ABSTRACT
Integrative psychotherapy has its roots in a number of different traditions which have come together in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but which are based on much earlier philosophical ideas. In this movement we can see the origins of the humanistic challenge to positivistic psychology, a challenge that has been supported by philosophical developments through Kant, Hegel and nineteenth-century writers within the phenomenological and existentialist traditions. Kant (1724±1804) in particular drew attention to the relationship between the perception of an object and the object itself, claiming that the object itself, the noumenon, could not be known, and that knowledge therefore resided only in the object as it appeared to us, the phenomenon. These ideas place a particular focus on the nature of perceptual reality, and importantly for psychotherapy, on the nature and role of the perceiver. From such a starting point, any one theoretical perspective as a potential `truth' within the psychological therapies becomes impossible. These early humanistic ideas paved the way for further thinking that has a direct relevance to the practice of psychotherapy and which is highlighted through developments in the phenomenological tradition. Of particular importance to later thinking and practice within the ®eld of psychotherapy was the notion of the co-creation between observer and observed, an idea that lies at the heart of the phenomenological position, and that forms the basis of our integrative stance on the co-creation of all relationships, and the inseparable nature of ®gure and ground.
