Therapeutic Conversations 1: A Twentieth Anniversary Reflection—introduction to the Special Section

Abstract

I admit it. I was star struck! I was working in an adolescent mental health center in Calgary, Alberta, in the fall of 1990. We were preparing to sponsor Bill O’Hanlon the next spring. His schedule said he was to be in Tulsa, Oklahoma in June of 1991, along with Steve de Shazer, David Epston, Stephen Gilligan, Karl Tomm, John Weakland, Michele Weiner-Davis, and Michael White, at a conference entitled “Generating Possibilities Through Therapeutic Conversations.” I decided, then and there, I had to get to Tulsa, come hell or high water, June 27 to 30, 1991. The conference proceedings (Gilligan & Price, 1993) were published soon after. As a young therapist in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was swept along in a period of transition in the brief and systemic therapies. Previously, practitioners largely viewed themselves as outside of the client system, intervening by sizing up system dynamics and assigning a therapeutic task. However, in the years surrounding TC 1, new voices (Andersen, 1995; Anderson & Goolishian, 1992; Cechin, 1992; Fleuridas, Nelson, & Rosenthal, 1986; Lipchik & de Shazer, 1986; O’Hanlon & Weiner-Davis, 1989; Penn, 1982, 1985; Tomm, 1987a, 1987b, 1988; White & Epston, 1990) proposed a different way of thinking about therapy. This new sensibility sees therapy as a collaborative conversation meant to construct new realities and preferred client futures. The conversation is the intervention. In this context, Bill O’Hanlon and others organized the inaugural Therapeutic Conversations (TC 1) conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in June 1991. Bill recalled: