Ordeal Therapy

Unusual Ways To Change Behavior
by Jay Haley

Reviewed by: Stephen J.M. Bray

 

ORDEAL IS A VEHICLE OF CHANGE in Haley's compendium of twelve studies, plus a fictitious story about a priest who had a problem with pleasure. There is a great deal of effective and informative re-worked material from Haley's earlier books.

The core of the therapeutic ordeal is for the client to be faced with something that is harder on him than the symptom. He must then lose the symptom in order to avoid the ordeal. Haley's ordeal may be a straightforward or paradoxical task, or even the ordeal of the relationship with the therapist. It may involve more than one person.

Haley claims the ordeal ranks equal to all existing theories of change. Like other 'true theories', it can explain any outcome in any kind of therapy because all people in therapy go through an ordeal. However, if the ordeal of therapy is the cause of change, why do some people change, whilst others remain the same? The answer perhaps lies in technique. All Haley's illustrations of ordeals for clients share the characteristics of the careful construction and execution described in the book's introduction.

However, Haley's explanations do not always go far enough. Devoting only three paragraphs to religious and political ordeals he misses the opportunity to make explicit the relationship between his theory of change and the ordeals of initiation or political oppression: the ordeal of Winston Smith in the Novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, for example, seems to fit Haley's model. Haley does advise caution: 'the ordeal is a procedure which can cause harm in the hands of the ignorant and irresponsible who rush off to make people suffer.' I share this caution with Erickson who stated 'when the double bind was used for personal advantage it had bad results. When the double bind was used for the other person's benefit, however, there can be lasting benefit.'

Although I do not subscribe to Haley's ordeal theory of change, this volume is a valuable source book of therapeutic bind situations. I also recommend it as an entertaining read.

Jay Haley, Ordeal Therapy: Unusual Ways to Change Behavior. San Francisco:
1984 Jossey-Bass 213 pp