The world-renowned Brief Therapy Center was founded in 1966 by Dr. Richard Fisch.

One of it's initial members, John Weakland, Ch.E. remembers how it started: "Dick was doing therapy in his office and Paul (Watzlawick) was also excited about the possibility of getting together in a more formal way to do what we were doing anyway: talking about our difficult cases and seeing if we could look at them in a different way. We were concerned at the time that the 'new' Family Therapy was developing into long-term way of helping people and we were saying to each other that we were going to end up doing the same thing as the psychoanalysts were. We actually did not want to make therapy longer; we wanted to get things done". This is probably where the name of 'brief therapy' came from: the world saw this approach as short-term, brief, more so than what it really is, which is a different way of solving problem. Nowadays a description that better fits it is: problem solving brief therapy.

In 1974, members of the Center published their first major work introducing such a rationale, Change, Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution, Watzlawick, Weakland, Fisch. This was followed by a companion work in 1982, The Tactics of Change - Doing Therapy Briefly, Fisch, Weakland, Segal. More recently, in 1999 the Center published Brief Therapy with Intimidating Cases by Richard Fisch and Karin Schlanger

Thousands of professionals in the behavioral sciences in almost every area of the globe have been participants in our workshops, training programs and formal presentations. Through these programs as well as its publications, MRI has achieved unique national and international prestige.

Never satisfied with past accomplishments, The Center is hoping to continue its work adapting its systematic and brief approach to schizophrenia and problem drinking, as well as non-clinical problems, in particular, the application of systems-oriented problem-solving strategies to business organizations. Another area of interest that has been developed in the last 14 years is the application of the problem-solving brief therapy to the Spanish-speaking community, through the Latino Brief Therapy and Training Center.