MA Integrative Psychotherapy

Integration involves drawing the best from different psychotherapeutic approaches and blending them based on certain core principles. These core principles are that the client-therapist relationship is an essential aspect of healing and that our development as children affects how we are now. If aspects of us are not supported as children, they do not fully develop and cannot integrate seamlessly into our personality. This is where therapy comes in.

The Integrative training programme devised by the Sherwood Psychotherapy Training Institute is a developmental-relational approach that uses a synthesis of Humanistic Psychology, Object Relations Theory and Psychoanalytic Self-Psychology. Further integration of Developmental Psychology is made via the work of John Bowlby, Margaret Mahler, Daniel Stern and others.

This Psychotherapy programme focuses on the dynamics and potential of human relationships, with the aim of facilitating the individual’s ability to respond choicefully and to create more satisfying relationships.

The central aim is to establish a therapeutic relationship which will lead to a corrective emotional relationship. This involves:

• Understanding the internal and external barriers that people create to the formation of successful relationships.

• Understanding how these barriers relate to the problems the person experiences.

• Engaging the person in a therapeutic relationship which provides the opportunity and therapeutic support for engaging with these relationship problems.

The effectiveness of this kind of Integrative Psychotherapy is based on the ability of the psychotherapist to make an informed relationship with the client and to use his/her understanding of the difficulties in the relationship (including conscious and unconscious aspects, emotional and intellectual understanding) to address the client's difficulties.

The psychotherapist has to use both his/her theoretical and personal skills in this engagement and be sensitively aware of their own contribution to the relationship. This responsibility requires a high degree of self-awareness, honesty, receptivity, professional acceptance and ethical endeavour on the part of the therapist. Thus the course demands that trainees and students are willing and able to examine their own capacity for relationship and reflect on these processes.

If you would like further information about this course please contact our office.

Click here for an application form.