Circular Therapeutics: Giving Therapy a Healing Heart
Hillary and Brad Keeney have written an amazing book! It exceeds the promises in Gregory Bateson s writing. When therapists discovered cybernetics, many started using its vocabulary without living up to its promises not the Keeneys. Circular Therapeutics transcends that disconnect and offers compelling accounts of what cybernetics can do when actually embodied in practices of living, not merely talked about. It opposes following therapeutic theories and advocates instead surrendering one s preconceptions to an involvement in the kind of virtuous circularities that can bring forth learning, healing, and improvisation not just for clients but, in the evenhanded spirit of cybernetics, for therapists as well. Circular Therapeutics boldly challenges the therapeutic profession with the wisdom of an interactive poetics that evokes creative involvement. I recommend it to anyone who is open to constructive ideas, whether they are therapists willing to overcome their entrapment in the theories of traditional schools, ordinary folks ready to engage in healing communications within their communities, and even cyberneticians as it teaches everyone a lesson in its offering of a circular way of being in communication with one another. --Klaus Krippendorff, Ph.D. Gregory Bateson Professor for Cybernetics, Language, and Culture, The Annenberg School for Communication University of PennsylvaniaCircular Therapeutics invites us into a dance of helping, healing, learning and knowing. While focusing on helping relationships, Hillary and Brad Keeney offer us profound insights into the very systemic ideas that are at the heart of being human. As such, it is a book that should be read by therapists, cyberneticians, and systems thinkers, but also dancers and poets. And it is a book where we, as readers, become engaged with the wisdom of improvisational performance. It is a sheer delight that inspires positive movement in many senses; movement in our thought, movement in our bodies; with ourselves; and with others in a joint improvisation. --Frederick Steier, Ph.D. Professor of Communication, University of South Florida, and Former President, American Society for CyberneticsCircular Therapeutics is a straightforward and masterful account of a profound way of healing. It should be required reading, not just for psychotherapists, but for anyone interested in understanding and changing themselves and others. --Stephen Tyler, Ph.D., Hubert S. Autrey Professor of Anthropology, Rice University; a founder of postmodern anthropology