Integrative Psychotherapy

As an Integrative Psychotherapist, the term 'integration' refers to the process of integrating the personality: helping the client to assimilate and harmonize the contents of his or her ego states, relax the defense mechanisms, relinquish the life script, and reengage the world with full contact. It is the process of making whole: taking disowned, unaware, unresolved aspects of the ego and making them part of a cohesive self. Through integration, it becomes possible for people to have the courage to face each moment openly and freshly, without the protection of a preformed opinion, position, attitude, or expectation.

"Integrative" also refers to the integration of theory, the bringing together of affective, cognitive, behavioral, physiological, and systems approaches to psychotherapy. The concepts are utilized within a perspective of human development in which each phase of life presents heightened developmental tasks, need sensitivities, crises, and opportunities for new learnings. Integrative psychotherapy takes into account many views of human functioning: psychodynamic, client centered, behaviorist, family therapy, Gestalt therapy, object relations theories, psychoanalytic Self psychology and Transactional Analysis. Each provides a valid explanation of behavior, and each is enhanced when selectively integrated with the others. The psychotherapeutic interventions are based on research-validated knowledge of normal developmental process and the theories describing the self-protective defensive processes used when there are interruptions in normal development.

From Institute of Integrative Psychotherapy; Republished in Erksine, Richard G. (1997); Theories and Methods of an Integrative Transactional Analysis Press, San Francisco, CA.