Research » The Integration Research Group
The Integration Research GroupThe distinctive aim of the IPS is to approach the psychological sciences in an integrative manner. To integrate is to harmonize, to synthesize, to bring together aspects or dimensions of a thing which properly belong together but which perhaps commonly are found isolated and apart.
Our age is one in which analysis is prized and perfected. We try to understand a thing by breaking it apart. We explain something by proposing a model of it, which is to say that we simulate it, we consider only some aspects of it. We consider a thing’s quantifiable dimensions only; or we look at it only insofar as it depends upon or may be ‘reduced’ to some other domain.
But clearly analysis, although necessary, cannot be the final step of understanding, since properly to understand something, which in reality and originally is a unity, would require that we reassemble, or integrate, those aspects which we have first distinguished through analytical methods. This integration of what may as a first step be distinguished analytically is especially important when what we want to understand is a human person who thinks, wills, has emotions and desires, is affected by mood and constitution, and whose subjective life is, in part, the result of upbringing and relationships.
Such integration should be conceived of as a task, one at which we will likely succeed only imperfectly. It is not something one can find finished and accomplished in a book, like a fact or formula that a student might take and use without any expenditure of effort; rather, it is a question primarily of acquiring certain intellectual virtues, of the sort which enable him or her to understand something in the appropriate way.
At the IPS, four different types of integration are aimed at:
(1) The first is that already mentioned—of the object of understanding. A human person may be considered with respect to biochemistry, physiology, ethology, psychological development, social system, emotions, moods, thoughts, aspirations, personality, moral principles, spiritual wholeness and maturity, and interior freedom. It is only through bringing all of these together that we can form an understanding of another that corresponds to the actual reality. Call this the integration within psychology of all the human sciences.
(2) Only philosophy, however, can provide a context in which particular sciences are coordinated. That is why the second type of integration aimed at by the IPS involves developing a philosophical account of human nature, and understanding the results of particular sciences in this context. In this endeavor, the IPS wishes to draw especially upon the classical accounts of human nature found in Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas; it therefore aims to integrate as well past wisdom about human nature with recent science. Call this the integration of the philosophy of human nature with psychology.
(3) At the IPS, the psychological sciences are studied and advanced within the context of openness to faith, because of the importance of harmonizing the values represented by faith and reason. Thus, researchers and clinicians regard themselves as free to draw upon insights of faith, when helpful, to illuminate truths of psychology and insights of psychology, to instruct and refine what they accept in faith. Call this endeavor the integration of faith and reason as regards the psychological sciences.
(4) Finally, at the IPS, it is held that the best clinical practice is that which is informed by a deep appreciation of psychological theory, and that theory receives its life from and should be tested against practice. Call this last, familiar type of integration the integration of psychological theory and clinical practice.
One shouldn’t neglect to observe that these four types of integration are far from being themselves unintegrated, since each reinforces and is informed by the others.