Psychotherapeutic schools and directions and the hope for integration/inclusion

A contribution of paradigm research to the development of psychotherapy(science)

Abstract

At the beginning of psychotherapy there was one single "school of therapy" - Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis. In 2022 there are 23 accredited therapeutic schools in Austria - and a much larger number of "forms of therapy". The entire history of psychotherapy, which spans more than a hundred years, is characterised by increasing diversification, but also by competition and territorial struggles. Accordingly, there are voices calling for a one-size-fits-all therapy to replace all the individual schools, as well as voices arguing either for a continuation of the parallel existing schools without hybrid forms and integration attitudes - or for a "bridging knowledge" that could serve as a common basis and leave the identity of the different schools untouched. In this article, core paradigms as guiding basic assumptions of the four psychotherapeutic directions and the SIC paradigm as a "bridge element" between these four core paradigms are unfolded using three fictitious cases. The sample cases of borderline, compulsion and phobia served as concretising application cases and as illustrations of the basic theoretical assumptions located at the highest levels of abstraction, which could be applied to all diagnoses, but also to the understanding of all non-pathological individual and social phenomena.