Provocative Therapy: A Review of a Provocative Therapy Workshop Given by Frank Farrelly at Oxford, England

A Review of a Provocative Therapy Workshop Given by Frank Farrelly at Oxford, England

Not long ago Richard Bandler called Frank Farrelly "the wildest clinician I have ever seen." Was Farrelly going to be too wild for England? The fear that he might be put the brake on Philip Booth's eagerness to invite him over for a workshop. However, he has now been here and England survived.

Philip's caution was not unreasonable, though, because Farrelly could be misunderstood, on the one hand, as aggressively ripping into the client or, on the other hand, as providing entertainment at their expense. This is not what the client experiences, but I've hear of people seeing videotapes of him in action and simply being appalled. I've heard audiences at the beginning of his workshops express a wide range of concerns (which tend to dissolve as the workshop progresses). However, I've not seen anyone who actually took the seat beside him feel they were in any way abused. The perspectives of videotape, audience, and client are very different. Even sitting up close in an audience people will cringe (as they laugh) when he makes fearfully negative comments about the client. Then at the end of the mini-session when he asks for their reaction to him the client will frequently say that Frank had put into words just what they thought about themselves.

The client sits down encased within the citadel of their concern, be it built of bones, glittering marble facades, granite slabs or straw. Then Frank Farrelly rolls in like a high speed movie of a feisty demolition crew in action. Cognitive constructs crumble.

He suggests absurd advantages to continuing with the problem behaviour, blames the client (if the client puts the blame for the problem outside themselves) or blames life or the system (if the client is blaming him/herself), and offers idiotic solutions which are either patently unworkable or would be worse than the original problem. Whatever the client says he wings back a provocative response exaggerating the problem, or denies either that it is a problem or that the client can do anything about it anyway, or he redefines the problem or the client in ways they don't want to hear.

If we act in response to representations in our heads then it is no surprise that clients will act differently after Frank has locked in a dramatic set of vivid full-colour holographic representations. This is the "cortical implant". The client's mind is batted about between lurid images like a ping-pong ball. Frank doesn't pay a lot of attention to what the client WANTS but goes for what the client NEEDS. He goes straight for the psychological jugular. The client can start talking about a problem which Frank seems to totally ignore as he pumps out questions and provocations which send the client spinning (you could see their cognitive world suddenly lurch and dump them into a trance state).

You can't talk about a Provocative Therapy workshop without saying that, despite (or because of) the fact that he was dealing with real personal issues, it was great fun and often riotously entertaining. It's the psychotherapeutic equivalent of rock ‘n roll. As Carl Rogers said, "Boy, you don't let people get set; you keep them off balance."

Frank came across as a man ready to test his chops with anyone. He's created Provocative therapy and run it through a huge range of diagnostic categories, across different social classes, ages and nationalities and continues to believe that anyone who has a brain can be helped. This is not vapid optimism, he's tangled with the toughest. Yet he retains a very positive and life-affirming stance: "Yes, there's pain and suffering but the ultimate truths do not lie in anger and pain. Life is also the theatre of the ridiculous and the absurd. Laughter has more truth than tears and depression."

The workings of Provocative Therapy cannot be understood without recognizing that at the core of Frank's approach is his care for the client and his commitment to their best interests. Carl Rogers clearly understood this and supported the development of Provocative Therapy. He commented to Frank, "People are like dogs; they know whether you like them." So while the words may sound like a blistering attack, the parallel communications of voice tone and that twinkle in the eye convey caring and build a deep rapport.

Some participants were surprised to find him less savage than they'd expected from reading his book. Of course, the print is shaved down to one mode of communication and cannot adequately convey the non-verbal support and warmth, but it may also be that he reined himself in first time around in a new country. Whatever the case, he does have a wider range than may at first be apparent. As he says, "I can be a teddy bear or I can chew ass like a sabre-toothed tiger."
The case for Provocative Therapy is well-put in the book of that name, so the emphasis of the workshop was on seeing it in action. Frank began with an impressionistic ramble in the associative landscape through which, what he calls, his "butterfly mind" flits. He delights in characterizing himself as an old codger with "brain slippage" who needs to get the synapses firing in the morning. Actually, he admits that his mind has always worked like that. Yet when he demonstrates a provocative interview you get to see that butterfly mind home in like Muhammed Ali.
Over the two days Frank did nine sessions with individual participants, each lasting 25 minutes and followed by discussion. There was also a "micro-teaching" where we looked at the video of one of the sessions and he enlarged on what he was responding to and why. This gave us plenty of opportunity to see his approach in action.

Provocative Therapy is sophisticated simplicity. Perhaps its central principle is that people need to take responsibility for the choices they make. They are always making choices (whether they recognize it or not, whether they like it or not, and whether they want to or not). The psycho-social reality is that those choices have consequences which they then have to live with. Having worked extensively with criminals, the insane, and the criminally insane, Frank doesn't hold the view that they are not responsible for their actions. Yes, we might be sympathetic to them and we might come up with convincing etiologies for their behavior but, nonetheless, they are having to live with the consequences --one consequence being that they are in prisons or mental homes.

The workshop ended with a rapid scan through Frank's ideas on psychotherapy in the 21st century. For some participants this may have been more provocative than the provocative interviews themselves. He quoted Freud as having said that if he had his life to live over again he would devote it to the study of psychic abilities for that is where the truth is about the human person. Frank feels that an integration of psychic studies and psychology is inevitable. Whilst he recognizes that there is as much rubbish in the field of psychic studies as in any other field his own experiments have convinced him that this is the wave of the future. The long history of denial will have to end. As more and more people blow the whistle on the inadequacies of the current paradigm, many rock-solid truths will crumble. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that "rock-solid truths" don't cut much ice with Frank Farrelly after the years he's spent vapourizing the rock-solid and limiting subjective truths of his clients.