Fear Integration Theory is new, but the questions underlying it are ancient.
Human beings have attempted to understand differences in temperament, fear, suffering and psychological balance for thousands of years.
The continuing development of FIT engages with ideas including:
Evolution and survival — the biological importance of threat detection and defensive responding.
Hippocratic and later humoral traditions — early attempts to understand temperament, individual difference and equilibrium within human functioning.
Jungian psychology — psychological preferences, differentiated ways of experiencing the world and the movement towards greater psychological integration.
Psychodynamic theory — unconscious processes, defence, internal conflict and the influence of earlier experience.
Attachment and relational theory — safety, connection and threat within human relationships.
Existential psychotherapy — mortality, freedom, isolation, uncertainty and meaning.
Trauma theory and neuroscience — the interaction between perceived threat, defensive responses, cognition, emotion and the body.
Systemic perspectives — recognition that distress cannot always be understood solely within the individual and may reflect the systems, cultures and environments in which they exist.
FIT brings these conversations together around a deceptively simple therapeutic question: