Despite the many efforts to integrate psychoanalysis with CBT, many loyal therapists of each school have consistently refused to 'open their gate' to the other's influence. We explain this resistance as a way to preserve a strong professional identity through the Us-Them distinction. Any attempt to encourage loyal therapists to be influenced by the other school must guarantee that the other will not threaten their identity. We use Derrida's notion of hospitality to facilitate mutual influence between the schools while overcoming the other's threatening encounter. According to Derrida, hospitality, in response to the law of ethics, opens the home's threshold to the foreigner; in this law, the other is always welcome. At the same time, hospitality prevents a hostile takeoverby the law of politics, which ensures the owner's ongoing control over his house. By thus keeping the tension between openness and control over who enters, hospitality makes listening and learning between the psychotherapeutic schools possible. We discuss practical ways to put the concept of hospitality to work between the two schools, offer illustrations, and argue for this model's advantages.

Psychoanalysis, in its purist mainstream sense, tends to be considered as an isolationist discipline that steers clear of interdisciplinary connections with other psychotherapies. Its drive for purity does not open up to influences that cast as alien and a threat to its core principles. We refer to Hegelian dialectics in an attempt to offer an alternative approach to interdisciplinarity in clinical psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis entertains a complex dialectical relationship with the major theories it opposes. In this dynamic, psychoanalysis begins by negating the non-psychoanalytic theory as a part of self-negation (Hegel calls this phase self-alienation). But in its own process of growth, it negates this negation and reabsorbs the alienated self part. Reabsorbing the negated component, psychoanalysis does not revert to its original identity but becomes sublated into a different, more complex idea. In this epistemological process, psychoanalysis deals with its own practical and theoretical anomalies and lacunas. The paper illustrates this process using three central developments in the history of psychoanalysis: empathy in self psychology (connection with Rogers' humanist psychology), short-term dynamic psychotherapy (connection with short, intensive therapies), and mentalization-based psychotherapy (connection with cognitive-behavioral therapies). In all of these cases, psychoanalysis integrates components it previously opposed and changes these components to their own, specific characteristics. We address the epistemological shifts in the scientific status of psychoanalysis and show their connection to dialectics. Finally, we conclude that dialectical development is what allows psychoanalysis to remain relevant and up to date, to be open to interdisciplinary influences without its identity and tradition coming under threat.

Based on Hegel's dialectics, we argue that different psychotherapies considered monolithic such as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and psychoanalysis, even though they hold radically different views on human suffering and therapy's aims, profoundly influence each other. We call this mutual influence dialectical integration (DI). DI is the result of unconscious processes that are activated by antagonism and negation for self‐constitution. In a dialectically formative process, the self‐constitution of CBT and psychoanalysis each is achieved by means of the negation of part of itself, which undergoes alienation in the other, thereby superficially taking the form of a rejection of the other approach. But whenever theoretical or practical lacunae occur in the unfolding of these disciplines, they negate this primary negation and re‐internalize the alienated self‐component. This part does not return in its original—and negated—form, but, through a sublation introducing theoretical and practical development. This is illustrated here by Hartmann's ego psychology, Beck's cognitive theory, Young's schema therapy, and Bateman & Fonagy's mentalization‐based therapy (MBT). We show how these developments incorporate elements of otherness, which are not simply extraneous to the tradition but also part of it. We conclude by showing how DI gives rise to recognition and containment of otherness in both schools.