Fulfilment as Integration: A Principle of the Victory Within Method™
Fulfilment is often described in simple terms: satisfaction, happiness, or the absence of unmet need. Yet, within clinical practice, such definitions fail to capture its depth. Is fulfilment merely the sum of gratifications, or is it something more demanding, rooted in the integration of self, desire, and relationship?
This writing considers fulfilment not as a static state, but as a dynamic outcome of integration. Drawing from psychoanalysis, attachment theory, and contemporary relational approaches, I will argue that fulfilment arises when the fractured parts of the self are held together within both internal and relational coherence.
The Question of Fulfilment
Freud conceived of fulfilment as the successful discharge of libidinal energy, but his account narrowed desire to a biological mechanism. Later theorists complicated this view: Winnicott, for instance, highlighted the capacity to live authentically within relationships, while Bowlby reframed fulfilment in terms of secure bonds. These positions point to a question that continues to press upon practice: can fulfilment exist without both autonomy and connection?
Integration as Condition
The Victory Within Method™ places integration at the centre of its philosophy. Integration here does not mean perfection, nor the elimination of conflict. Rather, it refers to the capacity to hold contradictions without collapse: the wish for closeness alongside the wish for independence, the presence of erotic longing alongside the need for safety, the vulnerability of self-disclosure alongside the instinct for protection.
Fulfilment arises not from choosing one pole over the other, but from sustaining both in relation. The divided self that cannot tolerate such tension finds only temporary satisfaction; the integrated self can inhabit desire without fear and intimacy without loss of individuality.
Clinical Implications
In practice, this view of fulfilment has significant consequences. It requires counsellors to attend not only to what the client lacks, but to what remains fragmented. The question is less “what is missing?” and more “what cannot yet be held together?” In this sense, fulfilment is not gifted by the counsellor, nor achieved through simple resolution of problems, but cultivated as clients develop tolerance for integration.
Conclusion
To treat fulfilment as integration is to reject reductionist definitions of happiness or need satisfaction. Instead, it recognises the human capacity to live with complexity as the hallmark of vitality. Within the Victory Within Method™, fulfilment is neither escape nor indulgence; it is the achievement of coherence, where desire and intimacy sustain rather than diminish one another.
