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The history of psychotherapy integration can be divided into three phases. The first was a phase of latency. The theme ran through the literature, starting in the early 1930s, but was not yet a well defined area of interest. The delineation of such an area characterized the second phase, that began in the 1970s, when interest in a rapprochement across the psychotherapies increased dramatically. In 1983 the SEPI (Society for the Exploration of Psychotherapy Integration) was founded. The recurrent themes in a rapidly growing body of literature were (Goldfried & Newman, 1986):
What does it mean to be an integrative psychotherapist today? But before confronting that question: what does it mean to be a psychotherapist at all? Is psychotherapy a robust phenomenon, or just a conventional container for a host of heterogeneous and incompatible practices? Some refuse such questions as too philosophical. Philosophy will give us no answers, they maintain: empirical research is all we need now. But is the definition of our field still so poor because too much, or too little philosophical work has been done so far? The fate of psychotherapeutic integration depends on the answer we can give to the above question (is psychotherapy a robust phenomenon or a conventional container): whether it will evolve from an area of interest (second phase) to a scientific discipline (third phase), or it will fade away and finally disappear, leaving the field to circumscribed orientations and to research in manualized treatments. The minimum requirement for a discipline to be scientific is that the object of study exists: there can be no science of a conventional container. The outcome is open, as there are signs pointing in both directions. The perspective of a world in which every DSM-disorder will have to be treated with a corresponding Empirically Validated Psychological Intervention may be so alarming to some (as it may be attractive to others), to stimulate the greatest efforts to avoid it. A small but meaningful contribution in this direction may be a web area of documents, in which the relevant issues of the present phase of psychotherapeutic integration are discussed. The first article in the series is the one by Stricker & Gold that was already on the SEPI web site:
The preceding text translates the Editor's Note in the Document area that I edit on the SEPI web site, as the first two documents in this Psychomedia area translate the first two on the SEPI web site. The project is to edit two quite twin areas, with only minor differences, with the English text of a lot of the documents on the SEPI web site and the Italian text on the PSYCHOMEDIA web site.
Some essential informations about the web resources on the theme of Psychotherapy integration follow below. The international integrationist association is the SEPI (Society for the Exploration of Psychotherapy Integration) The SEPI journal is the "Journal of Psychotherapy Integration".
The most important integrative Italian school is the ASPIC (Associazione per lo Sviluppo Psicologico dell'Individuo e della Comunità), On the discussion list "PM-PT Psicoterapia" of PSYCHOMEDIA various debates on the theme of Psychotherapy integration have been held. Some of these have been edited and posted on the web (only Italian text): On the area of PSYCHOMEDIA "Models and Techniques in Psychotherapy " one can find an article of mine in which I lay down my basic ideas on the theme of psychotherapy integration:
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