The Topsy-Turvy World Of Frank Farrelly’s Provocative Therapy
By Dr Graham Dawes
Richard Bandler, not the world’s most conventional or conservative psychotherapist, described Frank Farrelly as “the wildest clinician I have ever seen.” One thing is for sure, a Frank Farrelly therapy session is unlike any other therapy session. At least, on the surface. Deep down it deals with the same issues as all therapy: Helplessness, Hopelessness, Worthlessness and all the ways people can get themselves into trouble. But on the surface it looks and sounds like a vaudeville theatre of the mind.
The shibboleths of psychotherapy shatter. Farrelly’s mouth opens (often before he’s even given the client a chance to explain the problem) and what comes out is everything you’ve been told never to say to a client. He even encourages the client in their craziness, throwing out all sorts of advantages their crazy behavior will bring to the client (albeit the advantages are crazier than the client’s behavior), providing the client with a wealth of justifications for their behavior (albeit the justifications are more spurious than any the client has come up with), exhorting them to continue with the behaviors they say they want to stop (albeit cheerfully confirming that the consequences of continuing will be those the client is most anxious to avoid).
The client’s mind is bouncing around, a ping-pong ball between mirrors, among the lurid images painted by Farrelly’s words. As often as not, the client will start backing away from their symptom as if it were a vampire. A flight into health. Backwards. Away from all the problem behaviors, thoughts and feelings which had, just moments ago, seemed so imperious -and so impossible to get away from. This is the Frank Farrelly “cortical implant.” The images he conjures up are so vivid they impress themselves on the client’s mind and are difficult to forget. Whenever the client thinks of, or engages in, the symptom behaviors those images tend to jump into their mind. Because his images stay in the mind their effects last a lot longer than the therapeutic interview
Beginnings
Frank Farrelly was born into an Irish-American family as number nine of what were to be twelve children. He often refers to the influence of his upbringing and has been known to question the generalizability of some psychological theories on the grounds that “the person who came up with that must have been an only child.” Further evidence for the importance of his family background is a collection of autobiographical sketches, ‘Frannies Welt: Ein Kindheit In Missouri’, many of the stories from which have been told in workshops to illustrate how he learnt this or that point of human psychology.
However, the therapeutic field was not Farrelly’s first choice of vocation. He originally intended to be a priest. Workshop participants are often surprised to hear this. They are less surprised to learn that his leaving the seminary was because he “flunked obedience.” A job behind the counter of a department store followed. There he got into trouble for selling people what fitted their needs and their pocket, rather than pushing them toward the higher-priced items. Destined neither for Church nor Commerce -here was a social worker.
During his social work training, fellow students introduced him to the work of Carl Rogers. This was a revelation and had a dramatic effect on how he conducted his therapy interviews. After training, he went to work at Mendota State Hospital in Madison, Wisconsin, where he could join Rogers and a team of colleagues, including Charles Truax and Eugene Gendlin, who were engaged in a large-scale research project with chronic schizophrenics. Being part of such a project was an intense involvement. The focus was not on the therapy alone but also in reflecting on and theorizing about the therapy he was engaged in. This format could be considered a recipe for learning and development. Indeed, it could have been the pressure-cooker context of this research project that led Farrelly to his invention/discovery of Provocative Therapy.
The occasion was the 91st interview with an hospitalized chronic schizophrenic. In all previous interviews Farrelly concentrated on an attempt to haul this client back from a dark and doom-laden vision of his future and to connect him to the standard therapeutic vision: one in which he was to see himself as a person of worth and potential, someone encompassing an untold myriad of possibilities for mental health and happiness. In effect, the client’s response was: No Sale! On this occasion, in frustration at their lack of progress, Farrelly flipped the therapeutic polarities. Instead of balancing the client’s pessimism he sided with the client’s hopeless prognosis, agreeing with his predictions of doom and gloom. As a result the client was stimulated to create the balance himself. Within minutes, in the face of Farrelly’s weighing in on the side of despond, the client was protesting that he was not as bad as all that. Right then and there, in the face of his therapist’s gloomy prophecy, the client started coming alive, becoming more responsive and attempting to argue him out of the certainty of those uncomfortable predictions. Now, instead of Farrelly arguing on the side of mental health and potential, it was the client who was taking this role. And in making his argument the client was obliged to produce behavioral evidence to justify his case. In effect, the client argued himself back into mental health and, in short order, into a discharge back out into society again.
We will examine the theoretical sense Farrelly made of this surprising experience when we look at the frames and processes involved in Provocative Therapy. While this was the seminal interview in its development, its import was supported by previous experiences and subsequently developed through future sessions with other clients. Because his discovery was important to him personally, as well as seeming to offer different directions in which to pursue therapy, Farrelly determined to put it to the most stringent tests. He made it a point of honor to use Provocative Therapy with an extremely wide range of clients. In Mendota were housed many of the diagnostic categories considered most difficult to help, and Farrelly made himself available as the therapist of last resort, willingly taking on the intractable cases of his colleagues. He also used the approach with the normally neurotic, and across a wide range of ages and educational backgrounds.
Farrelly has often spoken appreciatively of the encouragement he received from his colleagues, and the value of being able to discuss his evolving ideas with them. Especially valued by him was the encouragement of the man he considers his mentor, Carl Rogers. Farrelly played audiotapes of early Provocative Therapy sessions to Rogers and while the verbal style was distinctly different from Rogers’ own he was able to recognize, behind the banter, the same deep level of caring and commitment to the client’s well-being that is considered the hallmark of Client-Centered Therapy. Although, superficially, the two therapies seem worlds apart, Rogers recognized the value of Farrelly’s work. Indeed, he was generous enough to say to a colleague that, “If I were a young man entering the field of psychotherapy today I would be progressing along the lines that Frank Farrelly is doing therapy.”
However, all Farrelly’s relations with his professional colleagues have not been characterized by such mutual respect. As the developer of a unique therapeutic approach he might be expected to be present at the prestigious gatherings of those grand old men and women of the field who have, likewise, made substantial contributions to psychotherapy. This has not been the case. In consequence, Farrelly’s work is less widely known than it might be. Proponents of Provocative Therapy have wondered to what extent some of the other therapists might feel threatened by a man who, in expressing his ideas with sometimes abrasive directness and feisty and infectious humour, can galvanize an audience; thus making him a rather tough act to follow. Perhaps, also, they find the same difficulty in encompassing Provocative Therapy within their understanding of the therapeutic, as is often the case for Farrelly’s workshop participants.
For most people, exposure to Provocative Therapy is through books or through Farrelly’s own workshops given throughout Europe and Australia as well as in his own country. The primary text is Farrelly and Jeff Brandsma’s ‘Provocative Therapy’ (first published in 1 974; German publication in 1 986). This has been followed by two German studies of Farrelly’s work: J Orgen Wippich and lngrid Derra-Wippich’s ‘Lachen Lernen’ (first published in 1989; revised edition in 1996) and Eleonore Hofner and Hans-Ulrich Schachtner’s ‘Das -re doch gelacht!’ (published 1995). These sources are highly recommended, especially for anyone unable to attend a workshop, as they give examples of interactions taken from therapy sessions. These bring the subject alive and, while the attempt here is to convey something of this approach through different means, there is no substitute (even given the caveats to be expressed below) for transcripts or workshops to capture the living word as it flies.
A Farrelly Workshop/Seminar
Typically in a two-or three-day event Farrelly will begin with an introduction to the context of his discovery and development of Provocative Therapy. This allows everyone to settle in, including Farrelly who characterizes himself as an “old fart” with “mental slippage” who needs time to get his mind in gear (though he admits that he had the same non-linear thought patterns when younger). Most of the time will be taken with Farrelly’s therapeutic interviews with members of the audience or clients brought in from outside. Each interview is timed to either twenty or twenty-five minutes followed by reactions from the client and discussion with the audience. Sometimes there will be ‘micro-teaching’, where one of the interviews is re-run on video while Farrelly comments on the thinking behind his interventions. Sometimes there will be a couple or family or a group therapy. In longer workshops and trainings, participants do exercises which allow them to explore the Provocative Therapy behavioral repertoire.
Audience Reaction
Across many Farrelly workshops a similar pattern of audience reactions is apparent. Initial reactions are surprise and shock to hear Farrelly say the kinds of things most therapists thought should never be said to clients. For this reason, there can also be a sense of outrage -that anyone should speak to a client in that way. This is exacerbated by Farrelly playing up the role of ‘good ’01 boy’, the American macho redneck. The mix of emotions in the audience is complicated by the fact that the person having the reaction of outrage may well be laughing at the same time.
The first impression is that Farrelly is crashing through all the conventions of psychotherapy, and the fall of so many false idols can be too much for many people. However, in the &brief; of the therapeutic interviews and the more general discussions between, they come to recognize that not only does Farrelly care for the clients but that the clients are usually very well aware of this. They tend to be far less offended than some members of the audience will be on their behalf. As bits and pieces of Farrelly’s psychotherapeutic background and the extent of his experience emerges (a breadth of experience few psychotherapists can match) then even those uncomfortable with his approach have to recognize that it has been forged at the very heart of the psychotherapy tradition. It is neither some naive left-field invention, nor one that only works with the milder cases (YAVIS clients -Young, Attractive, Verbal, Intelligent, Successful). As this realization sinks in there tends to be a degree of allowance for Provocative Therapy as an approach, even among those who feel it is not for them.
It is noticeable that one’s experience of the therapeutic interactions differs considerably depending on how close one is to the action. This is a more important variable than when observing other forms of therapy. For instance, many people react badly to seeing a video, in which the nature of the medium enforces distance. Watching from the back of the workshop group is also quite different from being closer to the interaction between Farrelly and the client. The closest possible experience is actually to be a client in one of the workshop sessions. The closer people get the more they are able to pick up the deep rapport Farrelly has with a client. This simply cannot be ‘felt’ in the same way from a distance. To say there is rapport, though, is not to say that clients always like what he says to them. Frequently, though, they recognize that while they might not like to hear what they are hearing, what Farrelly is saying is what they need to hear.
He reports that one workshop participant (a practicing psychic) claimed to have ‘seen’ a huge blue aura shoot out from him and enfold both him and the client as they began working. In whatever way one might represent this deep rapport it is essential that its presence and its importance is recognized. Without it the provocative interaction could be too challenging for many clients. From a different perspective, without the therapeutic intent on which it is founded, the provocative interaction could be seen as entertainment at the expense of the client, Farrelly’s purpose is not simply to lampoon the client but to bring them to laugh at their own problematic behavior. He often quotes Martin Luther’s dictum, ‘The Devil cannot withstand ridicule and laughter’. Laugh at him and Satan shrivels. For Farrelly, the same principle applies to our own internal devils, our limiting patterns of thought and behavior. We usually take them so seriously. Laughing at them loosens their grip on us. When we have seen their essential ridiculousness their power over us is reduced.
A paradox is that the kinds of concerns I have mentioned arise in the minds of a professional audience in part precisely because they find the interactions so humorous, and they are part of an audience. Most often therapy is conducted in private, where some of these concerns would not arise. This is ironic in that Farrelly’s willingness to demonstrate his therapeutic approach is driven by a strong value orientation. He says that during his own psychotherapeutic education he never once saw his professors do therapy. (And he points out that nobody ever saw Freud doing therapy, either.) Farrelly wants to ensure that those who study with him do not have to base their evaluation of his approach on theory and hearsay alone.
Getting To Grips With Provocative Therapy
Some would say that Farrelly has reversed the tendency of his own professors and that, while those who attend his workshops get plenty of demonstrations of his approach in practice, what they lack is his theory. This is a commonly held view. Admittedly, he does not engage in long lecture- style presentations in his workshops, nor does he foreground theory (and perhaps does not appreciate quite how different, conceptually, Provocative Therapy is). Nonetheless there seems to be something more to these reactions than that. After all, Farrelly is not a primitive running on intuition without an idea in his head. In earlier years he was very much courant with the contemporary psychological theory and for many years was a clinical professor in the School of Social Work and an assistant clinical professor in the Department of Psychiatry of the University of Wisconsin. In his standard text, ‘Provocative Therapy’ (co-authored with Jeff Brandsma), he has a whole chapter called and concerned with ‘Assumptions and Hypotheses’. Since even those who have read this book, and seen many workshops, still feel they lack an adequate theoretical understanding of his work we might wonder whether the term ‘theory’ is being used for whatever they feel is missing in their understanding, whether or not that something is actually theory.
The problem is that with Provocative Therapy, people are faced with an approach quite at variance, in significant ways, from that of other psychotherapies. Not only that, but the style of therapeutic behavior also bears little relation to what they are familiar with. It is, therefore, doubly difficult for them to get a conceptual grip on the approach sufficient to encourage them to adopt it for themselves. Provocative Therapy appears distant from their image of conventional psychotherapy, and this is why, no matter how many times they read or hear its theoretical constructs, many therapists still find it difficult to get their heads around it, or to know where they would begin in incorporating it. It is this with which they struggle, and through being unable to articulate, come to feel theory is what they are missing.
This issue may be approached by recognizing that any psychotherapy (as also any model of personal development or any spiritual discipline, come to that) has two facets: Frames and Processes. The processes are the things one does, and the frames, in effect, answer the question of why one does those things. The frames, which can range from grand theoretical constructs to modest rules of thumb, provide the scaffolding of meaning (or conceptual framework) within which the psychotherapy is conducted. Psychotherapeutic frames tell us how this therapy proposes we understand people what makes them tick, and how they can change -and, thereby, provides justification for utilizing the processes of that psychotherapy.
Whilst the therapeutic frames of various psychotherapies differ from one another they do so while retaining larger frames of understanding. Within these larger frames, they share various orientations toward helping people.
These include such concepts as working with the client toward their healthy and life-enhancing goals and, if challenging the client, doing so from a position of alignment with positive and healthy ways to think and behave.
Provocative Therapy punches through this consensus by appearing to side with the negative aspects of the client. That is to say, siding with those aspects of which the client wishes to rid themselves. It is this stance that has gained Farrelly the appellation of ‘devil’s advocate’. His orientation is a huge wrench in the mental gears of most psychotherapists. It suggests they set out in the diametrically opposite direction from that of almost all other therapies.
We have seen that Farrelly’s work presents those who would explore it with a challenge on many levels. As a result, there is the tendency to take, what should be recognized as, an intellectually-bankrupt road and declare that only Frank Farrelly can do Provocative Therapy. This is a nonsense. And it is given the lie by those individuals who do use it, as part or the whole of their therapeutic approach, and can be found in many different countries. As with any therapeutic approach, those who use it will not use it exactly as its developer does .(only Farrelly will do it Farrelly’s way); each individual will have made it their own. But they will all be doing Provocative Therapy.
There are a number of resources available to those who want to explore Provocative Therapy. Below we will briefly sketch some of the frames and processes which can be drawn from the body of writings on Provocative Therapy. As has been said, Farrelly himself continues to give workshops and these are to be highly recommended. They are a salutary experience for anyone interested in the field of personal change. Whether or not those who attend will choose to take up Provocative Therapy seriously is secondary to their being exposed to something radically different in that field. They may continue with their familiar methods but, to the extent they remember the example Farrelly has given, they will feel freer in their role and able to bring more of themselves to their work.
Some Frames And Processes Of Provocative Therapy
Within the limits of this introduction it is not possible to detail all the frames and processes which contribute to Provocative Therapy. A good many of them can be stated, but there is not space to elaborate or illustrate them here. They are drawn from various texts, and from various people’s attempts to capture what it is that Farrelly does in his therapy. There is no definitive list.
But before we turn to other frames and processes there is a precursor which needs to be addressed. Although his humor is the most noticeable thing about Farrelly’s therapy, it is so obvious that it is usually assumed. Here, I would like to make its necessity explicit.
Humor, The point was made earlier that many therapists find Farrelly’s approach difficult to incorporate into their own ways of working. Contributing to this, as we saw, is a reversal of the theoretical orientation of most of psychotherapy (as seen in supporting the negative). Two other factors are:
(1) the inability to step outside the fairly rigid norms of what is considered ‘appropriate’ behavior for a psychotherapist; and
(2) an inability to access, at will, the kind of internal (emotional) state that is conducive to humor (from a mildly teasing manner right through to a rip-roaring, guffawing, thigh slapping, belly-laughing, falling-off-your-chair form of humor). This is an issue because, as Farrelly says, quoting the old saying, ‘Anyone can pretend to be serious. But nobody can pretend to be witty’.
As regards the second of these factors, a therapist is all too likely to have the same relation to this necessary state of humor that their clients have to their own emotional lives. That is, emotions are just something that happen to us. This is a general cultural assumption, and it applies to humor even more than to other emotions.
The cultural belief is that we feel however we feel because something happened (or didn’t happen that should have). Our feelings, in other words, are an ‘environmental variable’. They are not under our control, but are merely our ‘natural’ and inevitable reaction to what happens to us. In that vein, the cultural consensus is that some people are funny and others aren’t. And that’s just how it is.
A less extreme version of the cultural consensus about humor is that most people can be humorous, given the right circumstances. Perhaps when they are with friends, feeling relaxed, maybe after a few drinks, or whatever. Once again, though, the presupposition is that the ability to be humorous comes out of the surrounding circumstances, whether those be the good feeling between friends, intake of alcohol, or something else. Obviously, the context of Provocative Therapy is quite different. Here is a situation where we can expect that one of the two people begins by feeling anything but humorous. The client is in the therapist’s office precisely because they are plagued with feelings they do not want to have yet feel unable to avoid. The onus, therefore, if there is to be an atmosphere of humor, is on the provocative therapist to be the one to generate it. This means they have to be able to kick off the session in a humorous mood, and maintain that mood throughout, perhaps with little or no encouragement from the client.
This, then, is a prerequisite for Provocative Therapy. Different therapists will have different ways of putting themselves into the necessary state of humor. It is quite clear, when observing Frank Farrelly, that although he is ready to jump into humor at almost any time, nonetheless, he goes into a special state for when he is going to do therapy. Part of that ‘special state’ involves a feeling of humor, part of it involves the kinds of qualities Carl Rogers advocated for the therapist, along with other elements unique to him. The point is that how a therapist prepares for a session will be an individual matter but that, in relation to doing Provocative Therapy, one element must be an ability to get oneself into a state of humor, a lightness, a bouncy quality, which allows the mind of the therapist to bounce around in an associative and humorous way and, therefore, encourages movement in the mind and emotions of the client.
A humorous frame of mind is essential to doing Provocative Therapy, and is so fundamental it seemed important to single it out. Taking that as a necessary precursor, let us now turn to other frames which are important to doing Provocative Therapy:
Frames
As was mentioned earlier, the term ‘frames’ refers to those conceptual and theoretical formulations which create the framework within which the therapy takes place. A frame, as it were, creates the context. It sets the boundary that situates all that goes on within the therapy. As such, frames can be thought of as the operating assumptions on which the therapy is based; that is, the set of ideas, premises, beliefs, etc., about therapy and about people that the therapist brings to bear during the therapeutic session.
Rogerian Qualities. The name of Carl Rogers has become synonymous with a caring approach to therapy. To a degree, the manner of the Client-centered Therapist has become something of a cliché within the therapeutic field. Although Farrelly strongly emphasizes respect and caring for the client it is not a marshmallow mushy caring that he demonstrates. Often it might better be characterized by the term ‘tough love’ which he uses in the interview that follows. However, it was not only empathy, warmth and caring which Rogers advocated. There was also congruence and genuineness. And the kind of radical congruence with which Farrelly was to operate would frequently not appear like the stereotypical ‘caring’ mode. It was supportive, but in an indirect way; “faster than the eye can see” he would have the clients protesting his characterization of them and their situation and, in doing so, calling on their strengths. Caring is not served by being soft on the client, by colluding with their avoidance of uncomfortable truths; on the contrary, it may mean being confrontive and bringing up things they don’t want to hear. Nonetheless, even confrontation must be done in such a way that the quality of caring is conveyed to the client and this means, primarily, that it is conveyed non-verbally. In fact, as we shall see when looking at the kinds of therapist behaviors involved in Provocative Therapy, the therapist’s caring is rarely made explicit. And it is precisely because it is not the part of the communication which is most explicit that it is so important that it be present, and that it be conveyed to the client.
Questioning Client Fragility.Two of Farrelly’s early papers, written with Arnold Ludwig (see references), illustrate that he was not long into his career as a psychotherapist before he was questioning the orthodoxy. Much of the literature implies that clients are fragile. This is particularly so when the client is either acting out, or considered to be borderline or suicidal. The impression is of the therapist tiptoeing around on eggshells. The client is characterized as if made of cut-crystal glass, teetering on a table edge, so that any ill-considered thing the therapist might say or do will tip the glass over the edge -to splash into psychotic shards on the floor below.
This conception of the fragility of the client is very unnerving to the therapist. A large degree of their behavioral freedom is lost in one fell swoop. The upshot is that there is much more behavioral flexibility available to the client than to the therapist. Viewed in terms of systems theory, this would suggest that it is the client who is more likely to control the interaction. It is hard to see how this is to the client’s benefit, overall. In other words, the premise of client fragility could be counted one of the more ‘disempowering’ assumptions for a therapist.
Not only that, but Farrelly’s experience certainly did not support the assumption. His experiences in Mendota, with the most difficult and diagnostically extreme cases taught him that clients were anything but fragile. They were tougher than most therapists. They had their families tearing their hair out over them and their therapists at their wits end. The recognition that clients are far from as fragile as they have been made out to be, or even might claim to be, is a necessary operating assumption for the provocative therapist. Consequently, those early papers remain significant to Provocative Therapy today.
Ten Assumptions. The Farrelly/Brandsma book has a chapter entitled ‘Assumptions and Hypotheses’ which lists ten assumptions and two hypotheses which frame the practice of Provocative Therapy. In the book, each assumption is explained and elaborated on, often with examples. Here they will simply be listed. Many are self explanatory, as will be seen:
1. People change and grow in response to a challenge.
2. Clients can change if they choose.
3. Clients have far more potential for achieving adaptive, productive, and socialized modes of living than they or most clinicians assume.
4. The psychological fragility of patients is vastly overrated both by themselves and others.
5. The client’s maladaptive, unproductive, antisocial attitudes and behaviors can be drastically altered whatever the degree of severity or chronicity.
6. Adult or current experiences are at least if not more significant than childhood or previous experiences in shaping client values, operational attitudes, and behaviors.
7. The client’s behavior with the therapist is a relatively accurate reflection of his habitual patterns of social and interpersonal relationship.
8. People make sense; the human animal is exquisitely logical and understandable.
9. The expression of therapeutic hate and joyful sadism toward clients can markedly benefit the client.
10. The more important messages between people are non-verbal.
It should be noted that in the following interview, Farrelly regrets the way the penultimate assumption (9) is expressed as it could give rise to misunderstanding. He was struggling to express a concept that was later encapsulated under the name of ‘tough love’. What the assumption is intended to convey becomes more explicit in the following two hypotheses. That is to say, the aim is to have the client react against the therapist’s negative definition of them and their behaviours, abilities, prospects, etc., and to make their own choice for the route of positive self definition and self-determination.
Two Hypotheses. The two hypotheses are:
(1 ) If provoked by the therapist (humorously, perceptively, and within the client’s own internal frame of reference), the client will tend to move in the opposite direction from the therapist’s definition of the client as a person;
(2) If urged provocatively (humorously and perceptively) by the therapist to continue [their] self defeating, deviant behaviors, the client will tend to engage in self-and other-enhancing behaviors which more closely approximate the societal norm.
The link between these two hypotheses and the behaviors of the provocative therapist will be readily apparent when we come to the section on the processes of Provocative Therapy. But it should be noted that what they suggest is a quite different approach from much of psychotherapy.
The Five Goals. The same (primary) text identifies the five goals of Provocative Therapy. The processes, to be mentioned below, are designed to provoke affective and perceptual experience within the client which will lead them to:
1. Affirm their self-worth, both verbally and behaviorally.
2. Assert themselves appropriately both in task performance and relationships.
3. Defend themselves realistically and authentically against the excessively negative assessments others make of them.
4. Engage in psychosocial reality testing and learning the necessary discriminations to respond adaptively: Global perceptions lead to global reactions; differentiated perceptions lead to adaptive reactions.
5. Engage in risk-taking behaviors in personal relationships, especially communicating affection and vulnerability to significant others.
Another section of the book characterizes the four stages through which the typical provocative therapy client passes. These provide a framing which makes sense for the therapist of the different client reactions to be expected during the course of therapy and indicate the trajectory of therapeutic progress.
The Map Behind. An area of particular interest to this author concerns the ideas Farrelly has about the progress of a human life and where and how in that life people might get themselves into trouble. This is ‘the map behind’ what he does. It informs his actions in as much as it is his ‘map’ for where to check for life difficulties, on the one hand, and on the other, to judge an appropriate life course at different ages. These are different from the previously mentioned frames, though, in that they are not essential to the use of R-evocative Therapy. One will be doing Provocative Therapy when operating from the frames previously mentioned and the processes we will be examining shortly. And it is possible to do that without sharing, or even knowing of, the way Farrelly himself conceptualizes the human life span.
Nonetheless, in observing him work it seems there is more behind his choice of therapeutic strategy than is captured in the already explicated frames and processes. To take the most noticeable instance, when first sitting down with a client Farrelly will frequently ask the client’s age, profession, whether they have any children, current relationships, etc. This, it became clear, was in order to situate the client in terms of the likely kinds of issues which a person of that age, sex, etc., would be dealing with, regardless of whether or not such issues were what they had decided to work on. In the extreme case, Farrelly would sometimes totally ignore the issue the client said they wanted to work on in order to probe how they were dealing with the issues of their sex, age and situation. Delineating Farrelly’s map of the human life span is a lengthy, and ongoing, project. Suffice it to say, here, that it is a developmental map, having much in common with the work of Daniel Levinson, Roger Gould and Gail Sheehy, though it was developed independently and through clinical experience. The work of those authors came as confirmation more than anything else. It has a very different quality in Farrelly’s rendering, though, because he characterizes the issues and pitfalls of particular stages of life much more dramatically, drawing rich and vivid illustrations from his clients’, his own and his family’s lives.
Male-Female Tribal Wisdom. A further set of frames which inform Farrelly’s work, yet are also not essential to someone else applying Provocative Therapy, is his collection of ‘Male-Female Tribal Wisdom’. This is an ever- growing set of epigrammatic statements gleaned from therapy clients when they were speaking ‘off the record’. These are not the sort of things men and women tend to say to one another. They are not very respectful. They might be characterized as the uncensored stereotypes between the sexes; unsaid but, in being unsaid, nonetheless affecting the way many men and women think of one another and, therefore, having an underlying influence on how they relate to one another. The Social World.While neither the Male-Female Tribal Wisdom nor The Map Behind are essential to Provocative Therapy, what is essential is a recognition that the client is socially situated. They live in a world of other people. They affect other people and other people affect them. And they have to live with the consequences of both poles of that influence. Having had extensive experience of working with couples, families, and therapy groups, Farrelly has a deep understanding of social psychology and brings the social world into the therapy room, even when doing individual therapy. No client is an island. An intra-personal approach, alone, is not enough. Thus many of his questions will concern how other people feel about or respond to a client’s behavior.
Processes
As mentioned earlier, the term ‘processes’ refers to the behavioral concomitants of the aforementioned frames. In other words, within the conceptual framework provided by the frames we now turn to the operations through which the clients are engaged. Obviously, frames and processes cannot be completely separated. The therapeutic context itself sets a frame which tends to suggest meanings for behaviors which are engaged within it. For instance, there is likely to be the assumption, on the part of the client, that whatever behaviors they are asked to engage in, even as minor as being asked to answer a question, are intended to have some benefit to them (or at least to contribute, in however small a way, to a beneficial outcome). It is important to recognize that because, as humans, we are meaning-making beings any and every behavior can have some meaning attributed to it. In that sense, processes do not stand apart from frames. However, conceptually it can be useful to distinguish between them. It is also important to remember that all therapeutic modalities are comprised of frames and processes; that is to say, in therapy you are either establishing meanings or doing something (in relation to those meanings) which is designed to create new meaning. In this sense, the creation of new meaning on the part of the client is synonymous with change.
Keeping in mind the frames Provocative Therapy offers to the therapist, we will now turn to the processes, the behaviors through which the frames are brought to life and their conceptual and theoretical understandings are brought to bear on the client’s ways of thinking and behaving, more specifically those which are not serving the client’s own interests.
The Four Languages. The Farrelly/Brandsma book indicates four languages used by the provocative therapist. These languages are:
(i) religious-moral language
(ii) locker room language
(iii) professional jargon
(iv) body language
While body language is always present in any face-to-face communication, the other languages are normally used in different contexts, frequently refer to different areas of life, and when referring to the same area do so from very different perspectives. However, in Provocative Therapy all these languages may be mixed into the same intervention (even into one sentence). They may wildly contradict one another, and will always shift the perspective on the topic of conversation.
Thirtv Farrelly Factors. Observing Farrelly at work over many years, a Dutch colleague, Jaap Hollander, has distilled a list of thirty (annotated) ‘Farrelly Factors’ related to doing Provocative Therapy. These cover the following:
Ongoing behaviors: such as ‘Speak in a joking, teasing tone of voice’ and ‘Focus your attention completely on the client’
Conditional behaviors: such as ‘If the client shows low emotional involvement, then vary your own behavior until you elicit a strong nonverbal reaction’ and ‘React in a dissociated, distracted manner to statements the client emphasizes or presents with emotion’. The list of provocative tools is divided into: those for general use: such as ‘Interrupt the client’s story (and train of thought) with unexpected, “snappy” lines’ and ‘Ineptly deny or regret ludicrously any progress the client reports’; those for reacting to problem-statements: such as ‘Encourage problematic behaviors, thoughts and moods by describing absurd advantages (or absurd disadvantages of changing them) or overemphasizing the client’s capability to cope’ and ‘Give absurd explanations’; those for reacting to self-concept statements: such as ‘Exaggerate perceived negative self-concept’ and ‘Exaggerate cultural stereotypes’. Under the heading of the therapist’s internal processes are such factors as: ‘Maintain warm, understanding feeling state towards the client’ and ‘Imagine wise persons standing behind you consulting with you about the client. Listen to what they say’. As regards strategic patterns, the list includes: ‘Teasingly blame the client (if the client blames system); bombastically blame the system (if the client blames him/herself). Change this around if the client changes, always staying in the opposite position’ and ‘Act crazier than the client’.
This brief review of some of its frames and processes hopefully makes clear that Provocative Therapy is not an impenetrable mystery. While it may be located at an unexpected angle, that cuts across the assumptions of many other psychotherapies, it can be learnt.
Conclusion
Perhaps the last of the ‘Farrelly factors’ (‘Act crazier than the client’) best characterizes the enormous amount of ‘permission’ or freedom Provocative Therapy gives to the therapist. Rather than the straight-jacket of what is assumed to be an appropriate therapeutic demeanor, Farrelly would always advocate that the therapist feel free to be weirder and wilder than the client. The therapy session can be high drama in a carnival key, shot through with surrealism. And this detracts not one whit from recognition of the profound pain with which a client may be living nor the aim of releasing them from that burden.
Provocative therapy is not a flip or superficial denial of what is serious, of the difficulties life throws at us, or of the way we can suffer wrenchingly from the tangled knots of our psyche. Buddha emphasized that life is suffering. Farrelly emphasizes that life is humorously absurd. As he suggests, the tragic mask alone is not an adequate representation of life; there is also the comic mask. . We live through tears and laughter. And all too often, while honoring the tears, the field of psychotherapy insufficiently honors the laughter.
References
Farrelly, F. Male -Female Tribal Wisdom (workshop handout). Undated.
Farrelly, F. Frannies Welt: Eine Kindheit in Missouri. Quell Verlag: Stuttgart, 1 997. ISBN 3-79 18-2540-2.
Farrelly, F. and Brandsrna, J. Provocative Therapy. Cupertino, Calif.: Meta, 1 974. [Deutsche Ubersetzung von E.Petzold und G.Shneider-Gramann. Springer-Verlag: Berlin, 1 986. ISBN 3-540-1 6666-1]
Farrelly, F. and Lynch, M. Humor in Provocative Therapy. In W.F. Fry and W.A. Salameh (Eds.), Handbook of Humor and Psychotherapy (pp.81-106). Professional Resource Exchange: Sarasota, Florida, 1987. ISBN 0-9431 58-1 9- 2.
Farrelly, F. and Matthews, S. Provocative Therapy. In R.J. Corsini (Ed.), Handbook of Innovative Psychotherapies (pp.678-693). New York: Wiley, 1 98 1. ISBN 0-47 1 -06229-4.
Hollander, J. Thirty Farrelly Factors (workshop handout). Nijmegan, The Netherlands: IEP (Instituut voor Eclectische Psycholgie). Latest edition, 1996.
Ludwig, A.M. and Farrelly, F. The code of chronicity. Archives of General Psychiatry, 1 966, 1 5, 562-568.
Ludwig, A.M. and Farrelly, F. The weapons of insanity. American Journal of Psychotherapy, l967, 21 (4), 737-749.
Rogers, C.R. Client-Centered Therapy. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1951.
Hofner, E. Die Kunst der Ehe zerruttung. Reinbek: Rowohlt-Verlag, 1993.
Now in paperback ISBN 3-499-60484-1. [Provocative Therapy applied to couple relationships.]
Hofner, E. and Schachtner, H-U. Das ware doch gelacht!: Humor und Provokation in der Therapie. Reinbek: Rowohlt-Verlag, 1995 .ISBN 3-499- 6023 1 -8.
Wippich, J. and Derra-Wippich, I. Lachen Lemen: Einfuhrung in die Provokative Therapie Frank Farrellys. Junferrnann Verlag: Paderborn, 1996. ISBN 3- 87387-1 96-6.
[N.B. Headings in lowercase and other underlined words should be rendered in italics.]
(c)Graham Dawes, 1998 [Approx. 7000 words]