K is for Keys – Skeleton Keys.

 

Steve de Shazer published Keys to Solution in Brief Therapy in 1985. For those of you who know it perhaps you might concur with me that it is a fascinating book written on the cusp, at a time when the shift from a problem focus to a solution focus has started but is in no way complete. For example chapter 2 is entitled ‘Complaints: Damn Bad Luck’ and includes sections on  ‘Complaints and how they get that way’, ‘A model of complaints’, ‘Reconstructing complaints into problems’ and so on. Indeed de Shazer draws out, literally, ‘The Building Blocks of Complaints’ (de Shazer, 1985, p 290. However alongside this problem focus we see the emergence of some very new, and very different and tremendously exciting thinking. Chapter 4  ‘A Cooperating Model of Therapy’, chapter 5 ‘The Crystal Ball Technique’, chapter 8 ‘Skeleton Keys’ and chapter 9 ‘Change is not only possible but inevitable’ all seem to be breaking new ground but for our purposes we are concentrating on chapters 8 and 9

de Shazer writes “most of the writing on brief therapy, systemic therapy, and strategic therapy has focused on tailor-made interventions designed for idiosyncratic situations. However, this chapter . . .  describes interventions that have been found useful with a wide variety of difficult situations . . . Our formula tasks (each of which are standardised) suggest something about the nature of therapeutic intervention and change which has not been clearly described before: Interventions can initiate change without the therapist's first understanding, in any detail, what has been going on.”
This idea, that we can initiate change whilst knowing little, if anything, about the nature of the problem, is surely radical. Later on the same page de Shazer adds “the interventions, therefore, need only prompt the initiation of some new behaviour patterns. The exact nature of the trouble does not seem important to effectively generating solutions, because the intervention needs only to fit. Just a skeleton key is called for, not the one-and-only key designed to specifically match this specific lock” (1985, p 119).

This concept of a Skeleton Key is nicely manifested in the following chapter when de Shazer highlights the development of the BFTC’s so-called ‘First Session Formula Task’, framed as follows “between now and next time we meet, we would like you to observe, so that you can describe to us next time, what happens in your family/life/marriage/relationship that you want to continue to have happen” (de Shazer, 1985, p 137). The intervention was initially developed for a specific case “a family that appeared rather hopeless and described their situation in very vague terms” (ibid, p 138), however noting the family’s response in the following session when they reported worthwhile things that had been observed  some of which were ‘new behaviours’, in other words the family was reporting change, the team began to use the task more widely. Indeed when the team set up a study, subsequently reported by Michele Weiner-Davis (1987), the team invariably “used the formula first session task except when there were clear reasons against it” (ibid, p 148).

The concept of Skeleton Keys was a vital early part underlying the development of the Solution Focused approach. Of course the approach developed further but it was here that the idea that the problem developing process and the solution developing process were not necessarily connected begins to emerge. This idea comes to fruition in the BRIEF team’s work when the ‘best hopes’ question (George, 1999) emerges by which time it is clearly understood that there is no need even to know what the client believes the problem to be for therapeutic change to be effected. However the beginning of this journey lies in the concept of Skeleton Keys.

George, E., Iveson, C. and Ratner, H. (1990; Revised and expanded Edition 1999) Problem to Solution: Brief Therapy with Individuals and Families. London: BT Press   

de Shazer, Steve (1985) Keys to Solution in Brief Therapy. New York: Norton.

Weiner-Davis, M., de Shazer, S., Gingerich, W. (1987) Constructing the therapeutic solution by building on pretreatment change: an exploratory study.  Journal of Marital and Family Therapy. 13 (4): 359 – 363

 

Evan George
London
12^th January 2025