The Functions of Safety in Psychotherapy: An Integrative Theoretical Perspective Across Therapeutic Schools

Objective: There is a certain consensus in the psychotherapeutic literature that safety plays a central role in human development and psychotherapy and that lack of safety undermines mental health. However, the role of safety in psychotherapy has not yet been thoroughly examined. In this article, we identify and integrate the different functions of safety in psychotherapy on a theoretical basis. Method: We made a panoramic overview of the concept of safety across some of the main psychotherapeutic schools that represent major paradigms in contemporary psychotherapy (psychodynamic, cognitive-behavioral, humanistic). We then analyzed, compared, and synthetized the findings to identify the common functions that safety plays both in ontogenesis and in clinical practice across different therapeutic orientations. Results: Our analysis showed that safety is indeed rightly prioritized across psychotherapy schools because of its developmental value in promoting change and adaptation both in ontogenesis and clinical settings. The findings suggest that the main functions of safety are to secure survival, facilitate restoration, promote exploration, sustain risk-taking, and enable integration, with these functions being complementary and dependent on the context. However, safety seems to be in a dialectical and paradoxical relationship to psychotherapy and human development. Adequate ontogenetic development and treatment progress do not appear to require continuous maintenance of maximum possible safety. Rather, they seem to require enough safety, adequately and timely modulated according to developmental needs and treatment phases. Conclusions: Although safety provides the necessary basis that enables restoration, fuels exploration, and facilitates treatment progress, safety's misdosage (e.g., lack, excess), misconstruction (e.g., misattunement, misinterpretation), or misuse (exploitation, idealization) may hinder the healthy development of attachment, identity, autonomy, self/co-regulation as well as the ability to tolerate and cope with dangers, risks, insecurities, or frustrations. Future research is suggested to further explore the role of safety in psychotherapy.