Integral Counseling Psychology Master’s Program
Master of Arts in Counseling Psychology, Concentration in Integral Counseling Psychology
About the Program
The Integral Counseling Psychology (ICP) program is one of five distinct master's in counseling psychology programs at CIIS. ICP was the first East-West, transpersonal psychology graduate program in the world. Transpersonal psychology is a framework in which Western schools of psychology are synthesized with the world's spiritual traditions. We view psychological healing and growth within the larger context of spiritual unfolding.
Educational Vision
- Transpersonal—Spiritual, greater than the individual, transcends the personal.
- Integral—Essential to wholeness, involving all aspects of a person, the synthesis of different theories.
- Transformative—Understand your own psyche in order to become a therapist and help the greater community.
- Experiential—Actually practice in real time what you are learning.
- Diversity—Awareness and process of threading cultural, gender, and sexual-orientation diversity throughout the program.
Our Approach
While behavioral, analytic, systemic, and humanistic-existential schools of psychology offer important visions of the psyche, they have largely ignored the spiritual dimension. The master's in counseling psychology programs at CIIS take an integral approach, which holds that psychological training must be inclusive of the spiritual to be complete.
A major emphasis of the Integral Counseling Psychology (ICP) program is on the two major streams of depth psychology: contemporary psychoanalytic and humanistic-existential.
We want students to become sophisticated in working with transference and countertransference dynamics in a relational approach to the psyche while also being astute to existential and somatic approaches incorporating the wisdom of the body.
Behavioral and family systems orientations are also taught in the ICP program. Because our education is so thorough, we consistently have one of the highest pass rates of all graduate degree programs in California for the Marriage and Family Therapist (MFT) exam.
This program is experiential, transformational, culturally sensitive, and centered on the inner work necessary for becoming a healer. We create a learning community that is both deeply supportive and profoundly challenging.
From the first class in Therapeutic Communication through the final Integrative Seminar, threads of spiritual integration, rigorous self-reflection and self-realization, and understanding and practicing the craft of psychotherapy are woven together by each student.
Rigorous and Challenging
Some students will be more stretched by the academic demands; others will be more challenged by the culture of ICP, which asks us to look inside ourselves and bring awareness to those parts that may limit our ability to freely connect with our clients; still others may find it is the clinical training that confronts their personal edges most directly.
The fundamental assumption behind ICP's integral education is that it is only in deeply engaging our own psychological healing that we are able to help our clients deeply engage in their own healing.
This is not a "neck up" education. Integral education is demanding on every level: body, heart, mind, spirit. It is also, we believe, profoundly rewarding.
Weekend Option
The ICP program at CIIS also offers a full-time weekend option in addition to its regular weekday schedule. The curriculum of this program (ICPW) mirrors that of the regular ICP program and takes three years to complete.
Master's in Counseling Psychology Programs
Learn about our other psychology graduate programs.
