Without the therapist's understanding: The Legacy of Steve de Shazer no 2.

Without the therapist’s understanding

The second part of this Legacy of Steve de Shazer ‘series’, focuses on the core of Steve’s thinking that made the Solution Focused approach possible, an idea which we can find encapsulated in two short sentences, the first from 1985 and the second from 1988:
‘Interventions can initiate change without the therapist’s understanding, in any detail, what has been going on’ (de Shazer, 1985, p119),
and
‘Solutions need not be directly related to the problems they are meant to solve’ (de Shazer, 1988, pp 51 – 52).
These two quotes exemplify the separation of the problem creation process and the solution development process that is at the heart of SFBT. The world of therapy prior to de Shazer had seemed to tightly connect the two; in order to work effectively, therapy seemed to propose, the therapist had to understand in detail ‘what was going on’ and without a doubt and almost self evidentially ‘solutions’ did indeed have to be ‘directly related to the problems they are meant to solve’. These two ideas, these two de Shazer propositions, form the foundation for the sorts of conversations that we Solution Focused practitioners have with our clients day by day and challenged the taken-for-granted thinking of many in our field.

In this short video Evan George expands a little the thinking around these two statements and the impact that they have.

de Shazer, Steve (1985) Keys to Solution in Brief Therapy. New York: Norton.
de Shazer, Steve (1988) Clues: Investigating Solutions in Brief Therapy. New York: Norton.

Evan George
London
12 July 2020