Integrative Psychotherapy

“The common factors approach seeks to determine the core ingredients that different therapies share, with the eventual goal of creating more parsimonious and efficacious treatments based on their commonalities. This search is predicated on the belief that commonalities are more important in accounting for therapy outcome than the unique factors that differentiate among them”.

John Norcross

Integrative therapy is an approach to therapy that combines ideas and techniques from different therapeutic schools of thought depending on the unique needs of a given client. Integrative Psychotherapy considers many views of human functioning. Psychodynamic, client-centred, behaviourist, cognitive, family therapy, Gestalt therapy, body-psychotherapies, object relations theories, psychoanalytic self-psychology, and transactional analysis approaches are all considered within a dynamic systems perspective. Each provides a partial explanation of behaviour, and each is enhanced when selectively integrated with other aspects of the therapist’s approach. The aim of an integrative psychotherapy is to facilitate wholeness such that the quality of the person’s being and functioning in the intrapsychic, interpersonal and sociopolitical space is maximized with due regard for everyone’s own personal limits and external constraints.