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In Search of Solutions is a technique-based book that emphasizes a style of therapy that is brief, goal oriented, and not particularly concerned with the meaning of a patient's symptoms. O'Hanlon and Weiner-Davis believe that reframing the problem, focusing on the patient's strengths, and constructing a view of the future without the problem, all contribute to swift and enduring changes. The authors propose a theoretical and therapeutic model that does not utilize notions of transference, the unconscious (at least in the psychoanalytic sense), or the understanding that symptoms represent compromise formations or the repetition of historically meaningful lived experience. Consequently, In Search of Solutions is not a psychoanalytically oriented book, though in a sense it could be considered psychodynamic.
The authors begin, “This book offers a new way to think about and approach therapy. It is a method that focuses on people's competence rather than their deficits, their strengths rather than their weaknesses, their possibilities rather than their limitations” (p. 1). Other forms of therapy are portrayed as often inviting passivity and infantilization, whereas the