Vladimir Zelinka: Could you please talk about the role creativity plays in your therapy?

Jeff Zeig: I am creative in my therapy because I want my patients to be creatively empowered. If you are living creatively, then you are leading a fulfilling life with meaning.

Derald Wing Sue was born in Portland, Oregon and is Chinese American. He grew up in a predominantly white neighborhood and remembers being teased due to his ethnicity. Although the prejudice and discrimination negatively affected Sue, it prompted him to study multiculturalism and later, cross-cultural counseling.

How did he do it? How did he develop his artistry? How did his work unfold as seemingly simplistic? Or was it, really? What was behind the thinking of this great man? What directions would he take if he were with us today, a generation after his passing?

It is with immense pleasure that I present to you the engaging interview below, conducted by Dan Short with Jeffrey Zeig, founding director/president of the Erickson Foundation. The Foundation is celebrating 40 years since it was established in 1979, while Erickson was still actively…

In the summer of 1973, I had just finished my training in child and adolescent psychiatry at the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic and had started a private psychiatric practice. That fall, I took a weekly course in hypnosis, sponsored by a local psychiatric hospital. One day, the focus was on Milton Erickson.

Christine Padesky is a clinical psychologist and co-founder of the Center for Cognitive Therapy in Huntington Beach, California. Along with Kathleen Mooney, she is now developing “strength-based cognitive therapy.”

Lilian, we have known each other for some time, and you have been teaching the Intensives for many years. I browsed the Erickson website and discovered that the Intensives program has changed a lot.