Practitioner Account
Jay Haley spent decades arguing that therapeutic failure is not accidental. It follows a specific program, can be taught and learned, and is actively maintained by the institutions that train practitioners. He made this argument in print in 1969, in “The Art of Being a Failure as a Therapist,” and he was still making it in the classroom three decades ago, when I trained under him at his school of family therapy. What follows is a practitioner’s account of that framework, drawn from direct training, clinical supervision and private sessions with Haley over several years.
Haley’s starting point was uncomfortable: spontaneous improvement among patients is far higher than the field admits. Studies of waiting lists showed that between fifty and seventy percent of patients improved without any intervention. A practitioner who did nothing would still record a substantial success rate by chance. To fail consistently, to become reliably useless, required active effort and a supporting ideology.
He described twelve steps toward that reliable failure, which he called the “daily dozen.”
The first was to dismiss the presenting problem. Insist that what the client is asking to resolve is merely a symptom of something deeper, and redirect the conversation away from it. This ensures the practitioner never has to develop skill in treating the actual complaint.
The second was to search for historical roots. By focusing on the client’s past, infancy and fantasy life, both practitioner and client avoid the harder work of changing current behavior. The past becomes a permanent distraction.
The third was to invoke symptom substitution. Warn the client that removing the symptom will cause something worse to appear. This encourages patients to cooperate in their own failure by developing a fear of getting better.
The fourth was diagnostic language as incapacitation. Labels like “passive-aggressive,” “weak ego” or “deep-seated dependency needs” tell you what someone is, but provide no direction for what to do about it. A practitioner who has diagnosed someone as having a weak ego has no clear instruction to give. The diagnosis ends the thinking rather than beginning it.
The fifth was to insist on a single method regardless of results. When patients fail to improve, define them as “resistant” or “untreatable” rather than changing approach. When colleagues try different techniques, dismiss them as superficial.
The sixth was to place change in the patient’s interior. Define therapeutic change as something that happens in the unconscious, outside observation and outside the practitioner’s responsibility. This ensures that no precision in technique can develop, because technique is aimed at something that can’t be seen or measured.
The remaining six steps covered: warning patients of their own fragility to prevent swift improvement; ignoring the patient’s actual social context; interpreting what is most unsavory about the patient to generate guilt; avoiding poor patients who insist on results; refusing to define treatment goals; and above all, never evaluating outcomes.
He summarized the posture behind all twelve as five rules he called the “Five B’s”: Be passive. Be inactive. Be reflective. Be silent. Beware.
Haley’s alternative was built on two premises. First, that the practitioner is responsible for outcome. If a strategy isn’t working, it’s the practitioner’s failure, not the patient’s resistance, and something different must be tried. Second, that symptoms are communicative: they are tactics in relationships, not disorders in individuals. A symptom persists because it is doing something in the current system, not because of what happened in the past.
His clinical method followed from this. He located the current interactional sequence maintaining the symptom. He named it in terms precise enough that the usual intellectual resistance found nothing to hold on to. He assigned tasks directed at the sequence rather than at the client’s understanding of it. He considered a case unsuccessful until the specific presenting problem was resolved.
Precision was his clinical signature. In supervision, he could identify the exact moment a session lost traction: usually when the practitioner moved away from the presenting problem toward something that felt more interesting or more comfortable. He was patient with students and withering about systems.
By the time I trained with him, Haley had spent years watching graduate education in psychology produce practitioners who had been trained away from effectiveness. The problem wasn’t individual instructors. It was structural: programs protected students from any feedback system that might examine results, loaded them with theory that made direct intervention seem crude, and rewarded passive attentiveness over strategic initiative.
His school at the Family Therapy Institute was built for people who hadn’t been processed through that system, or who had and recognized what it had cost them. He treated training as a systemic intervention in itself. Students were given cases where conventional approaches had failed. They were required to take responsibility for the outcome, design specific interventions and account for what happened. He observed sessions through a one-way mirror and called in directives mid-session when the practitioner lost the thread.
He was also watching what was happening to children through the 1990s. Psychiatric medication of minors was expanding, and Haley was among the few figures in the field who treated this as clinical failure rather than progress. He wrote about it and said it in classrooms. The institutions doing the prescribing did not find this useful.
Strategic therapy did not fade because it stopped working. It was pushed to the margins by the same system Haley had spent his career describing in the failure essays: one that had no mechanism for examining results, no interest in doing so, and strong institutional reasons to avoid it.
This account is based on direct training, supervision and clinical sessions with Jay Haley at the Family Therapy Institute. For Haley’s formal published positions, see: “Strategies of Psychotherapy” (1963), “Problem-Solving Therapy” (1976), “Ordeal Therapy” (1984) and “The Art of Strategic Therapy” (2003).