The Integrative Attitude - A Personal Journey
The Integrative Attitude - A Personal Journey
The Integrative Attitude - A Personal Journey
JOHN NUTTALL
Abstract
The origins of clinical psychotherapy date from the beginning of last century and the
development of broadly four foundational schools – psychoanalytic, cognitive-
behavioural, humanistic and transpersonal psychologies. The imperative to integrate
these schools, however, is relatively recent and in the last 25 years a professional
integration movement has developed, exemplified by the formation of SEPI and the
UKAPI, and ‘integrative psychotherapist’ is now the most popular nomenclature used
in the profession. This article gives a brief history of the integration movement, reviews
some issues raised by developments so far, and discusses the personal dilemma that
integration evokes in the would-be integrative practitioner. Using my own journey I
espouse an integrative attitude that is based on the nature of integration as an evolving
personal process rather than an ideal, fixed, profession-wide position. I describe three
interweaving modalities of integration I call constructive, complicit and contiguous
integration, which form a developmental framework that aims to encourage the
individual activity of questioning, inventing, researching and interrogating the
discipline within its philosophical, professional and social context. In concluding,
this article exhorts the profession to see integration as a personal journey, as a way of
being that is constantly becoming and unfolding in relation with the therapist’s
training, experience and interaction with peers and clients. The result is indefinable
and unnameable, and perhaps represents the soul of integrative psychotherapy.
Introduction
Psychotherapy as an empirical-scientific discipline, although foreshadowed by
Hippocrates and Gallen, has existed for little more than a hundred years
On the face of it, this seems a fairly useful definition. However, it does not
clearly delineate psychotherapy because the underlying methods, principles
and purpose are not fully explicated; there is no sense of the uncertain,
subjective and chaotic nature of such interpersonal systems. Nevertheless, as
Mahrer (2000) points out:
Although the field seems to lack an officially sanctioned list of its formally stated, taken-for-
granted fundamental givens and truths, the field is rife with foundational beliefs
that are generally presumed, assumed, implied, taken for granted, and occasionally spelled
out (p. 117).
In the same way, I wondered if the four pillars of psychotherapy had at their
base some single foundation or truth. Unfortunately, nobody has yet
discovered the ultimate truth of how to conduct psychotherapy, and the
research quoted earlier suggests no one school is more efficacious than another.
As trainees, we expect our training institution to provide us with meaning and
certainty or, at least, an approximation of the truth. Instead, we are presented
with diversity, uncertainty, relativism and a range of different ways of talking
about ostensibly similar psychological phenomena we encounter in the
consulting room. No doubt this lack of cohesion evokes in us the very psychic
dilemmas we entered the profession to resolve. For many trainees it leads to
periods akin to St. John of the Cross’ Dark Night of the Soul (Starr, 2002):
feelings of being totally abandoned by certainty. In my experience of training
others it normally hits about half way through a typical masters degree
programme in which five or six different approaches to therapy are studied.
Reconciling this complexity and tolerating the uncertainty, especially for the
trainee integrative therapist, is – in my view – the central concern of the
integrative quest. It is something of a lifetime’s task, and may never be resolved,
as Jung’s retrospective of his journey suggests. In his autobiography he wrote:
The older I have become, the less I have understood or had insight into or know about myself.
I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am distressed, depressed, rapturous.
I am all these things at once, and cannot add up the sum. I am incapable of determining
ultimate worth or worthlessness; I have no judgement about myself and my life. There is
nothing I am quite sure about. I have no definite convictions – not about anything really.
I know only that I was born and exist, and it seems to me that I have been carried along. I exist
on the foundations of something I do not know. In spite of all uncertainties I feel a solidarity
underlying all existence and a continuity in my mode of being (Jung, 1963, p. 392).
Shah points out that this is one of the most famous Nasrudin stories about
novices not knowing where to seek enlightenment (1999). As a client and
student myself, and later as a practitioner and teacher, I realised that the
certainty, knowledge, enlightenment, or whatever I was seeking was ‘at home’,
that is, within me. Heraclitus tells us, ‘It belongs to all men to know themselves
and to think well’ and that, ‘much learning does not teach understanding’
(Kahn, 1981). Teachers and schools can show us the way, but they cannot
direct our inner quest. I considered it my responsibility as an individual to
question, experiment, search and re-search for meaning and understanding in
this subject I had chosen, and psychotherapy integration raised a number of
personal and professional issues for me that needed reflection, if not resolution.
O’Brien and Houston (2007), who ‘see integration as a corrective tendency in
an over-fragmented field’ (p. 4) discuss a number of ‘obstacles to integration’
(p. 5), but the most thorough review of such issues that helped me was by
Hollanders (2000) who enumerated nine issues central to the integration
debate. I should like to discuss these briefly, adding one of my own, to pave the
way for a deeper discussion of my journey and the development of my view of
the integration process.
to the stage of full integration, the characteristics of which are not yet
determined. These conceptualisations identify a tension active in most
integrationists, as Paul Wachtel (1991) describes, ‘eclecticism in practice and
integration in aspiration is an accurate description of what most of us in the
integration movement do much of the time’ (p. 44).
Issue two raises the incommensurability of paradigms, that the mainstream
schools of psychotherapy cannot be reconciled because of their different
philosophical or epistemological bases (Kuhn, 1970) and this raises ‘the issue
of whether integration is a viable project at all’ (Hollanders, 2000, p. 34).
Such an objection only really applies to theoretical integration, and suggests
that this particular route is idealistic or unattainable; although to accept this
would be to undervalue the work of integrationists such as Alexander (1963),
Wachtel (1977) and Ryle (1990).
Issue three is about the relationship between integration and pluralism, and
questions whether the concept of integration is out of step with the
postmodern Zeitgeist. This is only an issue if integration is viewed as the
search for a single grand theory. If, however, it is viewed as a position or
process that individual therapists determine for themselves, then it may – as
Norcross and Newman (1992) hoped – constitute ‘an open system of
informed pluralism, deepening rapprochement and empirically grounded
practice’ (p. 32). The question of whether integration is a position or a process is
the fourth issue raised by Hollanders. If the grand theory is neither possible
nor desirable then new integrative positions are only likely to add to the
proliferation of systems and bring further confusion to the marketplace. This
may be an acceptable transitory consequence, a desegregation stage, of getting
to the integrative position envisaged by Norcross and Newman above. On the
other hand, others prefer to emphasise the unending process and dynamic
nature of integration, ‘one of the most underlying values is that integration is
an ongoing process in a continual state of development and evolution’
(Clarkson, 1992b, p. 290).
The above issues interact with what I think is the most significant of the
nine Hollanders (2000) raised. This is the question of where the locus of
integration lies. He posits three possibilities: ‘Externally’ (i.e. primarily outside
the practitioner) in the profession or group; ‘Internally’ (i.e. primarily within
the individual practitioner) by therapists developing their own integrative
systems; and ‘Within the relationship’, that is between the therapist and client
as the client’s needs emerge (p. 37, original italics). Hollanders (2000) locates
the three routes described earlier as external integration. He identifies no
similar example for internal integration, but suggests it refers ‘to the whole
process involved in being a reflective practitioner’ (p. 38) and emphasises ‘this
reflection should be as widely informed as possible, by the experience of
others, the literature, varied ongoing training, etc.’ (p. 39). Similarly, the
principle behind integration within the relationship is that ‘it is the client who
indicates what is needed, and that she does so by the way in which she relates
to the therapist’ (p. 39). This concept is embraced by the integrationists
Duncan and Miller (2000) in their client-directed, outcome-informed
approach to therapy, and is perhaps echoed in the psychoanalytic school by
The integrative attitude – a personal journey 27
of one body’ (cited in Jung, 1946, p. 85). The theories of chaos and
complexity offer a contemporary narrative for understanding relationship in
terms of non-linear dynamic systems (Stewart, 1997). Isham (1995) also
points out that the concept of quantum entanglement suggests at a
fundamental level objects are ‘inextricably linked or entangled . . . in a sense,
they simply cease to be independent things, and one can only describe them
in relation to each other’ (p. 27).
Complicit integration takes this perspective of relationship and views some
integrative approaches as something that the contemporary sciences might
call strange attractors or emergent phenomena. In this sense, Stewart and
Cohen (1997) define emergence as ‘the appearance of recognisable large-scale
features in a system whose chain of small scale causality are far too intricate to
describe let alone follow in detail’ (p. 149). In nature such simplicity emerges
from complexity by an iterative process they call complicity. In Figments of
Reality Stewart and Cohen argue that the human condition represents such a
system, a ‘complicit interaction between culture and individual mind, each
shaping the other’ (p. x). The book presents a somewhat Heraclitian view of
the world as a place of constant interaction and flux, the underlying physical
reality of which we can only infer and never truly know through personal
experience. In deference to the above process I adopted the word complicit to
describe those integrative approaches that seem to represent such emergent
and higher-order systems of psychotherapy (Nuttall, 2002a) and I consider
Clarkson’s relationship framework (1995) and the transtheoretical model
developed by Prochaska and DiClemente (1984) to constitute such systems.
Others too have identified emergent relational modalities (Gelso & Carter,
1994; Greenson, 1967; Kahn, 1997), although these have not led to the
development of distinct models of integration.
Prochaska and DiClemente’s (1984) system ‘is predicated on the belief that
the current relativism can be transcended by discovering or constructing
concepts that cut across the traditional boundaries of the psychotherapies’
(Prochaska & Norcross, 1999, p. 491). They define it as a ‘higher-order
theory of psychotherapy’, which sets ‘out to construct a model of
psychotherapy and behaviour change that can draw from the entire spectrum
of the major theories’ (p. 491). I would argue in line with the principle of
complicity, that rather than construct, they have recognised – or identified –
a simple therapeutic process that has emerged out of the complexity of the
many disparate psychotherapy systems. Confirming this they write, ‘in
colloquial terms, we have identified the basics of how (process), when (stages),
and what (levels) to change’ (p. 505, my underlining).
The quest to find a basis for rapprochement prompted Clarkson’s research
(2003), from which she distinguished five primary modes of therapeutic
relationship, which she proposed as ‘a possible integrative framework for the
different traditions’ (p. xiii). In support, Hollanders (2000) describes it as an
‘integrative approach based essentially on the nature of the therapeutic
relationship’ (p. 23). The five modes are the working alliance; the
transferential-countertransferential; the reparative or developmentally
needed; the person-to-person or real; and the transpersonal relationships.
The integrative attitude – a personal journey 31
Clarkson (1995) writes, ‘it is important to remember these are not stages but
states in psychotherapy, often ‘overlapping’, in and between which a patient
construes his or her unique experience’ (p. xii). Hinshelwood (1990)
supportively described Clarkson’s framework as ‘an attempt to find a
perspective from which an overview might become possible . . . instead of
having incompatibilities we have different priorities and emphasis’ (p. 129).
These approaches bring a new perspective to psychotherapy integration that is
about understanding the simplicity, the essence, or the core of what we do as
psychotherapists. They encourage the view that the four foundational schools
can be seen as complementary and enriching, rather than incompatible and
contradictory.
My interest then moved from one of finding integrative links to one of
understanding the integration process as a whole. In this I recognised a third
modality of integration, which reflects how psychotherapy relates to, and
explains, the world we experience and in which we live. It characterises
psychotherapy not only as a meta-psychology of the individual, but also of the
group, organisation and society, and represents engagement with the world
and other disciplines, such as neuroscience, sociology and anthropology. In
formulating an integrative approach I consider such contiguity or internal-
external correspondence useful in testing the approach’s robustness and
efficacy and, accordingly, I called this modality contiguous integration
(2002a). This seems to have been important historically for philosophers
and psychologists as it validated and added meaning to their conceptualisa-
tions. According to Samuels (1995), modern psychotherapy has had ‘an
ambition to give therapy to the world’. The principle of interrelatedness
underlying this dimension of integration can probably be traced back as far as
Heraclitus who wrote, ‘from all things one and from one thing all’. The
principle is apparent in later philosophies exemplified by the Hermetic adage,
‘as above, so below’ (Marshall, 2001, p. 251) or the Kabbalistic aphorism ‘so
too does the lower sphere affect the upper’ (Hoffman, 1996. p. 167). Leaving
philosophers aside, in modern psychology, Freud probably first demonstrated
this integrating process with Totem and Taboo (1913) and more concretely in
Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1922). Similarly, Freud’s Project
for a Scientific Psychology (1895) was an early attempt at integration of
psychoanalysis with the more recognised biological sciences; this particular
synthesis is also apparent in the work of Bowlby (Mitchell & Black, 1995) and,
more recently, Schore (2001).
Menzies Lyth (1986) writes, ‘psychoanalysts have been interested in society
and its institutions since ever there were psychoanalysts’ (p. 284) and,
following Freud and Klein, it was Bion (1962) who probably developed the
first comprehensive psychoanalytic theory of group and organisational
behaviour (de Board, 1995). These theories are now well-accepted
explanatory paradigms for group and organisational behaviour (Jacques,
1955; Menzies Lyth, 1986; Kets de Vries & Associates, 1991). At the political
level, Moses (1987) and Elliot (2005) show how psychodynamic processes
affect, and often hinder, the political process of conflict reconciliation, such as
those affecting the Middle East and Northern Ireland. In the humanistic
32 J. Nuttall
pp. 55–56) (my thanks to the late Petruska Clarkson, who first used this
story in the context of psychotherapy integration [1995, p. 325])
A learned man once said, just for the sake of saying something,
‘There is a tree in India. If you eat the fruit of that tree you’ll never grow old and never die.’
Stories about ‘the tree’ were passed around and finally a king sent his envoy to India to look
for it.
People laughed at the man.
They slapped him on the back and called out, ‘Sir, I know where your tree is, but it’s far in the
jungle, and you’ll need a ladder.’
He kept on travelling, following such directions and feeling foolish for years.
He was about to return to the king, when he met a wise man.
‘Great teacher, show me some kindness in this search for the tree.’
‘My son, this is not an actual tree, though sometimes it has been called that.
Sometimes it’s called a ‘sun’, and sometimes an ocean or cloud.
All these words point to the wisdom which comes through a true human being,
Which may have many effects, the least of which is eternal life.
In the same way that one person can be a father to you and a son to someone else, an uncle to
another, and a nephew to yet another, so what you are looking for has many names, but only
one existence.
Don’t search for one of the names. Move beyond any attachment to names.
Every conflict between human beings has happened because of this disagreement about
names. It’s such a foolishness, because just beyond the arguing there’s a long table of
companionship, set and waiting for us to sit down.
Conclusion
So how might we view the integrationist? Hollanders (2000) suggests their
job is:
. . . to develop connectedness with the different parts of the field, to stand between the various
schools, to encourage dialogue and debate, and to find ways of helping each to discover and
respect the contributions of the other. In short, her role is to serve as a kind of ‘statesperson’
within the field (p. 44).
This is a commendable view and I support the need for communication and
dialogue at a profession-wide level. However, this must encourage the
continuous and personal process of integration that needs to take place
primarily within the individual therapist as well as – or alternatively – within
the therapeutic relationship. The individual may take his or her lead from
other more experienced or learned practitioners whose approaches may be
already well-recognised external systems of integrative psychotherapy. But it
is still, as Norcross and Arkowitz (1992) wrote, ‘premature to advance any
one integrative system . . . I urge students, in the integrative spirit, to take the
‘best’ from each model and to discern converging themes for themselves’
(p. 23). The process is necessarily a personal one, as Bion (1962) affirmed in
respect of the various emerging schools of psychoanalysis, ‘as a method of
making clear to himself the analyst needs his own book of psychoanalytic
theories that he personally frequently uses’ (p. 39).
The developmental journey I have described and the integrative attitude
I now espouse, will, I hope, encourage the activity of questioning,
of experimenting, of discovery, of inventing, of researching and of interrogat-
ing the discipline of psychotherapy in relationship with the experienced world
34 J. Nuttall
References
Alexander, F. (1963). The dynamics of psychotherapy in the light of learning theory. American
Journal of Psychiatry, 120, 440–448.
Arkowitz, H. (1989). The role of theory in psychotherapy integration. Journal of Integrative and
Eclectic Psychotherapy, 8(1), 8–16.
The integrative attitude – a personal journey 35
Palmer, S., & Woolfe, R. (2000). Preface. In S. Palmer & R. Woolfe (Eds.), Integrative and eclectic
counselling and psychotherapy (pp. xv–xvi). London: Sage.
Polkinghorne, D. E. (1992). Postmodern epistemology of practice. In S. Kvale (Ed.), Psychology
and postmodernism (pp. 146–65). London: Sage Publications.
Prochaska, J. O., & DiClemente, C. C. (1984). The transtheoretical approach: Crossing the
traditional boundaries of therapy. Homewood, IL: Dow Jones-Irwin.
Prochaska, J. O., & Norcross, J. C. (1999). Systems of psychotherapy: A transtheoretical analysis.
Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole.
Rogers, C. (1961). On becoming a person. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Rogers, C. (1990). A more human world. In H. Kirschenbaum & V. L. Henderson (Eds.),
(pp. 436–77). London: Constable.
Rogers, C., Perls, F., & Ellis, A. (1965). Three approaches to psychotherapy: Gloria. [video tape].
(Available from: Concord Video, Ipswich, England).
Roth, A., & Fonagy, P. (1996). What works and for whom? A critical review of psychotherapy
research. London: Guilford Press.
Rumi, J. (1991). One-handed basketweaving. Athens, GA: Maypop.
Ryle, A. (1990). Cognitive-analytic therapy: Active participation in change – a new integration in brief
psychotherapy. Chichester: Wiley.
Safran, J. D., & Messer, S. B. (1997). Psychotherapy integration: A postmodern critique. Clinical
Psychology: Science and Practice, 4, 140–152.
Schore, A. (2001). Mind in the making. British Journal of Psychotherapy, 17(3), 299–328.
SEPI. (2003). Mission statement. Retrieved November 18, 2003, from http://www.cyberpsych.org/
sepi/
Shah, I. (1999). The Sufis. London: The Octagon Press.
Starr, M. (Trans.) (2002). Dark night of the soul by St. John of the Cross. London: Rider.
Stern, D. (1998). The interpersonal world of the infant. London: Karnac.
Stewart, I. (1997). Does God Play Dice? The New Mathematics of Chaos. London: Penguin Books.
Stewart, I., & Cohen, J. (1997). Figments of reality, the evolution of the curious mind. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press.
Sussman, M. (1992). A curious calling: Unconscious motivations for practising psychotherapy.
New York: Aronson.
Wachtel, P. L. (1977). Psychoanalysis and behaviour therapy: Towards an integration. New York:
Basic Books.
Wachtel, P. (1991). From eclecticism to synthesis: Towards a more seamless psychotherapy
integration. Journal of Psychotherapy Integration, 1, 43–54.