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It is argued that psychotherapists who function as eclectic theorists must inevitably embrace divergent and contradictory notions. To remain theoretically consistent does not require the rejection of promising techniques culled from other theoretical orientations. Technical eclecticism can enrich the practitioner's range of therapeutic effectiveness without violating his allegiance to a theoretical system which best satisfies his own subjective needs. The view upheld is that therapeutic competence depends upon an array of effective techniques rather than upon a mass of plausible theories.

Lazarus contends that efforts to integrate psychotherapy at the theoretical level have fostered the same unfortunate profusion of competing approaches associated with nonintegrative traditional schools of psychotherapy. Messer views this flowering of integrative theories as unavoidable, even desirable, and as consistent with a social constructionist view of reality. As an alternative to theoretical integration, Lazarus advocates technical eclecticism, which he considers to be governed by observations rather than theories, and as such, draws freely upon techniques validated within other frameworks. Messer argues that such observations are necessarily theory laden, and that techniques imported from other therapies are colored by, and assimilated within, the new clinical and theoretical context in which they are employed, and therefore must be validated anew.