Abstract 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. Nevertheless, the role of safety in psychotherapy has not yet been systematically examined. Therefore, we analyzed and compared the concept of safety across some main psychotherapeutic schools (psychodynamic, cognitive-behavioral, humanistic). Our goal was to identify and integrate the different functions of safety in psychotherapy on a transtheoretical basis. Our analysis showed that safety is rightly prioritized across psychotherapy schools mainly because a lack of safety activates psychobiological defense systems. Our findings suggest that the main role of safety is to secure survival, facilitate restoration, promote exploration, sustain risk-taking, and enable integration, with these functions being complementary and dependent on the context. It appears that the effective functioning of human development and psychotherapy does not require the continuous maintenance of the maximum possible safety, but enough safety. Although safety provides the necessary basis for an adequate ontogenetic development as well as for 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, with negative consequences on the therapeutic process. Future research is suggested to further explore the role of safety in psychotherapy.
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Martin Podolan (2022) studied this question.