Solution-Focused Brief Therapy

Solution-focused brief therapy (SFBT) is a postmodern constructivist approach to psychotherapy closely associated in its origins with the early development of family therapy. Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg, the two most significant figures in the approach, met in the mid-1970s at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, California, where their mentor John Weakland and his colleagues, the Palo Alto Group, were founding their problem resolution brief therapy. Leaving Palo Alto in 1978, de Shazer and Berg set up the Brief Family Therapy Center (BFTC) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where, with a group of talented collaborators, they developed an approach that was to prove both challenging and increasingly influential. Currently, the influence of the solution-focused approach is found beyond psychotherapy in the fields of ...