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Louisa, a 6 year old girl - depressed and confused
Louisa, a six year old girl, was referred to me for art therapy by her General Practitioner. She presented with emotional-behavioural problems and was depressed. She did not allow her mother to leave the art therapy room, and spent much of her time, cuddled by her mother, as an infant-in-arms would be. She did not want to talk to me and the only adult she would talk to was her mother. I encouraged her to draw, to paint and to make up stories. She would use the art materials fairly confidently though was extremely reticent to talk about what was troubling her. Her parents had recently split up but were pretending to be 'happy families' every weekend. Her parents' relationship was confusing and Louisa was as unclear as they were, as to their confirmed separation, or not......

After 3 sessions, Louisa began to trust the art therapy process a bit more and would happily sit and paint, and draw out the pain......Meanwhile her mother began to dominate the silence with non-stop chatting about her life, and her family. It was hard for her to allow her daughter the space to express herself verbally. As a reaction against this, Louisa had begun intensely irritating her mother by talking at home in "Donald Duck Speak". These were husky vocalisations (that I could not understand) and that her mother had taught her.

One session, as her mother began to tell me about her week, Louisa started talking in the most irritating and nonsensical 'Duck language' which got louder and louder. It was certainly irritating me! I had a therapeutic choice - to work classically with the transference and counter-transference, and to invite Louisa to express some of this anger in her image-making, or to use a provocative therapy approach. I chose the latter. Becoming all headmistressy, I insisted that Louisa was not allowed to talk any more English for the rest of the session and that she was only permitted to talk 'duck language.' Louisa continued to talk 'duck' until she was gasping for breath. Her mother told me how this has been 'driving her nuts' for weeks, and it had to stop, and she didn't know how to make her stop this nonsense talk.....
After 20 minutes non-stop 'duck' Louisa wanted to stop, and I said she wasn't allowed to. She carried on for another 5 minutes, yapping away as she painted. She asked to stop again and this time, being about 8 minutes before the end of the session, I said she could return to English.
Louisa spent the last 8 minutes of the session talking to me in beautiful English, talking about her feelings of anger and irritation with her mother.

The following session, Louisa's mother reported a remarkable improvement during the week, and a complete cessation of 'duck talk' at home. In this provocative therapy intervention the client is not asked to stop the unsocial behaviour but conversely is asked to do it more and more strongly, leading to it's cessation.

Hephzibah Kaplan
Art Therapist

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