JAY HALEY ON THERAPY Jay Haley is widely acclaimed as a major teacher of therapy. He is one of the founders of family therapy, and his writing has influenced generations of therapists. The co-founder of the Family Therapy Institute of Washington, DC, he pioneered the development of strategic, humanistic approaches to therapy and was the founding editor of Family Process. He was also Research Associate at Stanford University and the Mental Research Institute. He was Director of Family Therapy Research at the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic as well as Adjunct Professor at the University of Maryland, Howard University, and the University of Pennsylvania. He was also the first recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Milton H. Erickson Foundation. He is the chief architect of the strategic approach to therapy. His prolific publications are written in a clear and concise style with many examples illustrating the major ideas about the field of therapy. Now for the first time his ideas are available on a videotaped series.

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JAY HALEY INTERVIEWED BY MAYA PINES PSYCHOLOGY TODAY NOVEMBER 1982

Therapist Jay Haley talks about disturbed power relationships in modern families.

Jay Haley is one of the nation’s leading family therapists —a quintessentially pragmatic man with a clear eye and sardonic wit who teaches his students how to make ailing families function again. Mostly, in his view, this involves straightening out mixed-up family hierarchies—like the "perverse triangles" that forms when, for instance, one parent becomes allied with a child against the other parent. (For an account of Haley’s methods of dealing with these harmful alliances, see the box on page 3).
     As a therapist who has been working with families for nearly 30 years, the 59-year-old Haley is eminently qualified to talk about the problems of the American family today. To hear his views, I went to meet Haley in the small private house in Washington, DC, where he maintains his Family Therapy Institute. I expected a rather formidable figure. I found a tall, rangy man with a graying mustache, western in bearing (he was born in Wyoming), soft-spoken, and wearing sandals.
     We covered a range of topics: divorce, remarriage, the economy’s effects on families, the case of John W.
Hinckley Jr. and his family. But always the conversation seemed to come back to questions that Haley considers
central: power and family hierarchies.
     If a kid is acting up or crazy, we know that his parents must be divided, that the family
hierarchy is in confusion.

Maya Pines: When you work with families, you must have some kind of ideal family in mind, don’t you?

Jay Haley: No.

Pines: No? Well, what are you working toward, then?

Haley: Oh, rearranging that particular family. You see, I used to do research on families, and I was astonished at their diversity. There are no many different ways to be a family. You don’t come out of that with an ideal way of how a family ought to be.

Pines: Didn’t Tolstoy say that all happy families are alike, while each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way?

Haley: I know the quote you mean. I don’t think Tolstoy say a lot of families.

Pines: He didn’t see as many as you did?

Haley: Well, one of the curious things that happened about the mid-1950s was that, for the first time, people arranged situations in which families could actually be observed talking
together. Before that, we had only people’s reports about what they did with one another. And when you observe them, you see that there are tremendous cultural differences—Italian
families, Asian families. And there are big class differences between the working class, the miserably poor, and the rich. There are families in which people aren’t married. And families
where they were formerly married. Families where the kids are adopted. Families made up of kids from three marriages.

Pines: What is the total number of families you’ve observed?

Haley: God, I have no idea. I see them six to eight hours a day, all day long, day after day. You know, there’s a theory that after you’ve seen more than 300 families, you begin to go
through a change in your thinking about the mature of human beings. Up to that point, you can think about them as a collection of the individuals. But somewhere around 300 you begin to understand that people aren’t what they’re traditionally thought to be. That is, you really begin to believe that people do what they do because of what other people do, and not because of individual choice or free will. And it’s an unsettling idea. I remember that when the family therapist Don Jackson managed to communicate something of that to Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, the psychoanalyst, she replied, "I don’t see how you can live with thatidea."

Pines: Then how can you tell who is influencing whom in a family?

Haley: Well, if a kid is acting up or crazy, we assume that the family hierarchy is in confusion.

Pines: How do you recognize a family’s hierarchy?

Haley: By watching the way the family members deal with another—who interrupts, who takes over the interview. We also have them talk to one another about the problem that brought them here, and in the process, their hierarchy begins to appear.

Pines: What kind of hierarchy is there in healthy, normal families?

Haley: I don’t know. How would anybody know? There hasn’t been any research on it that I know of except through self-reports. But if you have a young person who’s violent, crazy or on drugs, one way to get him over it is to have a strong family hierarchy—to put parents in charge, sometimes in a almost tyrannical way. Now that doesn’t mean we believe that this is how people ought to live. If you have a kid with a broken leg, you put a cast on that leg, but that does’ mean the way to raise normal kids is to put casts on their legs.

Pines: What would you have done with the Hinckley family?

"We’ve had families with a kid who won’t go to school. But once the parents are in agreement, by God he’ll do it."

Haley: I never met them, so I don’t know. Probably I’d have had the parents take the boy in and get him on his feet and working before he left home. Often in families there is a kid who fails, who staggers away and wanders around the country. I think this has a function: It stabilizes the family by having it concentrate on him. And you can’t get him free of that situation by just telling him to go away and avoid his family, or having the parents throw him out, because he collapses and comes back again. You have to have him come home. Then he can leave home properly, after he’s started functioning in a normal way.

Pines: But how could the Hinckleys have made him function normally?

Haley: They could have brought the kid home and come to some agreement about what he should do go to school, work. ...My impression from the newspaper reports is that the parents objected to what he was doing while financing his doing it—an don’t think that’s sensible.

Pines: He was pretty old for them to control him, he was in his mid-20s.

Haley: Age has nothing to do with it. It has to do with the stage of family life you haven’t got past. That’s one of the tragedies in many families. If a young adult begins to leave him and it
goes badly, they never get away from one another. It can go on for years—in and out of jail, in and out of the hospital or various programs. The parents can’t cure him, and they can’t get red of him. And often they get advice from a well-meaning psychiatrist: Throw him out! I think this is a grave error. Because he’ll be back. Hinckley will be back with his parents. They’ll be struck with him till they’re 70. Because it’s been mishandled up till now.

Pines: How could they have forced him either to go back to school or to work?
 

Haley: There are ways. I don’t want to talk about the Hinckley, but we’ve had other families here with a kid who won’t go to school, and once the parents are in agreement, by God he’ll
do it.

Pines: That sounds a lot like what people used to say about the need to have a united front.

Haley: Yes, it is an old-fashioned view. And I’m not sure it apples to normal families. But with a problem kid, then they’d better pull together.

Pines: Can a coalition between the parents ever be the cause of a child’s problems?

Haley: There probably are families in which the parents are in some kind of unfortunate, bizarre, extreme coalition against their kids, but it’s not common. Sometimes you’ll have two
parents who share a delusion of some kind. I remember a couple in Colorado who shared the delusion that there were some airplanes over them trying to give them rays through the roof. They had lead on the roof. Their little girl was always with them until the therapist got her into nursery school and away from their constant influence.

Pines: What should parents do if their kid had become a drug addict?

Haley: There have been some studies showing that addicts are really very involved with their families—much more so than was ever thought. We assume that if the parents take charge of the kid and get him off drugs, he’ll stay off; but often, if the problem is handed to an expert who tries to get him off drugs, he’ll collapse and go back home and start all over again. Now I don’t want to imply that the parents caused it. It’s just that once a kid is into it, the way to get him off drugs is to bring him together with the parents and have the parents take charge of him. The parents don’t cause it, but they can cure it.

Pines: Do you have any evidence that parents can cure it?

Haley: There was a program at the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic, a group led by Duncan Stanton, on family therapy of street addicts, in which there was quite a high cure rate. They did very well there with the same sort of organizational, structural approach of putting the parents in charge.

Pines: You really believe in having the parents take charge.

Haley: In recent years I’ve gone further in that direction. For example, when young people come out of a mental hospital and start family therapy, I prefer to have the therapist side with
the parents against the offspring during the first interview, in order to construct the correct hierarchy. This is quite the opposite of 20 years ago, when we tended to side with young
people against the parents because of the idea that the child was a victim and the parents were a noxious influence.

Pines: What if the parents are divorced or remarried?

Haley: In some of these blended families, with children from several different manages, there are special problems. We’ve been seeing more of them.

Pines: What kind of problems?

Haley: Oh, "my kids, your kids, and our kids"—that sort of thing. If a guy brings a couple of kids into a family and the woman has a couple of kids of her own, very often there’s a
disciplinary issue: Who has the right to discipline whose kid: There are also hierarchical problems. You may get a family with two 12-year-old boys, and that can be quite a problem.
Ordinarily, kids work out a hierarchy by age.

Pines: In such cases, what do you do?

"My impression is that Hinckley’s parents objected to what he was doing while financing his doing it. I don’t think that’s sensible."

Haley: Negotiate. Lay out a plan for the family. Mostly we work on getting the parents to agree on what to do which the kids. And if there’s a real problem—a kid with a problem that looks
as if it’s the result of a blended situation—we may not only bring in all the kids and both parent, but also the previous family–the biological father or mother—and get everybody to
agree. I remember we did that with an adolescent who stole women’s underwear and hid it in his room. To deal with his sexual confusion, we brought in his biological mother as well as his stepmother and his father.

Pines: Did it help?

Haley: Oh, yes.

Pines: Is he still doing it?

Haley: Not as far as I know. It’s been two years. It was an exasperating case. His father just sort of vaguely protested. So we put the father in charge of solving the problem. The
procedure we gave him was that every time the kid stole lingerie again, the father would have to come home from work and go out in the backyard to watch the kid dig a hole three feet deep and bury it there.

Pines: Who dreamed that up?
 

Haley: I did. If you make it more difficult for somebody to have a symptom by making him go through an ordeal of some kind every time he shows that symptom, he’ll give up the symptom.

Pines: Did you explain to the family why you wanted the kid to dig that hole?

Haley: Not in this case. We just told them he’d get over his problem if he did that.

Pines: And they followed your instructions?

Haley: Yes. People while do what you ask. That’s the art of directive therapy. I mean, if you can get somebody to lie on his bacak and talk to the ceiling, while a psychoanalyst sits behind him, for seven or eight years and pay money to do that, people will do anything!

Pines: Is there anything people can do by themselves to improve their family lives, especially when they have children?

Haley: It’s hard to generalize. My wife, Cloe Madanes, and I have been thinking of writing a self-help book for families. But it’s a real challenge. Because I think that if a family is having
difficulty with a kid, they tend to think and do the things that are part of the system that is causing the difficulty. They have trouble getting out of the system by themselves. If you get
into a struggle with your wife and everything you do is producing struggle, and you realize that, it doesn’t mean you can stop doing it. It’s when an outsider comes in with different things to do that you have a chance to get out.

Pines: Wouldn’t it help to examine one’s own family hierarchy?

Haley: I don’t think so, no. Depends on what you’re trying to solve. You can examine it—but I’m not sure you can do any thing about it. (?Jt.)

Pines: Suppose one figures out who has the real power in the family. Can’t one deliberately change the balance?

Haley: You’d have to have a family meeting and get some agreement on trying to change it, and then in the process it might change. Sometimes what you can do is have the family draw on the blackboard who’s in charge, and then who next is in charge if that person is not home. And sometimes you can have them show the way it is in their family, and the way it ought to be. People can usually lay that out pretty clearly. But changing it is something else. You’d have to have a very careful plan, and go at it indirectly. The structure of families tends to be pretty firm.

Pines: Have you seen any body succeed at that?

Haley: No, I haven’t. Husbands and wives struggle to do that with each other quite often and that’s what makes the struggle.

Pines: I wonder how you’ll ever write that self-help book, considering the way you answer these questions.

Haley: It would have to be carefully figured out. We were thinking of calling the book Driving Each Other Sane. I think you could say, if you were in adolescent, what you could do; or if you were a wife, or a husband, or a grandparent. And from certain positions, if you planned a careful strategy, you could produce some changes in you family. But it would require
instructions. The book would guide people to it. Because they aren’t able to do it on their own. The average person who is kind of unhappy with the way his family is and tries to change it is in difficulty if he goes in and says, "I don’t want it like this anymore." That tends to arouse the very activity he’s trying to stop. He needs to triangulate according to somebody else’s system. (Why not try God’s Way, Agape! Amen! Jt.)

Pines: Family therapists seem to talk a lot about triangles. Who started it?

Haley: Oedipus.

Pines: Okay. I mean, when did therapists begin to think in terms of triangles?

Haley: Well, you see, the period of the ‘50s was really the end of the individual in therapy. That’s when psychoanalysis died as a force in the world. In the ‘60s, therapists developed a
dyadic view—both in behavior modification, with one person reinforcing another, and in communication therapy, where everybody was translating symptoms into communications
between husbands and wives, or between mothers and children. Then, in the ‘70s, therapists really got into triangles and organizational structures. It was quite a step, to begin thinking in three. You could think in terms of coalitions. "Feminism has moved women to more equality with their husbands. But it’s awkward to have two equals in charge of a group—like having two Presidents."

Pines: Can you give me an example?

Haley: Yes. Suppose we see a mother asking a child what she should do to punish him. In the ‘50s we’d have thought there was something wrong with that woman’s thinking, that she was asking the permission of her child to punish him. By the ‘60s we’d have focused on the ways both she and her child were behaving, that they got caught up in this strange thing where she was asking the child’s permission to punish him; and then we’d analyze the double bind. By the ‘70s we’d have assumed that a woman behaves like that when she doesn’t have power—when she doesn’t have the authority to tell the kid what to do because the kid has power from his father or grandmother, and therefore the mother has to ask the kid’s
permission, because she doesn’t have authority of her own. If you think in a longer unit than two, you look to see who else is involved when a mother is acting peculiarly, and usually you
see that somebody else is in coalition with the child against her. At least, these are three different explanations of the same behavior. And I think the triangular one is the most interesting on for therapists, because it gives them more opportunities. You can work with the mother, the father, the kid, or the while situation.
 

Pines: But that’s more difficult than working with just one person, isn’t it? I mean, if you problem is the result of your chemistry, presumably some kind of pill can change it If you’re
driven by your psyche, presumably some kind of individual psychotherapy can change it. But if you’re driven by other people, then it’s even more difficult, because you have to change many different people at once.

Haley: I wouldn’t think of it that way. As I see it, the effect of pills is often determined by the social situation. And the individual psyche and what happens to it are determined by other people. I don’t really you can change any individual psyche without changing other people. Which is really the family view—that the way you think and believe is a product of your situation and relationships, rather than that your relationships are a product of what you thinkand believe. In many ways, family therapy is easier than others because you motivate a lot of people to do something and a lot of things happen.

Pines: Do you still think in terms of the double bind, in which people become ill because they receive conflicting messages from their mother or someone else in their family?

Haley: Mo. That phrase has been used in so many ways that I don’t even know what it means anymore.

Pines: Have you noticed any new patterns, recently, in the kinds of problems that bring people to therapy?

Haley: I think that economic factors are becoming very important. Now we tend to get kids who had left home coming back home as they lose their jobs. And the family that’s been
organized without them has to reorganize to have them back again. The really sad cases are those of girls who get married to get away from their parents, and then the marriage breaks up and they have no place to go. So they came home with a baby, into a household where they didn’t hike the parents or didn’t get along with them in the first place. Those are very sticky problems.

Pines: And what’s the solution?

Haley: Just to have the family reorganize so as to share the labor, share the space and the privacy, and decide who’s going to take care of what.

Pines: In general, do you find that there is more authority and hierarchy in families now than there was 19 years ago?

Haley: Well, the culture is getting much more conservative. That tends to make the family more hierarchical, more structured. There was a time, in the ‘60s, when people make the mistake of taking the totally unexpressive way one behaves in therapy and translating it into how to raise a kid. Parents tried, but it can’t be done. It made for some very strange problems. I remember a psychiatrist who had a 7-year-old boy, and when he threw a party the kid would come downstairs and drink out of the bottle. The psychiatrist was terribly embarrassed, but he wouldn’t tell him not to, because you don’t tell a kid not to do something. So there was that
quality around for a while. That’s one of the reasons I hesitate to say that anything you do in therapy can be applied to normal life.

Pines: How much has the women’s movement changed the hierarchy in families?

Haley: It’s moved women to more equality with their husbands. But it’s a problem in some marriage, because it’s awkward to have two equals in charge of a group—like having two Presidents. So they have to divide it up in some way: One takes foreign policy, and the other takes domestic policy. Yet if you get into a real ethnic, Italian neighborhood, or among alder people, or working-class couples, you can’t use that model, because the husband still has more power.

Pines: On the whole, is your view of the American family very grim?

Haley: No. Grim in what way?

Pines: Oh, so many struggles over power, so many ways for the family to go wrong.

Haley: No. The main problems of the American family seem to have come from affluence, at until very recently. Long ago, families used to hang together because they had to. The wife stayed with her husband even if he treated her badly, because they had to be supported. And a woman who didn’t get married had to find a family to live with. And kids stayed with their parents even when they didn’t want to, because they couldn’t afford to move out.

Pines: Was that better, in your opinion?

Haley: No, not necessarily. But it’s a big change when there’s enough money in the culture for people to move out, and when there are enough jobs so that wives can go to work and kids of 18 came go to work. It means that there’s no economic cement holding the family together anymore.

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Haley, Jay (1923- )

Author/s: Catherine Dybiec Holm


Jay Haley is an American psychologist recognized as one of the founders of family therapy. Haley was a cofounder of the Family Therapy Institute in Washington, D.C., and he created the publication Family Process. His contributions to the field of therapy include the development of strategic and humanistic processes.

Haley was born on July 19, 1923, in Midwest, Wyoming, to Andrew J. and Mary (Sneddon) Haley. On December 25, 1950, Haley married the musician Elizabeth Kuehn. They had three children: Kathleen, Andrew, and Gregory; and were later divorced in 1971. Haley received his B.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1948. He later earned a B.L.S. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1951 and an M.A. from Stanford University in 1953.

Haley's career reflected his interest in family therapy, particularly in later years. He first served as a research associate between 1953 and 1962 in the Project for Study of Communication, Veterans Administration and Stanford University, Palo Alto, California. Between 1962 and 1967 Haley was director of family experimentation at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto. He served as the director of family research between 1967 and 1974 at the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic. Beginning in 1974, Haley was appointed as director of the Family Therapy Institute, Chevy Chase,
Maryland, where he serves currently.

Haley published a number of works relating to family therapy. These include Techniques of Family Therapy (with Lynn Hoffman) in 1967, Leaving Home in 1981, and Reflections on Therapy in 1982. Other therapy-related works include Uncommon
Therapy in 1972 and Strategies of Psychotherapy in 1963. He also wrote The Power Tactics of Jesus Christ: And Other Essays in 1969 and edited Changing Families (1971) and Advanced Techniques of Hypnosis and Therapy (1967). Haley received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Milton H. Erickson Foundation.