Research Program
A Research Program in Development
The Integrative State Framework for Psychotherapy (ISF) is a scholarly research program developing a state-based, depth-oriented framework for studying experiential configurations that appear to support integrative psychological processes within ethically regulated therapeutic contexts. ISF is situated within the broader research domain of State Integration in Psychotherapy (SIP) and is currently organized around a single formalized construct, the Stable Dual Awareness State (SDAS), with additional constructs anticipated as the program develops.
Position Within the Broader Research Domain
SIP Research treats state integration as a cross-theoretical domain of inquiry. Within that domain, ISF represents a focused conceptual program with defined constructs, explicit epistemic commitments, and a planned pathway toward empirical validation. ISF does not position itself as a rival to established psychotherapy models. It is offered as a framework in the sense articulated by Varpio and colleagues, a structure that organizes observation, generates comparison, and anchors research questions, rather than a theory that explains causes.
The ISF program's research posture is deliberately narrow. Its legitimacy is staked on the empirical viability of its first formalized construct. If that construct proves codable by independent raters and distinguishable from adjacent constructs, the framework gains empirical footing and additional features become legitimate targets for investigation. If the central codeability claim fails, the program will be revised or abandoned at that level. This falsifiable commitment is central to how ISF understands its own scientific standing.
Intellectual Lineage
ISF develops within an identifiable intellectual lineage that is acknowledged openly rather than minimized.
The depth-psychological tradition, particularly Jung's accounts of active imagination and the transcendent function, provides the closest structural precedent for the configurations ISF examines. Active imagination describes a procedure in which conscious participation is maintained alongside emergent unconscious material, allowing figures, images, and inner exchange to unfold within a held-open space. The transcendent function describes the integrative movement that becomes possible when conscious and unconscious positions are sustained in tension rather than collapsed into one or the other. The structural parallels with the configurations ISF examines are substantial. ISF acknowledges this lineage without committing to Jungian metapsychology and situates itself within the contemporary reconsideration of depth-psychological concepts through the lenses of cognitive neuroscience, attachment theory, and emergentist accounts of mind.
The clinical hypnosis tradition provides the proximate clinical lineage from which the framework's observational base developed. Much of the phenomenology ISF describes would be recognizable to practicing clinical hypnotists, and the framework's debt to hypnotic traditions is substantial, particularly regarding absorption, imaginative involvement, and altered experiential organization. ISF does not, however, position itself as a form of hypnosis or as a successor to hypnotic theory. The framework's specific contribution is the proposal that a process-level distinction may be usefully tracked within and across hypnotic, experiential, and depth-oriented modalities, a distinction that existing vocabularies within each tradition have not yet operationalized as a codable observational unit.
ISF also draws on the integrative psychotherapy literature, affect-focused and experiential traditions, somatic trauma therapies, focusing-oriented approaches, polyvagal theory, memory reconsolidation research, predictive processing accounts of change, and phenomenological philosophy of mind. The framework's cross-theoretical orientation reflects a judgment that the configurations it studies appear across modalities rather than within any single school.
Program Trajectory
ISF is currently in an early framework-development stage. The first formalized construct SDAS is prepared for peer-review submission. Planned work includes inter-rater reliability studies to test the central codeability claim, comparative process studies across experiential modalities, and mechanism-oriented investigation in collaboration with researchers equipped for that methodological range. Additional constructs within ISF may be introduced as the empirical and conceptual work develops.
ISF is not a manualized treatment, a proprietary method, a clinical training program, or a consumer-facing product. It is a scholarly research program whose continued development depends on empirical examination, disciplined comparison with adjacent constructs, and ongoing engagement with the broader integrative psychotherapy research community.
Contact
Clinicians or researchers with academic or research-related inquiries may contact Andrew A. Amend, LSCSW, at andrew@sipresearch.org. Inquiries are reviewed selectively, and responses may be limited based on relevance, scope, and availability.
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