What really makes therapy work? Clinicians invest prodigious amounts of time and energy trying to find out--comparing notes with colleagues, poring over journals, attending workshops, reflecting on their own recent sessions. But how often do therapists go to the source—their own clients—for wisdom on this vital question?

Evolving out of the coaching practices Roz Zander developed with clients and with Ben Zander over the past 15 years, The Art of Possibility is written as a kind of dialogue between the performing arts and the therapy profession that seeks to meld the creative power of the first and the healing insights of the latter.

I notice that many of my couples clients do well in therapy, only to return with the same or similar problems in a few months. What can I do to make the effects of treatment last?

The agency transferred him to work with me as an AIDS educator, seemingly unconcerned that we were now simultaneously therapist and client, supervisor and volunteer and, increasingly, work partners. Nothing in my prior training or experience had prepared me for this tangle of relationships.

The culture of therapy in America has gone through periods of dramatic change every 15 or 20 years with almost clock-like regularity, as succeeding generations of therapists respond to the evolving Zeitgeist while stamping their own imprint on prevailing social mores.

When Carl Whitaker died at age 83 on April 21st of this year after a long illness, it might be said that the therapy world lost its oldest, wisest and most compassionate juvenile delinquent.

Australian narrative therapist Michael White captured the imagination of the therapy world by introducing the method of “externalization,” a way of personifying and concretizing clients’ everyday struggles, giving them a larger-than-life, often heroic dimension.

Murray Bowen had always been something of a loner, never in the mainstream of pragmatic, problem-oriented family therapy practitioners. Since the earliest days of his career, he had considered family therapy a by-product of the vast new theory of human behavior that he believed it was his real mission to develop. Toward the end of his life, he had denounced family therapy for its intellectual vacuity, and dismissed it as an "evolutionary misadventure" doomed to extinction.

Being larger than life was something Virginia Satir knew about from her earliest days. She grew up bigger and smarter and more keenly aware than any of the kids her age in the Wisconsin farm community where she was raised. By the time she was three, she'd learned to read. By the time she was 11, she'd reached her adult height of nearly six feet.

At the Family Therapy Institute of Washington, DC they don't believe self-knowledge fires the engine of change and insist instead that therapy is really just a process of persuasion. Here, therapy is about metaphor and boldly sweeping clients along in unexpected directions. In fact, a visitor might wonder what on earth the institute's clients tell their friends about the things they're asked to do in the name of "therapy."