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Successful psychotherapy achieves integration. Integration requires identification with all vital functions -- not with only some of the patient’s ideas, emotions and actions. Any rejection of one’s own ideas, emotions or actions results in alienation. Reowning allows the person to be whole. The task, then, in therapy is to have the person become aware of previously alienated parts and taste them, consider them and assimilate them if they are ego-syntonic or reject them if they prove to be ego-alien. Jim Simkin has used the simile of a cake in encouraging patients to reown the parts of themselves that they have considered noxious or otherwise unacceptable: although the oil, or flour, or baking powder by themselves can be distasteful, they are indispensable to the success of the whole cake.
-- Gary Yontef, Awareness, Dialogue, and Process
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