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August 31, 2012

不良研究所 professors publish new book deemed "one of the best"

Faculty in 不良研究所's Marriage and Family Therapy Program published a book deemed "one of the best psychotherapy books of recent years," according to author and psychotherapist Dr. Stephen Gilligan.

Dr. Hillary Keeney, adjunct faculty in 不良研究所's Marriage and Family Therapy program, and Dr. Bradford Keeney, professor and Hanna Spyker Eminent Scholars Chair in Education, released a new book, 鈥淐ircular Therapeutics: Giving Therapy a Healing Heart."

The book was published by Zeig, Tucker, and Theisen, Inc. and demonstrates significant scholarship on the cybernetics of therapeutic change and explores the processes that lie at the heart of creative transformation. 

Dr. Klaus Krippenorff, Endowed Chair and Professor of Cybernetics, Language and Culture at the University of Pennsylvania, calls it "an amazing book that exceeds the promises in Gregory Bateson's writing."

Bateson is one of the founders of cybernetics, systems, and communication theory.

The foreword is written by Paul Trachtman, a former science editor of Smithsonian Magazine, who writes, "Hillary and Bradford Keeney have impeccable scholarship and aim to take on the next to impossible though absolutely critical job of demonstrating how clients and therapists are stuck in the same existential dilemma - an attachment to the idea that explanation and narrative direct living, and that suffering is appeased once we discover the best story line or grandest understanding.  With the ideas of cybernetics, Zen Buddhism, and what they call circular therapeutics, they join the great wisdom traditions in insisting that insight is the greatest obstacle to change." 

The Keeneys' book continues to receive outstanding critical reviews.

Dr. Pedro Avalos, Director of Clinical Psychology at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, said, "It is destined to be a classic that every therapist must read!"

Dr. Stephen Lankton, Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, said it is a "fantastic book capable transforming the entire thinking and practice of therapy."

For more information and to purchase the book, visit

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