Brief Strategic Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy

Strategic logic is based on the construct “knowing a problem by its solutions” (Nardone, 1993); in other words, knowing a reality through the strategies that can change it.

Without any claim to a priori knowledge of the phenomena at hand, the strategic therapist needs to have some “reducer of complexity” available that will allow him to start working on the reality that needs to be modified and gradually reveal its functioning.

Based on the studies of the Palo Alto school, and on twenty years of research in the clinical context, such a “reducer of complexity” has been found in the construct of attempted solutions.

When a problem emerges within a certain context (in our case, single patient, couple, or family) there is a tendency to rely on past experience and reapply interventions that have been successful in solving similar problems in the past.

If these strategies do not work, rather than applying alternative solutions there is a tendency to apply the initial strategy more vigorously, based on the illusion that doing “more than before” will be more effective.

Such attempts to reiterate the same ineffective solution eventually give rise to a complex process of retroactions in which the efforts to achieve change actually keep the problematic situation unchanged.

From this point of view, we might say that the “attempted solutions” themselves become the problem (Watzlawick, Weakland, and Fisch, 1974).

From the standpoint of change, it is not important to know how a problem was formed in the past, but what maintains it in the present. In order to change a situation, we must stop its persistence since we have no power over a formation process that occurred in the past.

What we have is a “circular causality” between how a problem persists and the ways people try and fail to solve the problem.

Therefore, if we wish to make a change, it is important to concentrate on the dysfunctional solutions that are being attempted.

If we block or change the recursive dysfunctional solutions, we interrupt the vicious circle that nourishes the persistence of the problem, opening the way to real, alternative change. At that point, change becomes inevitable: the breaking of this equilibrium necessarily leads to the establishment of a new one, based on new perceptions of reality.