Therapist Jay Haley talks about disturbed power relationships in modern families.
Jay Haley is one of the nation’s leading family therapists —a quintessentially pragmatic man with a clear eye andsardonic wit who teaches his students how to make ailing families function again. Mostly, in his view, this involves straightening out mixed-up family hierarchies—like the "perverse triangles" that forms when, for instance, one parent becomes allied with a child against the other parent. (For an account of Haley’s methods of dealing with these harmful alliances, see the box on page 3).
As a therapist who has been working with families for nearly 30 years, the 59-year-old Haley is eminentlyqualified to talk about the problems of the American family today. To hear his views, I went to meet Haley in the small private house in Washington, DC, where he maintains his Family Therapy Institute. I expected a rather formidable figure. I found a tall, rangy man with a graying mustache, western in bearing (he was born in Wyoming), soft-spoken, and wearing sandals.
We covered a range of topics: divorce, remarriage, the economy’s effects on families, the case of John W.Hinckley Jr. and his family. But always the conversation seemed to come back to questions that Haley considerscentral: power and family hierarchies.
f a kid is acting up or crazy, we know that his parents must be divided, that the familyhierarchy is in confusion.
"If a kid is acting up or crazy, we know that his parents must be divided, that the family hierarchy is in confusion."
Maya Pines: When you work with families, you must have some kind of ideal family in mind,don’t you?
Jay Haley: No.
Pines: No? Well, what are you working toward, then?