The Creative Therapist in Practice

Hillary Keeney, Bradford Keeney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429663192
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In The Creative Therapist in Practice Hillary and Bradford Keeney present a radically innovative approach to the practice of therapy. Combining improvisational performing arts, action-oriented cybernetics, and ecstatic healing traditions, therapy is re-imagined as a creative transformative art.

The book demonstrates the principles of creative therapy through numerous transcriptions of sessions conducted by the authors. It guides practitioners in conducting a three-part therapeutic performance: beginning with therapeutic techniques that broaden the context, igniting a session to creatively "cook," and finally concluding with a creative prescription for change that can be incorporated into the client's daily living. As well as tracing the historical development of creative therapy, chapters explore what is possible for the future of therapy when practitioners leave behind conventional models and theoretical interpretations.

Applying case examples of creative therapy to a wide range of presenting concerns, The Creative Therapist in Practice will be relevant to clinicians working across the field of mental health, including licensed psychotherapists, psychologists, and clinical social workers. Filled with inspiring anecdotes, unique interventions, and fascinating case illustrations, it will benefit anyone looking to become more naturally improvisational and wake up the creative life force in their sessions.

PART I

The Basics

1

The Historical Development of Creative Therapy

The seeds for creative therapy were planted in the early 1970s. At that time, Brad was an improvisational pianist and social cybernetician already steeped in the ideas of Gregory Bateson and Heinz von Foerster. He had little interest in psychotherapy and used to joke that he found the therapy profession more in need of therapy than its clients. As a young teacher of undergraduate psychology whose main academic interest was sensory-perception neurobiology, Brad conducted an unusual experiment. The students were shown a classic film series of sessions conducted by various founders of psychotherapy, but told that some of them were schizophrenics pretending to be therapists. After viewing the tapes, Brad asked the students to point out who the real therapists were. He was shocked to discover that the undergraduate students—not yet indoctrinated in psychological discourse—diagnosed most of the famous therapists as crazy imposters. This outcome made a long-lasting impression on Brad’s skeptical view of what is accepted and taught as therapeutic performance.

Then Brad attended a workshop conducted by Carl Whitaker in the spring of 1975 that was hosted by the institute where Brad worked as a researcher. Whitaker conducted a live interview with a family in front of the audience and it struck Brad as more an example of incredibly inspiring theater than any kind of therapy. What took place on stage appeared as a unique genre of improvisational performance—its transformative power was palpable. There was no need to assess, rationalize, or persuade anyone that a therapeutic outcome had taken place—it was immediately and obviously experienced by everyone in the room.

Afterwards Brad introduced himself to Carl Whitaker and the two of them started an immediate friendship that lasted through Brad’s early academic career. Whitaker asked Brad what he witnessed in the session and Brad responded without mentioning a single psychological abstraction or theoretical hypothesis. His words were limited to the patterns observed and the experiences evoked. Whitaker, known as a maverick practitioner who distrusted models and theories, immediately invited Brad to enter the field of psychotherapy and bring this kind of non-theoretical, performance-­oriented, and cybernetic pattern-attuned perspective to the profession. When Brad asked Whitaker how he learned to perform in a therapeutic session, he was little prepared for his answer. Whitaker replied, “I am fortunate because I was never trained. I did not have to unlearn those habits that bring the kiss of death to a session. I learned how to follow my unconscious instincts, chasing whatever wakes up a session and makes it feel alive. I am a non-theoretical, experiential family therapist.” Brad followed Whitaker’s advice and eschewed all training. Even while pursuing a doctorate in family therapy, he managed to avoid clinical supervision, instead getting faculty approval to set up an experimental project on a new method of therapy he invented, insinuating it was being studied at the Menninger Foundation where he worked as a communications analyst. Like Whitaker, Brad remained an untrained therapist, that is, uninfluenced by conventional schools of therapy.

Hillary began her career with much the same skepticism regarding psychotherapy that Brad had as a young man. Her interdisciplinary scholarship focused on social justice movements, Zen Buddhism, and dance. Then one day Hillary witnessed Brad conduct a live session with a married couple in front of an audience. The performance was so transformative and moving the audience laughed, wept, and erupted in applause. She had no idea that psychotherapy could be this creative, theatrical, and electric. Hillary refocused her scholarship on cybernetics as a tool for discerning how a therapy session is constructed by performed interaction rather than construed by informed interpretation. Performance oriented with aesthetic sensitivity and cybernetic pragmatic chops, Hillary partnered with Brad in the development and elaboration of what today is called creative therapy.

Creative therapy was able to sprout and grow only after the ground was swept clear of unnecessary explanatory principles—especially of the psychological and psychiatric kind. Rather than house therapy in social science or medicine, from the very beginning it was situated in the performing arts, having kinship with the kind of thrilling performance Brad initially witnessed by Whitaker and further developed in his own clinical work. Creative therapy’s developmental journey is radically free of psychology’s influence, but therapeutically enriched by several other lineages. These include theatrically setting a stage and making an enacted drama of transformation come to life. Add to this a few practical ideas from cybernetics that emphasize circular interaction and the co-construction of realities, and practitioners are better equipped to improvise rather than recycle a memorized routine. Next widen the range of expression that is possible in a session, something better acquired from other arenas of performance that include theater, dance, and music. And finally, become tutored by numerous global healing traditions that never forgot that change is something more felt than understood, and is best served when a practitioner is plugged into the ineffable source of the creative life force. Mix all this together and you have the creative therapist in practice—an innovative approach to therapy that uniquely blends the know-how of the performing arts, the wisdom of traditional healing ways, and the systemic understanding provided by the cybernetics of therapeutic interaction.

The Beginning: Exploring the Cybernetics of Change

The seminal ideas behind our unique therapeutic approach came into publication in the early days of Brad’s career when he served as Director of Research at the Ackerman Institute for Family Therapy in New York City and later as the director of several doctoral graduate programs. His first published book, Aesthetics of Change (Keeney, 1983), used the basic concepts of cybernetics, especially those articulated by Gregory Bateson, Heinz von Foerster, and Francisco Varela, to describe therapeutic change. Heinz von Foerster, one of the founders of cybernetics, cited Aesthetics of Change as a key general textbook on cybernetics in his entry on “cybernetics” in the Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence. Whereas Gregory Bateson earlier presented the ideas of Norbert Wiener to the social sciences, Brad gave more contextual clarification of the historical definition of these ideas, introduced their relationship to later developments of second-order cybernetics, and suggested how cybernetic metaphor could both describe and prescribe therapeutic process.

His next published books, Mind in Therapy (Keeney & Ross, 1985) and The Therapeutic Voice of Olga Silverstein (Keeney & Silverstein, 1986), used this cybernetic perspective to discern relevant patterns of communication in the sessions of renowned therapists that included Olga Silverstein, John Weakland, Jay Haley, Salvador Minuchin, H. Charles Fishman, Luigi Boscolo, and Gianfranco Cecchin. He demonstrated how therapeutic change could be discerned with a few primary distinctions, helping prevent any unnecessary multiplication of explanatory principles that dissociate attention away from the actual performance. His emerging orientation of scholarship combined cybernetic epistemology with a specific means of distinguishing the primary distinctions upon which any kind of experienced reality is built, a method inspired by George Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form (1969), a seminal contribution to logic and mathematics. As a “radical constructivist,” as it was called back then, Brad depicted a client and therapist as co-constructing a session’s reality through the primary metaphors they cast and wove together via their circular interaction.

Moving Therapy to the Performing Arts

Later, as Director of a clinical doctoral program at Texas Tech University, Brad turned his descriptive method of analysis upside down and used it as a prescriptive strategy to invent new forms of therapy. In this phase of his career, he originated several approaches to therapy that encouraged improvisation rather than model replication, that is, the creative invention of a unique therapeutic reality for each session and client, something he also found exemplified in the work of Milton H. Erickson. Variously called “cybernetic brief therapy,” “improvisational therapy,” “resource focused therapy,” and finally, “creative therapy,” Brad began building an archive of transcribed sessions that demonstrate an orientation not bound by a singular therapeutic model, but one that is a creative means of inventing endless therapies in real time with diverse clients.

During this time, Brad wrote a book called Improvisational Therapy (1991) that was arguably the first treatise calling for a postmodern second-order cybernetic orientation— a “therapy of therapy.” Heralded by postmodern anthropologist Professor Stephen Tyler, Brad’s work exemplified therapeutic experimentalism, improvisation, and an authentic liberation from attachment to either a preferred interpretation or interpretation itself, instead favoring expressive performance less constrained, filtered, and colored by theoretical allegiance. In other words, this work sought a performance (like Carl Whitaker) that truly embodied the postmodern sentiment that frees one from advocating for or imposing any ideology, including postmodernism, instead inspired by the unique particularities of action and understanding evoked by the situation at hand (like Milton Erickson). The first sentence of Improvisational Therapy (Keeney, 1991, p. 1), written nearly three decades ago, announced this radical move out of the clinic and onto the performance stage: “Imagine psychotherapy being contextualized in an academy of performing arts as a discipline comfortably related to theater, music, dance, and the rhetorical arts.”

This shift in context brought an emphasis on the performance of change with no need for exalting interpretation, whether it was named psychodynamic, behavioral, interactional, cybernetic, or postmodern, something unimaginable to a profession that typically believes its universe is a battlefield of contested interpretations and evangelical-like advocacy for a preferred ideology, even when the latter is an ideology concerning the deconstruction of other ideologies.

Brad found that opposition to one side of a polarity often results in an unnoticed conversion to what is opposed, what the Greeks (and later Carl Jung) named “enantiodromia.” Or as we now often humorously say, “too much protest leads to the love nest.” Opponents of traditional psychological interpretation fell into the same epistemological trap where “viewing” was elevated over “doing.” For instance, the very name adopted by Watzlawick and his Mental Research Institute (MRI) colleagues for their approach, “the interactional view” (an orientation we value) shows they did not detect their own pragmatic blind spot—they did not see that they did not see that a change of view is only more of the same kind of change—one that promotes the primacy of viewing. In other words, a change of outlook or perspective alone does not necessarily facilitate interactions that promote change. Here the more you try to advance the idea of interaction, the more you might be led to interpreting interaction and promoting an interactional ideology and its self-verifying reality.

More significantly, schools of therapy missed underscoring that change should involve more than the client—the therapist and the model of change must also be ready to change in each session. If a client and therapist are in a circular interaction together, then they will either change together or remain the same together. While the MRI model of change came closer than other models to identifying the importance of circular interaction, they did not fully apply it or embody it in their own involvement—MRI sessions and their therapists remained predictably the same. This model only addressed one kind of interaction—the interaction of problems and attempted ­solutions—while ignoring whatever or whoever else is included in an interaction with a client (unless involved in solution attempts). Until the whole therapist is interacting with the whole client, there is a dissociated situation in which only parts of the therapist and parts of the client are invited to the session as determined by the therapy model. Here is found the main form of interaction implicit in all therapy models: a therapist’s theoretical model is what interacts with the client, while the rest of the therapist remains constrained or removed from the situation. Carl Whitaker intuited this systemic partiality of a theoretically driven therapist. He was the only therapist to protest “the hindrance of theory” in clinical work (Whitaker, 1976). Though he wasn’t sure how to best articulate or rationalize it, he invited therapists to jump into the whole system of interaction that invites more forms of participation, especially those involving their more unconscious and unpredictable creative nature.

Without such participatory inclusion and performance plasticity, a model and its practitioners are rendered change resistant in order to maintain a particular viewpoint. The art of change requires the doing and viewing that embrace an ever-shifting approach to improvising transformation. In other words, the method, school, and orientation of change must itself be changing along with its proponents, which is something not easy to understand, enact, or teach.

Brad avoided promoting a non-changing model of change that was impervious to a self-corrective process that could alter its own protocol. He noticed early on how the main therapy models implicitly sought to prioritize verification of their own utopian outlook and unavoidably stumbled into the same theoretical entrapment, myopic preferentialism, and political evangelism seen in the works and institutions they critiqued. Brad chose to explore how an emphasis on freshly invented performance rather than an imposed, stale template would better serve transformation. He also learned that saying less about either cybernetics or a postmodern sentiment could better evoke, embody, sustain, and grow both. He kept changing his metaphors and even the name of his therapy to help keep it more creatively alive and more resistant to becoming change resistant.

Scoring Therapy’s Performance

Brad next invented a breakthrough research method that enabled an investigator to track and score the construction of a transformative conversation in any context concerned with the evocation of change. Later completed with Hillary, this method is called “Recursive Frame Analysis” (RFA). It reveals the barebones structure or conversational anatomy of what is going on (and what is not going on) in a therapy session no matter its theoretical orientation. Its analysis outlines the contextual frames that a therapist and client knowingly or unknowingly establish in their interaction. It makes clear whether or not an alternative experiential reality has been constructed or whether the therapist remains inside the same presenting context of the client or another equivalent analog of it. RFA tracks how the contextual space needed for a creative therapy session is built by highlighting an engaging, resourceful metaphor that, through successive re-indication and effective conversational weaving, becomes an expanded frame or existential “room” hosting a wider spectrum of transformative experience (Keeney, Keeney, & Chenail, 2015).

This innovative mapping also brought a tool for constructing new territory. RFA is equivalent to scoring music or notating the choreography of dance—a simultaneous description of and prescription for a performance. Imagine music and dance without their means of scoring—the absence of such a map would leave performers lost and students would find it nearly impossible to learn how to perform and compose. This actually has been the situation in psychotherapy—it has lacked the kind of map, score, and notational system that is performance oriented. Instead, it advances interpretations that are of a different level of abstraction, making more opaque what is happening in a session and more difficult to discern whether a session moves from a beginning, then to a middle, and finally to a transformed ending. As a result, the actual performance is often minimized or ignored altogether in favor of hosting debates on what therapists should think and how they should view rather than examining what they actually do.

Though not reported, RFA clearly revealed that most models and schools of therapy rarely achieve any significant contextual expansion nor any powerful experience of change in the session—echoing what Brad’s undergraduates had intuited in their untrained observations of therapy films. Proponents of mainstream therapy models are usually more concerned with rationalizing and fantasizing that change occurs in their sessions even when it is not immediately perceived. Like a performing arts academy, most of the educational curriculum and conferences in psychotherapy should involve live session performance, something Brad required in his graduate programs and presentations over the years. The stage should be the main focus, not theoretical reflection and speculation. Furthermore, a performance and not a multiple-choice exam better determines whether a student is ready to see clients. Without the primacy of auditions, recitals, and master performance classes, therapy too easily falls into action paralysis and performance amnesia. Therapy needs less abstract theoretical fantasy and more live performance—something that naturally occurs when it is resituated in the performing arts.

Early in his career, Brad heard Gregory Bateson declare that psychotherapy was more schizophrenic than anyone dare recognize. When Brad later shared this idea with Whitaker, he heard a typically Whitakeresque response: “Everyone is crazy. The better question is asking whether you are going to get paid for it or locked up for it.” Whitaker reminded him of a family therapy conference on schizophrenia that had occurred at the Barbizon Plaza Hotel in New York City. In the middle of the proceedings Jay Haley stood and protested that no human being was schizophrenic; it was, as Bateson and his team had shown, more a pattern of communication that served social adaptation than it was an individual’s mental disease. All eyes at the conference then turned to Whitaker to hear what he might say since he was widely regarded for his brilliant work with so-called schizophrenics. Whitaker responded, “I’ve actually never met anyone who wasn’t schizophrenic.” It takes some circular thinking to recognize that Haley and Whitaker were saying the same thing in two different ways. However, the difference that Whitaker’s connotation brings is the further implication that the client and the therapist are not that different. Something bigger must be enacted than simply proving who is the therapist and who ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Endorsements
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• PART I The Basics
• PART II Creative Therapy Case Studies
• PART III Epilogue
• Appendix: A ‘Pataphysical History for the Future of Creative Therapy
• References