Jay Haley

Jay Douglas Haley (July 19, 1923 – February 13, 2007) was one of the founding figures of brief and family therapy in general and of the strategic model of psychotherapy, and he was one of the more accomplished teachers, clinical supervisors, and authors in these disciplines.

Haley was born at his family's homestead in Midwest, Wyoming. His family moved to Berkeley, California when he was four years old. After serving in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II, he attended UCLA where he received a BA in Theater Arts. During his undergraduate years, Haley published a short story in The New Yorker. After a year spent in pursuit of a career as a playwright, he returned to California and received a Bachelor of Library Science degree from University of California at Berkeley and then a master's degree in communication from Stanford University. Jay was married for the first time in 1950 and had three children, Kathleen, Gregory, and Andrew, with his wife Elizabeth.

While at Stanford, Haley met the anthropologist Gregory Bateson who invited him to join a communications research project that later became known as The Bateson Project, a collaboration that became one of the driving factors in the creation of family therapy and that published the single most important paper in the history of family therapy, "Towards a Theory of Schizophrenia." The central members of this project were Gregory Bateson, Donald deAvila Jackson, Jay Haley, John Weakland, and Bill Fry.

In addition to his personal involvement in the birth and evolution of family therapy, Jay was an observational researcher of psychotherapy in the 1950s and early 1960s. The Bateson Project arranged for Jay and John Weakland to observe and record clinicians including Milton Erickson, Joseph Wolpe, John Rosen, Don Jackson, Charles Fulweiler, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, and others.

In 1962, while working at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, Jay became the founding editor of the family therapy journal Family Process (assisted by his first wife, Elizabeth Haley, an experienced journalist). While at MRI, Jay continued the professional relationship with Milton Erickson that had been established in the earliest years of the Bateson Project. Jay helped to introduce Erickson to the clinical public with such important books as Uncommon Therapy. Haley also worked closely with Salvador Minuchin, who developed Structural Family Therapy.

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