therapeutic skills. Haley also served as Clinical Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He co-founded The Family Therapy Institute of Washington, DC, and served as Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Howard University, and at the University of Maryland, where he continued his pioneering work in training therapists from around the world in directive family therapy. In the early 1990's he returned to California joined the faculty of Alliant International University, continued making training films, writing, and lecturing until his death in 2007. His contributions have been published in 21 books, more than 100 papers, which have been translated into 15 languages, and many therapy films.