ABSTRACT
Basic to our philosophy is the belief that it is important for each integrative psychotherapist to develop his or her own framework for integrative practice. How a psychotherapist practises as an integrationist will need to be congruent with the person's background, personality, therapeutic style and theoretical framework. We maintain that there will be as many styles of integration as there are integrative psychotherapists. At the same time we support a rigorous attention to the development of both a coherent theoretical model of integration and a careful attention to the application of strategies and techniques that are congruent with this formulation and appropriate to the needs of the client. In previous points we have highlighted a number of common factors or common principles of therapy that all integrative psychotherapists are likely both to know about and to adhere to to a signi®cant extent. However, we have also drawn attention to the importance of the way in which a particular therapist responds to a particular client and the ways in which re¯ections on this process might in¯uence the outcome for the therapeutic work. There is therefore the demand that the speci®cs of each client/therapist interaction be assessed on their own terms. We are in agreement with O'Brien and Houston (2007) when they state: `Integration must never be hijacked into becoming just one more brand of therapy. There is no place for hard and fast rules about precisely what to integrate and just how to behave' (p. 3). While this view is somewhat at odds with the interest among some colleague groups of maintaining a modality focus, we believe that it offers a potentially better service to the client while challenging practitioners to step outside the comfort zone of a particular approach.
