A guide to the use of treatment approaches known as constructive therapies The leading teachers and practitioners in this powerful handbook represent a variety of schools of therapeutic treatments that all share an optimistic view of people as resourceful individuals who construct their own realities. Emphasizing a collaborative approach, the therapies focus on the strengths and resources of the clients and look to where people want to go rather than where they have been.Hoyt should be commended for bringing together in one volume diverse voices that bring alive the exciting possibilities that mark and define this new era of psychotherapy. ?Steven Freidman, author of Time-Effective Psychotherapy

It is a singular pleasure to welcome the first Handbook of Constructive Therapies into existence. A volume on the construction of meaning, its very existence is itself a vital entry into our contemporary dialogues. (Kenneth J. Gergen, from the Foreword) Call them competency-based, strength-oriented, solution-focused, poststructural, narrative, postmodern, social constructionist--the approaches exemplified in this book offer the reader fresh perspectives and novel ideas for working with people in a respectful and collaborative manner. Michael Hoyt should be commended for bringing together in one volume diverse voices that bring alive the exciting possibilities that mark and define this new era of psychotherapy. (Steven Friedman, author of Time-Effective Psychotherapy, coauthor of Expanding Therapeutic Possibilities, and editor of The New Language of Change and The Reflecting Team in Action)

MICHAEL F. HOYT is a senior staff psychologist at the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Hayward, California, and serves on the clinical faculty of the University of California School of Medicine, San Francisco. An expert clinician and an internationally respected teacher and lecturer, Hoyt is the author of Brief Therapy and Managed Care (Jossey--Bass, 1995), editor of Constructive Therapies, Volumes 1 & 2 (1994, 1996), and coeditor of The First Session in Brief Therapy (1992).