Answer

Strategic therapy aims on one hand to eliminate symptoms or dysfunctional behaviors for which the patient came into therapy, and on another hand, to change the way through which the patient builds his own personal and interpersonal reality. To be more precise, the objectives are to produce changes in the way the patient perceives his reality and not only change his/her behavioral reactions- to shift his/her point of view from its primordial, rigid, and dysfunctional perception to a more flexible perspective with more possibilities of choice. As a consequence, strategic therapy represents a radical and long lived intervention, and is not a purely symptom-focused therapy. For these reasons, when the problems brought into therapy are solved, there is no development of substitute symptoms, as shown in the one year follow-up sessions conducted on more than 3,000 treated cases.