ABSTRACT
Creative therapy brings numerous differences to the practice of psychotherapy. These especially include the following imperatives: begin at the end—emphasize creative action rather than diagnosis and interpretation; treat the room, not the client—change the context rather than the individuals within it; become outcome based in real time—change your action based on what happens during the therapeutic interaction rather than rely on post hoc speculation and evaluation; emphasize the unexpected—change requires a source of the new rather than recycling therapeutic clichés; take a cybernetic walkabout and ignore postmodern and narrative dictums to ban the cybernetic interaction within whole systems in favor of individualism and interpretation; be inspired by the pioneer iconoclast therapists Carl Whitaker and Milton Erickson and bring more unconscious involvement and less conscious interference; invite your therapeutic action to be aided by art, dream, and other aesthetic resources; and elevate experimentalism and improvisation over ideological fundamentalism and unchanging method.
