For many years, most professionals in psychotherapy and clinical psychology have been engaged in an integrating movement of the different schools, moods, models, and techniques. It is about giving consistency to our theoretical body and expanding our arsenal of intervention techniques to better help the people who consult us.
This integration that we could call “horizontal” can be complemented by another integrating process, – in this case, a “vertical” one – between the different levels of understanding of psychological life. These three levels are the intrapsychic, the relational, and the groupal one. In reality, there are two more levels at the extremes but are currently being studied by neurobiology and sociology.
Attempts to integrate these three levels have been common in recent years, and thus individual, relational, and systemic psychological views have been common but in the absence of a conceptual model that encompasses them.
In this presentation, an integrating model will be presented, inspired by the complex thinking proposed by Edgar Morin, in its application to couples psychotherapy, which is a privileged field for it, since in its problems and approaches the three levels mentioned converge.
This integrative model will be applied to Eric Berne’s Transactional Analysis, based on three basic concepts of complex thinking: self-organization, emergent phenomenon, and organization, and some ways for its therapeutic application will be pointed out, considering the three levels (individual, relational, and groupal) as three levels of complexity.
