¿Prevalece el caos? Reflexiones sobre el eclecticismo técnico y la integración asimilativa

Abstract

Lazarus contends that efforts to integrate psychotherapy at the theoretical level have fostered the same unfortunate profusion of competing approaches associated with nonintegrative traditional schools of psychotherapy. Messer views this flowering of integrative theories as unavoidable, even desirable, and as consistent with a social constructionist view of reality. As an alternative to theoretical integration, Lazarus advocates technical eclecticism, which he considers to be governed by observations rather than theories, and as such, draws freely upon techniques validated within other frameworks. Messer argues that such observations are necessarily theory laden, and that techniques imported from other therapies are colored by, and assimilated within, the new clinical and theoretical context in which they are employed, and therefore must be validated anew.