One of the most difficult tasks students are given during their training experience is that of deciding upon a theoretical orientation. In several recent trends it was often suggested that students should be "eclectic" or "integrative" in their approaches. These approaches sound nice and are often framed as allowing for the therapist to adjust their therapy style to the client's needs.

 

    However, there are also costs to being eclectic. In practice, what often happened was therapists were practicing without a foundation. Eclecticism quickly became a rudimentary form of utilitarianism. As quickly as the eclectic movement passed, the integrative movement became popular. The integrative movement has some substantial improvements from eclecticism. There was an increased focus on making sure the approach had some cohesion.

 

    Kirk Schneider and Rollo May (1995) offered what may be the most impressive of the integrative approaches in their book The Psychology of Existence: An Integrative, Clinical Approach. What helped this book stand out is that it maintained a solid foundation of existential theory while integrating other approaches. The existential foundation allowed for an intelligent integration which demonstrated a superiority to the utilitarianism inherent in previous attempts.

 

    Within Depth Psychotherapy there are many points of agreement and many significant differences. Most depth psychotherapists will integrate from other, similar approaches. However, it is often best to first immerse yourself within one theoretical orientations. Once you have developed a good grasp of this approach, you will be better able to integrate other theories in a more intelligent, consistent manner.

 

    The links to the left provide students with an overview of the different theoretical orientations. These are all written by professionals who function from the particular orientation. Overtime, hopefully there will be more than one perspective on each of the orientations to reflect the diversity with exists even within the different orientations. So you may want to continue to check back regularly for updates.

 

- Louis Hoffman, Ph.D