Self-Working: A Novel and Integrative Approach to Psychotherapy

by Reza Johari Fard

Over the past century, psychotherapy has evolved through diverse schools of thought-each focusing on specific dimensions of human experience, from unconscious processes and emotional regulation to cognition and interpersonal relationships. While these approaches have significantly advanced clinical practice, the challenge of theoretical integration remains unresolved.

Self-Working offers a novel and coherent integrative model designed to bridge this gap. Grounded in systems thinking and informed by contemporary psychotherapy integration, this model provides a structured yet flexible framework for understanding psychological growth across time.

At the core of the Self-Working approach lies a three-dimensional therapeutic pathway:

Being-on-This - working with the individual's past, personality, and foundational psychological structures.

Becoming-to-That - actively constructing the future through values, strengths, and personal meaning.

Life Theme - cultivating conscious, responsible, and creative living in the present moment.

Unlike symptom-focused or single-school therapies, Self-Working conceptualizes psychotherapy as a lifelong educational and developmental process, integrating body, emotion, cognition, and attention into a unified clinical framework.

This book is designed not only as a theoretical contribution, but as a practical clinical guide-offering therapists, researchers, and graduate students a comprehensive model for working with clients in a holistic, future-oriented, and culturally sensitive manner.

Key Features

A fully integrative psychotherapy model grounded in systems thinking

Combines psychodynamic, cognitive, humanistic, and experiential perspectives

Applicable to clinical practice, psychotherapy training, and academic research

Includes conceptual frameworks, therapeutic structure, and clinical rationale

Suitable for psychologists, counselors, psychotherapists, and mental health students

Who This Book Is For

Clinical psychologists and psychotherapists

Graduate and doctoral students in psychology and counseling

Researchers interested in integrative and systemic models

Mental health professionals seeking a coherent theoretical framework beyond single-school approaches

Self-Working represents the foundation of an emerging psychotherapy framework developed and implemented in clinical and academic settings over more than a decade.