Join us for this Author Spotlight with Matthew Bennett, Psy. D., Towards an Integrated Analytical Psychology: Return to Freedom and Dignity . This book undertakes a forceful and scholarly deconstruction of behavioral and so-called evidence-based models of applied psychology that privilege empirical inquiry and epistemological certainty while marginalizing the ambiguous, irrational, creative, complex, affective, and relational values represented by psychodynamic models. It is also a clarion call for synergistic integration of psychoanalytic and Jungian positions to restore key critical perspectives emerging from both viewpoints into applied clinical practice. The author proposes an integrative circumplex model of personality development which combines the Jungian concept of archetypal thematic content with psychoanalytic models emphasizing self-psychology and the progressive influence of defenses.

The model proposed in this book, called Integrative Analytical Psychology, presents two major dimensions of personality development: the vertical and the horizontal model. The vertical model represents nested hierarchies of mental representation ranging from the more ephemeral, abstract, primal, unmeasurable, and powerfully motivating to the most concrete, operationalizable, and consciously accessible. Borrowing from the vocabularies of competing systems of psychological thought, the proposed order of mental representations on the vertical access are: Archetype, Symbol, Object, Complex, Schema, Self.

In arranging these various levels of psychological complexity in ascending order, this book proposes a “unified field” theory of mental representation which puts psychoanalytic, analytic, and cognitive-behavioral perspectives in a mutually integrative framework. The resulting levels of complexity are identified as holons, which are systems which are integral wholes while also belonging to higher-order categories, and the entire system is described as a complex adaptive system (CAS).

The horizontal model connects well-developed psychoanalytic conceptualization of character structure to deeper archetypal and symbolic content associated with Jungian theory, resulting in a circumplex model divided into four quadrants identified with schizoid, narcissistic, histrionic, and depressive personalities. This circumplex model of personality presents specific defensive styles described in the psychoanalytic literature as dyadic opposites (schizoid vs. histrionic, and narcissistic vs. depressive) resulting in the Jungian concept of enantiodromia as a driver of psychological growth and development.

This book broadly considers the applied clinical implications of both the vertical and the horizontal mental representations to psychotherapy and clinical practice. It concludes with an appeal for mutually supportive crosswalks between analytic and psychoanalytic perspectives, and urges for restoration of humanistic, phenomenological, and teleological perspectives in psychology, as well as a vigorous defense of Jung’s concept of archetype, which lies at the center of the Integrated Analytical Model.