For therapy to be successful I believe that it is essential that clients feel comfortable and safe with their therapist so that they can start an open and frank dialogue. Various research findings have indicated that the working alliance is as important as any other factor in successful therapeutic outcomes. This is not to say that feeling discomfort is not also part of the process, otherwise the therapist would not be doing their job in naming what needs to be named. John C. Norcross’s approach to integrative psychotherapy involves selecting models and methods from across orientations so that the client’s experience is best met and in context. He shows how meta-analyses demonstrates that tailoring therapy to the individual client enhances treatment effectiveness.
I sometimes wonder, however, whether integrative therapists debase some of the therapeutic approaches. When you look at various profiles on therapist directories, for instance, it is not uncommon to see practitioners describing themselves as analysts, gestaltists and CBT therapists. On closer inspection such profiles state that their psychotherapeutic training took place at generalist training institutes, usually integrative. Some profiles refer to offering ‘Jungian therapy’ as part of their counselling and psychotherapy private practice. In actual fact, what this means is that they had a few lectures on Jungian symbolism, at best. Their training was not in the Jungian approach, at depth, and they did not have analysis a few times weekly as part of their personal therapy (nor did they benefit from specific clinical supervision in the Jungian approach). The same is true of the Gestalt approach when integrative practitioners may have benefitted from a weekend of experiential work using some of the Gestalt tools and techniques in a very general way. However, they won’t have had any real thorough training in the Gestalt approach. As for CBT, it has been my experience that integrative training institutions are biased against the CBT approach and offer such a slimmed down version of it, as part of their core syllabus, that I wonder why they bother in the first place.
Of course, it is fine to say that as an integrative practitioner one can offer components of certain approaches as part of an overall psychotherapeutic offering, as a kind of generalist toolbox. Indeed, one can use continuing professional development (cpd) to expand one’s knowledge base in particular areas throughout one’s career. However, I find it disingenuous to talk about being an analyst in the absence of specific training in that approach.