Obituary
Steve de
Shazer: 1940 – 2005
This
obituary by Brian Cade is to be published in the British
Family Therapy
newsletter CONTEXT, the EBTA have the permission of the
editors to also publish it here.
We are grateful for this.
Steve de
Shazer, brief therapist and one of the primary developers
of the solution-focused approach, has died. Having been
struggling for some time with health problems, he was taken
ill whilst on a flight over Europe and taken directly to a
hospital in Vienna where he died on Sunday 11 September.
I first met Steve and his wife Insoo Kim Berg over quarter
of a century ago. He was tall and gangly and was dressed
like a lumberjack. I was immediately impressed with how
badly he lectured (then) and how interesting his thinking
was. We became friends. We shared in common the experience
of being profoundly influenced by Jay Haley’s early
seminal book, Strategies
of Psychotherapy (1963), and a
fascination with the work of Milton H. Erickson. Steve
recently wrote,
After
Strategies
– which
made so much sense to me – everything else was
(poorly written) nonsense until I found Advanced
Techniques of Hypnosis and Therapy which is a
selection of Milton H. Erickson’s papers. It is not
going too far to say that these two books changed my life
and shaped my future. (de Shazer, 1999)
The other great influence on Steve was the mentorship of,
and his subsequent long and close friendship with, John
Weakland of the Brief Therapy Center, Palo Alto. It was
John who put him in touch with Insoo and so must take, to
some extent, either the credit or blame for some of what
followed. In 1978 the two of them moved to Milwaukee to set
up what they called “the MRI of the Midwest”
where with a group of like-minded colleagues they developed
the ways of thinking and the practices that became known as
the solution-focused approach. This approach was based on
the assumption of pre-existing abilities, on client
strengths and resources, and on the certainty that there
have invariably already been exceptions to the behaviours,
ideas, feelings and interactions associated with problems.
Therapy would be focused on an amplification of these
exceptions and on helping clients, through techniques such
as the miracle question and scaling questions to build a
detailed picture of how their futures could be different.
It was not seen as necessary to explore problems or their
origins unless the client particularly wished to do so.
Steve was the author of many chapters and articles and of
five books, each demonstrating a stage in the development
of the thinking behind and the practicing of the approach.
A sixth book, More Than
Miracles, will be
published posthumously.
Steve had been a professional jazz saxophone player and his
interest in the spaces between the notes as much as the
notes themselves seemed to be very much reflected in his
minimalist approach to therapy. He also loved the character
of Sherlock Holmes and shared Holmes’s determination
never to draw a conclusion ahead of the facts. He described
hypothesising as “a disease” which gave
therapists the illusion of knowing something. He loved
philosophy and cooking - at which he excelled - and taking
long walks.
When I think of the many, many hours I spent with Steve we
rarely talked about therapy. We talked mostly about
literature or listened to music (classical or jazz) and
drunk beer, another of his passions. He was prepared to
walk miles to sample a particular beer and once walked me
practically to a standstill around the many pubs of
Heidelberg, each having its own special brand. He also
brewed his own.
The world of therapy has lost a clear and original thinker,
a creative iconoclast, and many of us have lost a valued
friend. He was not always the easiest of people to get on
with. He could be very opinionated, was somewhat eccentric
and did not suffer fools easily. He seemed much more at
home in Europe than in America and, in fact, spent a lot of
his time here. He once told me, “American audiences
don’t seem to like me: they don’t understand my
sense of humour”. He was much more caring than his
sometimes gruff and abrupt exterior suggested. I found him,
as I know others did, to be a very good friend.
The last conversation I had with Steve was by telephone
some months ago. We were bemoaning the fact that so many
teenage girls were coming to see us and subsequently
referring their friends to us, and that we had discovered a
facility for engaging and talking with these young women -
“forty five years too late”.
Brian Cade
Private Practice
Sydney, Australia
Haley, J. (1963) Strategies
of Psychotherapy. New York:
Grune & Stratton.
Haley, J. (1967) Advanced
Techniques of Hypnosis and Therapy: Selected Papers of
Milton H. Erickson. New York:
Grune & Stratton.
De Shazer, S. (1999) Beginnings.
BFTC Website (www.brief-therapy.org)