ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the Integral Intake as a tool for assessing patients in an idiographic manner, and suggests that it is the most comprehensive, clinically helpful, and efficient of the extant theoretically based intake instruments. Most psychotherapy theorists and practitioners agree that comprehensive assessment, in which information encompassing as many aspects of the patient as is reasonable to obtain, is essential and crucial to successful psychotherapy. Most therapists begin the process of psychotherapy with some sort of intake assessment, whether formal or informal. Patient intake represents one crucial point for assessment in the psychotherapy process. Although integral psychotherapists will at times administer standardized assessments, the Integral Intake is idiographic. Accurate assessment is critical not only in integral psychotherapy (iPT) but in all counseling and psychotherapy, for the simple reason that different people—with different quadratic issues and at different stages of development—face different struggles whose resolution demands different approaches and interventions.
