Unification: The Fifth Pathway to Psychotherapy Integration

An integral analysis of the etiology and treatment of schizophrenia: Integrated pluralism in research and clinical practice.

“…Furthermore, this type of interdisciplinary analysis provides a conceptual basis from which to motivate future integrated theory development, research, and clinical practice, including opening up the possibility to investigate how heterogeneous etiological factors and mechanisms interact and how such interactions affect treatment. This typifies the unification approach to psychotherapy integration, which is the most recently recognized psychotherapy integration "pathway" (Marquis et al, 2021; see the homepage of the Journal of Psychotherapy Integration). Unification fundamentally organizes research, theories, techniques, and principles into holistic, metatheoretical frameworks; doing so decreases the chances of being reductionistic and facilitates comprehensive conceptualizations and practice (Marquis, 2018).…”

“…Naturally, the problem extends to associated empirical research and clinical practice as well, often because researcher and clinical communities operate with different epistemological and methodological assumptions and interests, analyzing disparate aspects of the same phenomenon (Marquis, 2018). A unified understanding of the treatment options for psychopathology requires a means with which to integrate different etiological factors and conceptualize the interactions and relationships among them (Marquis et al, 2021).…”

Psychotherapy integration: History, current status, and future directions.

“…and that can serve as a coherent framework for systematically interrelating the essential knowledge elements within and among those domains" (Anchin, 2008, p. 325). A unifying approach maintains that a scientifically anchored (see Melchert, 2020) biopsychosocial (BPS) model of health and illness (Engel, 1977(Engel, , 1980 integrated with systems theory and science provides this organizing metatheoretical scaffold (Anchin, 2008;Marquis et al, 2021).…”

“…Complementary unifying metatheories present clinical implications of these conceptions (Marquis et al, 2021). Overarchingly, unificationists view the possibilities of treatment success as optimized when the therapist orients towards the patient with a biopsychosocial systems metaconception of psychopathology-that is, that psychological disorders entail an interplay between processes in the biological (e.g., genetic, neurophysiological, biochemical), psychological (e.g., cognitive, affective, motivational), and sociocultural (e.g., interpersonal, familial, cultural) domains.…”

“…In addition, conceptual and empirical work on how integrative psycho therapists think and practice highlights the blurry lines between the historical pathways to integrative practice. In many ways, the unified psychotherapy approach (Marquis et al, 2021) seeks to transcend these traditional categories, as do the focus on principles of change, mechanisms of change, and, in training, developing a PTA. In addition, comparative treatment trials have failed to demonstrate that integrative psychotherapies are more effective than singleschool therapies.…”