Category: Individual psychotherapy

What is integrative psychotherapy?

In: Individual psychotherapy

Defining integrative psychotherapy is a little bit harder than defining other approaches because, in doing so, one has to go against the perception that integrative psychotherapy is a smorgasbord of several other better defined approaches.

The European Association for Psychotherapy says of integrative psychotherapy that it
“affirms the importance of a unifying approach to persons. Thus a major focus is on responding appropriately and effectively to the person at the emotional, spiritual, cognitive, behavioural and physiological levels.”
This statement conveys something important about the focus of integrative psychotherapy, which is that it seeks to address the totality of a person’s experience. In this short article I would like to say more about this, as well as elaborate on what integrative practice looks like.
Clinical philosophy
 
Psychotherapy is integrative in scope and in outcome. It brings together into a consistent, functioning whole, the teachings of different schools of thought (psychodynamic, existential and person-centered) and, similarly, it seeks to help the patient integrate their conscious and unconscious lives.
The integrity of the person, that is, their deep sense of being ‘one thing’ and their ability to enact this consistently, starts developing from conception and is achieved – and tested – over time through interaction in different settings, from family to society and nature.
Where do our problems come from?
Pathology arises because we rarely get from our environment the response that is totally appropriate to our needs. We therefore develop unsatisfactorily and incompletely, and cannot take care of ourselves and others like we are able to. We live without integrity because a large part of our experience does not enter into the way we relate to ourselves and others.
For example, if a child’s parents do not acknowledge and respond well to, say, their feeling sad and being tearful, they will not help the child acquire the ability to acknowledge their own feelings and act accordingly, or to have emotionally satisfactory relationships with others.
How does integrative psychotherapy help?
Psychotherapy is the combination of a process (the conversation) and an environment (the therapeutic relationship) that afford the individual a reparative experience. This is made possible by the constant endeavour of the therapist to respond appropriately to the needs of their patient.
As a result of this, the therapeutic relationship is absolutely central to the healing process, and therefore the therapist works with a constant awareness of self and other. The therapist will seek to model integrity in their presence to the patient, which means calling upon the totality of their experience to help the patient make sense of their own.
It is essential that the therapist take into account the capacity of the patient to engage in psychotherapy and not try and impose a form to the encounter when it does not correspond to a genuine need of the patient. This is why the is no systematic use of transference interpretations, no imposition of a frequency of therapy, and no fixed setup in the consulting room that the patient has to adhere to. The therapist needs to work out what they need to take good enough care of themselves and create their boundaries and practices accordingly, and then enforce them firmly. This requires the therapist to be constantly in tune with themselves, and this is greatly facilitated by their own psychotherapy and supervision.
I apply these principles in my daily practice of psychotherapy inLondon.
By: Cedric Bouet-Willaumez Tags:
Multilingual Psychotherapy

Multilingualism, self-experience and psychotherapy: a lecture and seminar at the contemporary Training in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy

In: Individual psychotherapy

As part of my ongoing academic work in psychotherapy and counselling, gave a lecture and facilitated a seminar on multilingualism, self-experience and psychotherapy, which was titled “The multilingual experience in psychotherapy”

My aim was to show that a person’s ability to use different languages has a profound impact on the way their relationship to themselves and to others, and that it was possible and even indispensable to address this meaningfully in psychotherapy.
In a first part of this lecture, I showed that the process of language acquisition that we go through as infants, toddlers, children and then later as adults is entirely based on relationships: the relationship to self and the relationship to others. By acquiring a language, we learn to relate to ourselves, to the world and to the people around us. And this is something that we learn from the people closest to us. This means that each and every individual word that we use has a story and an emotional charge, and that every time that we use such and such word, we make a connection to the time and place that we learned it and to the person(s) that we learned it from.
In the second part of the lecture I described what it meant for this process to involve more than one language. I showed that the basic principle of language acquisition still applies, and that each language then brings with its own set of experiences, of relationships to self and to others. In summary, I suggested, as I have done in earlier research, that people who speak different languages engage with and manifest different aspects of their self according the the language that they live in at any given time.
I looked in the third part of this lecture at the consequence that this had on the process of psychotherapy for the multilingual individual. I showed through examples that people could use their bilingualism in a defensive manner, to keep painful things at bay, but also to make it possible for them to relate to a part of themselves that would be too painful if experienced in a first language.
The final part of the lecture focused on how multilingualism in the therapeutic relationship, whether it is the multilingualism of the patient, the therapist, or both, deeply affects the way psychotherapy unfolds. I described different ways of working with this meaningfully, and lively discussions ensued with the students I was teaching to challenge and further develop the points I was making about this. This workshop was very well received. I trust it will contribute to the students’ understanding of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, and how this intersects with the phenomenon of multilingualism.
As a psychotherapist in London I am committed to my personal development and research of this kind is essential to my practice, especially given that I practice in French and in English with equal ease.
By: Cedric Bouet-Willaumez