Psychotherapy Corey's ultimate recommendation, when it comes to the different schools of psychotherapy, is to pursue an integrative approach, in which the different methods are combined and individually tailored to suit the client. This seems ultimately very sensible, but the goals for my own practice are highly specific, and I think it is worth considering the ways in which I might be able to integrate different techniques in a practice that focuses on life coaching and career counseling.

The chief advantage of traditional Freudian psychoanalysis is that it encourages the patient to talk as much as possible with very little intervention by the therapist. I still consider this to be a useful technique to start. A therapist can only work with what he or she is given. But when the therapist's specific area of professional expertise is life coaching, a certain number of assumptions can be made about what sort of client will walk in the door. The clients that I can expect to be handling...

Consequently I imagine that my own method will probably use the Freudian technique of encouraging the client simply to talk, or even to free-associate, until certain patterns or even contradictions become evident. The more a client has to say about anything at all represents the more that the therapist has to work with, in this scenario. So as a form of methodology this seems very appealing to me, even if I find its underlying theory of mind to be largely irrelevant to the sort of work that I intend to do. I am certain I can integrate Freudian notions of parental-child relations if they seem specifically relevant to a client's issues in terms of career change or motivation, but it does not strike me that these…