Being A Creative Therapist with Bradford Keeney, Ph.D.

Clinical work is rarely referred to or examined as an art form. Therapy often focuses on problems, solutions, or interpretative narratives. Yet, therapists are often called to be creative, intuitive, healing and artistic. How can we tap into our creativity and personal ability to offer healing and truly help our clients? How can we hone the natural/primal skills we have in an effort to push past theory and reach our full potential?

In this Institute Dr. Keeney will work from a radical re-contextualization of therapy as a performing art of creative transformation. The art of clinical work is discussed in terms of successfully passing through a beginning, middle, and end, so that each session is well formed and resolved. This unique version of single-session whole therapy reframes clinical work as an opportunity to bring forth uncommon experiences that provide transformative rather than stuck ways of being in the everyday.

This course will draw upon an extensive background in the therapeutic arts including systemic family therapy, brief therapy, social cybernetics, the performing arts, postmodern play, and Dr. Keeney’s two-decade long tutelage with diverse cultural healing traditions. This experience will help liberate clinicians from over-reliance upon schooled approaches to therapy and to help them become more creatively responsive to the unique characteristics of each session.

Participants will learn to:

* gain proficient observation of the resources clients and therapists bring to a session.
* understand the means of detailing and describing the therapeutic movement of a session in terms of a progression of communication frames.
* develop skills in utilizing presenting communications in a way that is transformative.
* demonstrative, creative ways of inventing unique therapeutic strategies.

Course Schedule

Thursday, March 3, 2011 – Sunday, March 6, 2011
8:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. each day

This course provides 20 hours of continuing education.

Bradford Keeney, Ph.D. is a professor and Hanna Spyker Eminent Scholars Chair in Education at University of Louisiana, Monroe; Director, Institute for Creative Transformation & Virtual Pedagogy; Clinical Supervisor, Center for Children and Families, Monroe; and Honorary Senior Research Fellow, Rock Art Research Institute, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Dr. Keeney has worked at several psychotherapy institutes including the Ackerman Institute, the Karl Menninger Center, and the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a licensed family therapist and licensed supervisor in Louisiana; a Clinical Member, Approved Supervisor, and Fellow of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy.

 

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