Jay Haley

After serving in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II, he attended UCLA where he received a BA in Theater Arts.

While at Stanford, Haley met the anthropologist Gregory Bateson who invited him to join a communications research project that later became known as The Bateson Project, a collaboration that became one of the driving factors in the creation of family therapy and that published the single most important paper in the history of family therapy,[5] "Towards a Theory of Schizophrenia.

"[6] The central members of this project were Gregory Bateson, Donald deAvila Jackson, Jay Haley, John Weakland, and Bill Fry.

In addition to his personal involvement in the birth and evolution of family therapy, Haley was an observational researcher of psychotherapy in the 1950s and early 1960s.

While at MRI, Jay continued the professional relationship with Milton Erickson that had been established in the earliest years of the Bateson Project.

After leaving the Family Therapy Institute in the 1990s, Haley moved to the San Diego area and, in collaboration with his third wife Madeleine Richeport-Haley, produced a number of films relating to both anthropology and psychotherapy.