2005 CONFERENCE - BTN HOMEPAGE - BTTC-I
	BTN Interviews  The Brief Therapy Network Michael Hoyt

Tapio Malinen

 Multitheoretical thinking and integrative brief therapy practices, creative teaching and lecturing, participatory interview-projects with leading experts, and writing widely on brief therapy and related topics are some of the activities near to Michael Hoyt's heart.  His knowledge and experience is so extensive that he deserves to be called a Renaissance Man in the brief therapy field.  He works as a senior staff psychologist at the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in San Rafael, California, and is also a member of the clinical faculty of the University of California School of Medicine in San Francisco.

The following conversation took place in Helsinki, Finland, on March 9, 2001.  Michael had just finished teaching a charming two-day workshop on "Integrative Brief Therapy" (sponsored by the Finnish Family Therapy Association).

TM: Physicists are nowadays seeking for the so-called Big Theory.

MH: In brief therapy The Big Theory now is Social Construction. They used to think the Big Theory was The Unconscious; then, for awhile, it was Structure and Communication.   This is an interesting question: if anything is "The Unconscious," how is it useful to think about it and how is it not useful to think about it?  It´s a concept and it may be a helpful concept, but everything we think about, every way we approach something, opens certain possibilities and closes certain others.  So I am not necessarily for or against something as much as I´m asking, what do we gain or what do we lose by thinking in a certain way?  Every model or theory opens doors and closes doors.  What I gain by solution-focused approaches--whether it is specifically solution-focused therapy or some other variant (e.g., solution-oriented or possibility therapy or some other competence-based ideas or even some of the language system ideas)--is a sense of freedom.  The client and the therapist are building something rather than tearing something down. 

     As I mentioned in the seminar, I´m interested in the aesthetics of therapy; is it attractive and interesting?   I´m interested in the ethics; is it respectful, does it enlarge the person?   And I´m interested in the effects; does it work, is it helpful?   From what I have understood so far about  competency-oriented and language-based approaches, they satisfy all three of these more than any other schools or theories I have met.

TM: There are two things I´m thinking about right now.  First,  Steve de Shazer (2001) has said that there´s no theory in solution-focused therapy.  Theories don´t explain reality, they rather organize our brains. Wouldn't it be nice if we would have a Theory with big T, so we would be legitimized. But if we would have that Theory, all our minds would be clouded. The Big Theory would cloud that which is as it is.

MH:  Yeah-we'd be theorists rather than therapists, more interested in our "lenses" than our clients.  Bill O'Hanlon and Jim Wilk (1987, p. ix) have a funny line in their book where they quote a famous Irish scientist and wit who was reported to have remarked, "Well, it works in practice OK&ldots;but does it work in theory?"!

TM:   The other thing I was thinking about was what Ken Wilber (1998), one of the greatest philosophers in the field of transpersonal psychology, wrote in his book, The Marriage of Sense and Soul.  He also talks about good, beautiful and true; ethics, aesthetics and knowledge; moral, art and science. He is arguing that the good thing in modernism was that it differentiated these three spheres from each other.  They all have their different languages.  In my mind your way to evaluate psychotherapy reminds me of his analysis.

MH: I´m wondering if I borrowed my three concepts of aesthetics, ethics and effects from Ken Wilber. I don´t know exactly when I read that book of his, but I did read it, at the suggestion of Cloe Madanes.   I´m wondering if I´m having what is called cryptoamnesia, which means you picked something and don´t remember where it came from.  I surely want to give him credit, if I borrowed it from him. Thank you, Ken!

     He also said some other things in his book that had me concerned.  He has a very strong argument in which he talks about the "nihilism and narcissism" of postmodernism.  This whole topic has become a real bugaboo. The concept gets used so loosely nowadays; sometimes postmodern means nearly anything, that everything goes or everyone can have her own reality and there´s no reality that is better than any other.  That might be true inside people's heads, that everyone can have his or her own "Truth," their heartfelt beliefs and "take" on reality.  Truth is an elusive critter, but there is an external reality that science looks at, and if we ignore the objective reality outside of us, we are somewhere between autistic, ignorant, and psychotic.

TM:  There´s a really interesting footnote in your Handbook of Constructive Therapies (Hoyt, 1998, p. 15) containing a list by Gail Shafarman of "Thirteen Ways of Looking at How a Poet and a Therapist Are One."   She says that both the therapist and the poet recognize the beauty of the form--and the need to judiciously break it.  Could you say something about what beautiful and aesthetics means to you in therapy?

MH:  I know it when I see it.  Sometimes it´s hard to explain, but beautiful in therapy means to me that it elegantly and eloquently captures the magic of the moment.  It often has a certain simplicity or efficiency, there is nothing unnecessary, and in some lovely way it gets to the core, to the heart of whatever the topic is that is being discussed.  I heard Robert Bly, a well-known American poet, once read a long, beautiful poem.  And someone in the audience asked him, "What does it mean?"  And he said, "If I knew what it meant, I would have written an essay, not a poem."  I think beauty, like poetry, is not linear. It's not something where you say "A+B+C = Beauty."  It's something about the way the pieces come together.  It's hard to explain.

TM: Isadore Duncan also answered, when somebody asked her, what´s the meaning of her dance: "If I knew that, I wouldn´t dance."

MH: Isn't that interesting!  Maybe Bly borrowed from her. Beauty connotes for me that we are in a constructive (positive, creative, choice-making) process.  There is an infinity of good and an infinity of bad we can focus on.  What we choose doesn't make all the difference, but it does make a big difference.  I was reading an interesting book by Alex Kerr (1996) called Lost Japan.  In one passage (p. 243) he describes being at a tea ceremony in which a participant accidentally spilled the whole tea container all over the tatami mat. Everyone was petrified, until the tea-master spoke:  "What is the appropriate thing to say at a time like this?  You should say, 'Look how beautiful!'&ldots;.You may never see this again in all your lives&ldots;.Look, and admire!"  I love that!  Damn, I wish I could hold that consciousness.

Thinking about beauty evokes for me an aesthetic sensibility, the world of grace and proportion and creativity and appreciation, which I find very attractive.    I love well-turned phrases and picturesque, compelling language, but beauty in therapy (or elsewhere) does not just mean that something is clever or pretty or happy.  Beauty is not just skin-deep.

TM:  I really like the way you move back and forth using personal experience and poetic imagery. 

MH:  Thanks. I know you have similar interests (Malinen, in press). So, let me ask you, Tapio, how do you think about beauty in therapy? 

TM: I think beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So for me beauty in therapy is a way to see or a way to be in the world. If I as a therapist succeed to co-create together with my client an open space, where our truths (what is truthful for us, what makes sense and works for us) unfold in a respectful atmosphere and we can recognize once again who we are, our suchness, then I often experience that there are also certain aesthetic dimensions in this particular moment. It often kind of takes my breath away, takes time away, takes myself away, all at once. This mutual space has often the characteristics of flow, unpredictability, wholeness, uncontrol, serenity, participation and a kind of elegance. Often both the therapist and the client will be touched and nourished by the beauty of the moment.

To create this space you need to have some technical skills, but at its best the therapist meets his client as the wind meet the water. Then the technique and the encounter of the human beings are one. And that´s beautiful.

TM: You mentioned words and how precisely your colleagues talk.  As I talk with you, I also can experience how precise your way of using words is.  I would like to ask you what's the difference in your dictionary between the words eclectic and integrative?

 MH: The word eclectic generally means pulling, or drawing from different areas.  Eclectic to me sounds more like a collection, but the pieces are not necessarily organized synergistically or working together.  I think lots of therapists who say they are eclectic may have a lot of techniques and ideas that sometimes contradict one another.  It's very difficult, for example, to be doing solution-focused work but then also be questioning the client's underlying assumptions, the way they are viewing the world, be it via the making of psychodynamic interpretations or the cognitive-behavioral editing or correcting of the person's reasoning.  If you are also trying to tell them that their logic is valid and real, how can you also be challenging it's validity at the same time?  I tend to prefer the term multitheoretical because in English eclectic sounds like a cross between electric and chaotic!

I think integrative has the implication that the pieces fit together and together they are more than the sum of the parts.  They're multiplicative.  So it's easier for me to integrate, say, ideas from Ericksonian and solution-focused and narrative therapy, because they all are based on ideas of competency and utilization of resources. Those are much easier to integrate than disparate ideas from traditions that are much different.

 TM: Could one say that real integration, as you put it, would be one of the roads for the development of psychotherapy - something that is somehow emerging from these innovative and synergistic approaches?

 MH: In the United States there is an organization called the Society for Psychotherapy Integration. They hold conferences and they try to look for "common factors" or what's similar in different therapies.  What are the real factors that seem to make it work?  Scott Miller and his colleagues  (Miller et al., 1997) have talked about that at some length, about the big importance of the client's contributions relative to the therapist's contributions and the role of placebo effects.

 The difficulty, I think, with how to integrate different approaches in practice is that sometimes we wind up with mush; different approaches are not doing what they do well with a little bit of this and a little bit of that.  I think the concepts of social construction and narrative construction and the languaging of reality are ways for how to think about integration.  It's interesting: the wheels within the wheels.  We're trying to find a way to talk about talking, a language for languaging about languaging.  In physics there are various forces and we go into a unified field-theory, some kind of concept that pulls it all together. For me that's what social construction does. It's the idea of building stories and language games and solution construction. END.

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