Islands of Health: Implications of Academic Psychology for Psychotherapy Technique and Integration

Recent research in academic psychology, particularly in areas pertaining to healthy illusion, has significant relevance to integrative psychotherapy, on both a technical and a conceptual level The concept of healthy illusion can help us conceptually integrate-find common threads between-apparently disparate schools of psychotherapy. The cognitive-behavioral techniques of collaborative empiricism, manageable goal setting, and changes in self-talk; many of the dialectical-behavioral techniques used to balance acceptance and change, and to embrace paradox; the psychoanalytic concepts, and related techniques, of sublimation, self-object, internalization, transitional phenomena, and idealization have important links to the nourishing of positive illusion in therapy. The concept of healthy illusion also lends us some new integrative techniques, such as searching out, broadening, and even creating idealized figures and internalized objects, aside from the therapist. This research, in fact, challenges some of our most fixed and favorite beliefs about the process of therapy-particularly about the paramount importance of facing and accepting reality. Finally, the positive illusion research sheds some light on the difficulties of defining psychological health, hope, and resiliency.