36th BABCP Annual Conference, University of Edinburgh 16th-19th July 2008

Bridging the gap between Cognitive theory and therapy: using ICS to inform CBT

ICS Symposium 2008

CBT needs Interacting Cognitive Subsystems now more than ever, and recent publications show clinicians and researchers rising to this challenge, some of whom are represented in this Symposium. The crucial role of dual systems of processing in the inherant instability of the human mind is acknowledged in a variety of formulations ('situationally' and 'verbally accessible memory', ACT and Relational Frame Theory, Linehan's 'Emotion Mind' and 'Reasonable Mind' dichotomy in DBT). Mindfulness is increasingly employed as a therapeutic tool across diagnosis to bridge this duality. ICS provides the most comprehensive and coherant rationale for this development (Teasdale & Barnard 1993).

Research increasingly demonstrates that therapeutic approaches that engage the whole body, the senses and the emotions win out over the purely cerebral – witness the success of the use of imagery; behavioural experiments (Bennet-Levy..) and empty chair techniques (Gilbert; Chadwick). ICS provides a sound rationale here too.

CBT relies for its clinical effectiveness on a collaboratively shared rationale. As a science based therapy, this rationale needs an authentic grounding in cognitive science for credibility. ICS provides such a rationale for the easily understood and normalising 'Emotion Mind'/'Reasonable Mind' split in information processing systems; for the use of mindfulness to bridge that split, and for techniques that engage body, senses and arousal system in the therapeutic enterprise. Taken together it represents a clear, experimentally based, cross diagnostic way of making sense of psychopathology, in the context of normal functioning.

This Symposium offers a variety of experimental justifications for adopting this formulation (Kinderman and Duff) and clinical applications of it (Nick White and Michael Townend).