As human beings age, we are bombarded with losses: of our professions, businesses or jobs; homes; health; ideals; friends; family members and partners. This address will offer special techniques, usable in brief or long-term therapy, to help aging clients find ways to honor their losses as well as their own integrity, as they continue to grow and to savor life.
For the past half-century there has been a remarkable and continual evolution in the theory and practice of psychotherapy. Now that evolution shows signs of becoming a revolution. Many elements of these changes are, as yet, only scantily represented in the literature, but they are the stuff of bull sessions, the more liberated case conferences and solitary, sometimes fearful, experimentations. This transition comes about from a variety of influences, among which three are particularly worthy of examination for what they suggest about what is likely to emerge a half-century from now.
The traditional assumption that only insight into the causes in the past can bring about a change in the present makes us blind for what Alexander & French called "the corrective emotional experience," i.e., chance events in the present that may lead to almost immediate solutions. A great number of Erickson's surprising results could be considered the outcome of "planned chance events," often in the form of behavior prescriptions similar to interventions in hypnotherapy (e.g., "speaking the clients's language," prescribing resistance, the use of reframing, paradoxical interventions, etc.).
Supervision and therapy are isomorphic processes. What supervision teaches is the process of creating change in people, and the very teaching of this process is itself an attempt to create change in the supervisee. Like families, therapists tend to confine themselves to selected segments of their possible repertory. Thus a major goal of supervision can be the expansion of the therapist's use of self.
Panel 13 from the Evolution of Psychotherapy 1995 - Homework Assignments
Featuring Claudia Black, Ph.D.; Jay Haley, M.A.; Arnold Lazarus, Ph.D.; and Joseph LoPiccolo, Ph.D.
Moderated by Bernhard Trenkle, Dipl. Psych.
Panel 14 from the Evolution of Psychotherapy 1995 - Role of the Therapist / Role of the Client
Featuring William Glasser, M.D.; Lynn Hoffman, A.C.S.W.; Ernest Rossi, Ph.D.; and Joseph Wolpe, M.D.
Moderated by Betty Alice Erickson, MS.
Panel 16 from the Evolution of Psychotherapy 1995 - Key Ethical Considerations
Featuring Cloe Madanes, Lic. Psychol.; Margaret Singer, Ph.D.; Thomas Szasz, M.D.; and Jeffrey K. Zeig, Ph.D.
Moderated by Bernhard Trenkle, Dipl. Psych.