Una rivoluzione paradossale: il contributo di Jay Haley a una nuova concettualizzazione della psicoterapia

In this paper, the author illustrates the main concepts and general attitudes introduced by Jay Haley in the field of psychotherapy. He underlines how Haley succeeded in doing a quiet revolution, that introduced radical changes without eliciting a real form of resistance, and that can be then called paradoxical. Particularly, connecting ideas to clinical practice and therapeutic intervention, in order to reach this goal, Haley followed different strategies: using commonsense to defeat commonsense, don’t using analogies and metaphors as a form of reality, preferring simplicity to complication, giving importance to a positive view of life and therapy, and considering the context. Jay Haley’s collaboration with Milton Erickson and the many similarities of their views in conceiving and doing psychotherapy are described.