ABSTRACT
The following session was conducted in front of an audience during a ten-day seminar in Budapest, Hungary in 2014, sponsored by Dr. Dezsoe Birkas, Director of the Budapest Institute for Systemic Brief Therapy. Each day we conducted several live demonstration interviews with clients who brought a wide range of presenting issues, including behavioral problems, presumed psychiatric disorders, marital and relationship crises, family conflict, grief, and physical illness. The purpose of the seminar was to demonstrate how more creative choices of action arise when practitioners break free from the limitations of any form of habituated therapy protocol, diagnostic classification scheme, and advocated theoretical orientation and instead become organized by building a vaster, more resourceful existential “room” or “frame” for the client’s life. We have previously described this approach as improvisational therapy (Keeney, 1991), creative therapy (Keeney, 2009), and circular therapeutics (H. Keeney & B. Keeney, 2012). Regardless of the name used, our orientation remains focused on a non-psychological approach that regards each session’s structure as a three-act play that improvisationally unfolds from an entrenched beginning, to a transformational middle, and finally to an expanded ending where more possibilities and greater creative energy are found.
