The term “integrative” as it is used in integrative psychotherapy has a number of meanings.
Primarily it refers to the process of integrating the personality, which includes helping clients to become aware of and assimilate the contents of their fragmented and fixated ego states into an integrated ego, to develop a sense of self that decreases the need for defense mechanisms and a life script, and to re engage the world and relationships 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.
“Integrative” also refers to the integration of theory-the bringing together of affective, cognitive, behavioral, physiological, and systems approaches to psychotherapy.
Integrative psychotherapy takes into account many views of human functioning: psychodynamic, client-centered, behaviorist, family therapy, Gestalt therapy, Reichian-influenced body psychotherapy, object relations theories, psychoanalytic self psychology and transactional analysis. Each provides a valid explanation of psychological function and behavior, and each is enhanced when selectively integrated with the others.
A major premise of integrative psychotherapy is that the need for relationship constitutes a primary motivating experience of human behavior, and contact is the means by which the need is met.
Intehrative psychotherapy emphasizes the importance of contact in using the range of modalities just mentioned.
Contact also refers to the quality of the relational transactions between two people: the awareness of both one’s self and the other, a sensitive meeting of the other, and an authentic acknowledgment of one’s self.
Integrative psychotherapy correlates constructs from many different theoretical schools.
For a theory to be integrative, as opposed to merely eclectic, it must also separate out those concepts and ideas that are not theoretically consistent to form a cohesive core of constructs that inform and guide the psychotherapeutic process.
Integrative psychotherapy makes use of many perspectives on human functioning, but always from the point of view that the client-therapist relationship is crucial.
The client’s sense of self and sense of relatedness that develop seem crucial to the process of integration and wholeness, particularly when there have been specific, ego-fragmenting traumas in the client’s life and when aspects of the self have been disavowed or denied because of the cumulative failures of contact-in-relationship.
The central premise underlying the practice of integrative psychotherapy is that integration can occur through a variety of modalities-affective, behavioral, cognitive, and physiologicalbut most effectively when there exists a respectful, contactful interpersonal therapeutic relationship.
