Abstract
Single-school approaches dominated the practice of psychotherapy in the 1960s and 1970s. The majority of therapists identified with a particular school of thought (e.g., psychoanalytic, behavioral, or humanistic), tended to see their model as representing truth, and many engaged in vigorous—sometimes vitriolic—debates with practitioners from other perspectives. The 1980s saw the rise of eclecticism, which is the unsystematic blending of ideas and techniques from the various schools of thought. Eclecticism is noteworthy because it reflected an attitudinal shift from single-school approaches to more openness to looking at complementary aspects of treatment from different angles. In the 1990s and 2000s, psychotherapy integration became a genuine movement.
[P]sychotherapists behave like members of competing tribes, with different esoteric languages and rituals. Unification assumes that we all work in the same realm with the same processes regardless of the subsystem or specific domain we emphasize and specialize in. A unified model encourages us all to be aware of the larger picture and even if domain-specific treatment is undertaken, an understanding of the system and interconnections of domains and processes keep us alert to other possibilities for further developments.
Magnavita (2008a, p. 273)
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Henriques, G. (2011). Toward a Unified Psychotherapy. In: A New Unified Theory of Psychology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-0058-5_8
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