The Process of Constructing the Self and Its Relation to Psychotherapy

Rather, in the perspective offered here, each distortion and strategy functions adaptively, given the circumstances in which it was learned and applied (Crittenden, 2000b). Those circumstances include the individual’s maturational competence at the time, previous developmental experiences, and circumstances and events external to themselves. Because all of these change over time, the point of therapy becomes identifying the distortion and associated strategy and seeing its historic adaptive quality while, at the same time, exploring current conditions to identify critical features that require a different strategy. When this new strategy is learned, it can be added to the repertoire of possible strategies, as opposed to using it to replace earlier, currently maladaptive strategies. Consequently, psychotherapists need to identify the range of self-organizations that regulate their clients’ behavior and the conditions that elicit these strategies. In particular, it would be helpful to know what most threatens particular clients and, thus, reduces their potential to reflect productively about their own behavior. Often psychotherapists assay this by examining their own relationship with the client. But this can be tricky. Unless the therapist knows him- or herself very well and knows something about their own direction of movement, there is risk of a confusion of self and other. Without some objective measure, it can be difficult to identify one’s own delusions. Even without this source of confusion, few therapists can elicit the full range of clients’ self-protective functioning in the relatively protected setting of therapy. This suggests the need for broad-range assessments that are also highly specific with regard to eliciting conditions and strategic responses and that can tap, with reasonable accuracy, nonconscious functioning. This precludes most self-report measures. Further, the need for reliability and validity of assessment precludes projective instruments. Most attachment assessments lie somewhere between these two poles. They provide replicable, semi-structured probes that elicit enactment of strategic, self-protective responses. Moreover, they are developmentally sensitive, usually being constrained to a single developmental age. Their application to both client and psychotherapist can improve the quality and efficiency of psychotherapy. Integration The process of resolving incongruent dispositional representations is central to selforganization. The ability to integrate multiple dispositional representations to yield one bestfitting response requires neurological maturation, prior experience with the integrative process, and time. Time is especially important because greater processing yields more sophisticated and adaptive responses.