A Case Report of Dialectical Integrative Therapy for Self-Injuring Behavior (Individual and Family Therapy)

Abstract

NSSI is a serious public health problem. Repeated self-injury behavior of patients is the characteristic of this disease and also the difficulty of treatment. This paper records a case of using dialectical integration therapy to intervene in NSSI patients and obtain the curative effect. Dialectical integration therapy (DIT) is a comprehensive psychotherapy method, which takes the philosophical thought of materialist dialectics as the guiding principle, comprehensively uses various psychotherapy techniques, regards cases as a whole, continuously pays attention to the main contradiction of the overall development, and uses the category of dialectical philosophy to promote the development of contradictions in order to achieve the curative effect. The five important categories of dialectical philosophy are cause and result, inevitability and contingency, possibility and reality, phenomenon and essence, and content and form. DIT regards the mental state as a state of continuous change and regards disease as a special mental state to discuss the time and reason for state transition and deal with it. DIT attaches importance to family therapy and believes that people’s important concepts are mainly formed in the family. In the process of family therapy, we should regard the family as a whole and pay attention to the main contradictions of the family as a whole and the expectations and contradictions among members.