Unified therapy is a model for individual psychotherapy for personality disorders, repetitive self-destructive behavior patterns, and chronic depression and anxiety. It combines ideas from most major psychotherapy schools. In particular, it attempts to alter patients’ repetitive dysfunctional family-of-origin interactions that trigger and perpetuate problematic behavior.

Historical Context

Human psychology is so complicated that there are hundreds of competing schools of thought about psychological processes and behavior change. Empirical studies of psychological theories are often problematic because mental processes are often not observable. According to the unified therapy model, each theory is multifactorial, so all schools have some ideas that are valid while also containing incomplete or inaccurate ideas.

In response to this complexity, the psychiatrist David Allen developed unified therapy in the early 1980s in an attempt to ...

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