Frank Farrelly
He was born the ninth of twelve brothers and sisters,
and says that his parents and siblings were an important influence on his
development as a therapist. "I was
raised in a never-ending encounter group in the country - you were faced with
instantaneous feedback whether you were ready for it or not!"
Another great influence on him was the four years he spent in a monastery, "until", he says, "I flunked obedience..." A priest - Father Jerome Hayden - was his first "kinda guru", according to Frank. "He was a psycho-analyst, a physician, a theologian, and a PhD in philosophy - he collected degrees like some people collect bric-a-brac." Another influence was the world famous therapist Carl Rogers, with whom he worked.
In the late 1950's, Frank Farrelly was in clinical training as a social worker, and it is during this time that the roots of Provocative Therapy (PT) began to form. Later, he spent some seventeen years working in a mental hospital, and soon began deliberately seeking to work with "the kind of patients that turn off staff." It was in that setting that Frank first developed PT, though later he began using the same approach in his private practice as well.
In March 1978, Temple University Psychiatric Department held a conference, 'Analysing the Analyst'. Frank gave a number of demonstrations of his work at that conference, and his work was modeled by Richard Bandler and John Grinder, as part of the work they were doing developing the approach to psychotherapy now called NLP (Neurolinguistic Programming). Richard Bandler later described him as "The wildest clinician I have ever seen!"
Many of the ways of working developed by Frank Farrelly have been seen as wildly unconventional - it is the results rather than any claim to inherent respectability which has caused PT's increasing fame. Virginia Satir, a world authority on, and developer of Family Therapy once said to Frank, "I hear you are an ogre."
Wearily, he told her, "Virginia, I did not crawl out from under a rock when I was born. I was not suckled by werewolves and I do not eat babies for breakfast."
She burst out laughing and said, "I didn't think you did, or you could never get the kind of results that I hear repeatedly you consistently get."