Jay Haley - Life and Works

Life and Works

Conceived in a log cabin on his family's homestead in Montana, Haley was born in Midwest, Wyoming. His family moved to Berkeley, California when he was 4. After serving in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II, he attended UCLA where he received a BA in Theater Arts. During his undergraduate years, Haley published a short story in The New Yorker. After a year spent in pursuit of a career as a playwright, he returned to California and received a Bachelors of Library Science degree from University of California at Berkeley and then a Masters Degree in Communication from Stanford University. Jay was married for the first time in 1950 and had three children, Kathleen, Gregory, and Andrew, with his wife Elizabeth.

While at Stanford, Haley met the anthropologist Gregory Bateson who invited him to join a communications research project that later became known as The Bateson Project, a collaboration that became one of the driving factors in the creation of family therapy and that published the single most important paper in the history of family therapy, "Towards a Theory of Schizophrenia." The central members of this Project were Gregory Bateson, Donald deAvila Jackson, Jay Haley, John Weakland, and Bill Fry.

In addition to his personal involvement in the birth and evolution of family therapy, Jay was an observational researcher of psychotherapy in the 1950s and early 1960s. The Bateson Project arranged for Jay and John Weakland to observe and record clinicians including Milton Erickson, Joseph Wolpe, John Rosen, Don Jackson, Charles Fulweiler, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, and others.

In 1962, while working at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, Jay became the founding editor of the family therapy journal Family Process (assisted by his first wife, Elizabeth Haley, an experienced journalist). While at MRI, Jay continued the professional relationship with Milton Erickson that had been established in the earliest years of the Bateson Project. Jay helped to introduce Erickson to the clinical public with such important books as Uncommon Therapy.

Haley moved to Philadelphia in the mid-1960s to take a position at the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic. Through his collaboration with Salvador Minuchin and Braulio Montalvo, Jay influenced (and was influenced by) the evolution of Structural Family Therapy in the early 1970s.

After founding the Family Therapy Institute of Washington DC with second wife Cloe Madanes in 1976, Haley continued to be a central force in the evolution of Strategic Family Therapy. His publications from the years at the Family Therapy Institute include one of the field's most influential best selling books, Problem Solving Therapy.

After leaving the Family Therapy Institute in the 1990s, Jay moved to the San Diego area and, in collaboration with his third wife Madeleine Richeport-Haley, produced a number of films relating to both anthropology and psychotherapy. Madeleine also collaborated in the writing of Jay's final book, Directive Family Therapy. At the time of his death, he was also a Scholar In Residence at California School of Professional Psychology at Alliant International University.

Haley combined a systemic understanding of human problems and strengths with a pragmatic approach to intervention. His method of therapy-–he claimed not to have a theory of therapy—-emphasizes creative and sometimes provocative instructions for the clients to react to. The approach emphasizes careful contracting between clients and the therapist, experimenting with possible solutions (in a manner sometimes inspired by the therapist and sometimes inspired by the client), review of the results and informed resumption of experimentation until the goal of therapy is achieved. In the 1960s and 1970s when psychodynamic approaches to therapy dominated, such practicality was commonly seen as heretical. The here-and-now emphasis of Haley and others of his generation of pragmatic practitioners is now the norm for the field of psychotherapy.