The Field of Psychotherapy: Conceptual and Ethical Definitions (original) (raw)
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The author uses an anthropological perspective to consider how certain social conditions of training institutes, through the stresses they evoke, render trainees susceptible to the instruction of seniors. And depending on that which seniors advocate -'inclusive' or 'closed' therapeutic adherence -trainees will be influenced in that direction as practitioners. In this sense the internalization of clinical perspectives is facilitated by certain exacting conditions of psychotherapeutic training which generate this anxiety. This argument exposes for those desiring clinical reform two sites at which it might be profitably directed: at the social conditions of the training institute which arouse susceptibilities, or else at the instruction, which, by capitalizing on such susceptibilities, inculcates particular clinical values and perspectives. He concludes that if changes are to be brought to such perspectives then it is the social conditions of the training institute that need to be altered.
Teaching and transformation: A psychoanalytic perspective on psychotherapeutic training
British Journal of Psychotherapy, 2009
While there has been much recent interest in the impact of organizational structures underpinning psychotherapeutic training (e.g. Davies 2008; Kernberg 2006), there has been curiously little interest in the impact of interpersonal dynamics on the process of teaching psychotherapy. In this paper, I draw on my experience as a university lecturer and tutor on a postgraduate counselling and psychotherapy training programme to explore some of the unconscious dynamics underpinning the psychotherapy trainee’s development towards a mature professional identity. The implicit expectations that trainee psychotherapists hold at the start of their training are initially discussed; I then turn to psychoanalytic writers such as Bollas, Winnicott and Jessica Benjamin in an attempt to articulate and explore how trainees may progress from relating, to constructive use of their tutors in their quest for personal transformation and professional recognition.
" Trainees' perceptions on their role as developing therapists/ counselors "
Being therapists and trainers ourselves, we are interested in the overarching question of how psychotherapists and counselors develop. After reviewing the relevant literature, we decided to conduct a qualitative pilot study to help us refine the questionnaire of a wider quantitative and qualitative research project we are planning to run in the future, about how systemic psychotherapists/counselors in Greece, develop. At this stage, we devised and administered to sixty eight (68) trainees of our training institute, a brief questionnaire inquiring their views and perceptions on their role as psychotherapists/counselors. Our findings seem to go along with conclusions drawn from wider relevant research. However, at some points we came up with differentiations. The more our trainees go through personal therapy and supervision, the more conscious they become of the need to protect themselves. Furthermore, novices worry more about their personal development, whereas apprentices tend to worry more about their professional development. Moreover, an issue that has drawn our attention is that, while associations define the competencies of a therapist in terms of theoretical knowledge and specific skills and techniques, our trainees focus more on the emotional and relational aspects of the therapeutic process.
Psychoanalytic training—who is afraid of evaluation?
The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2018
Many aspects of the institutional life and organizational functioning of psychoanalysis deal with and are affected by evaluation. This paper focuses on one manifestation of this difficulty, namely the evaluation of candidates in psychoanalytic training. Opinions vary regarding its place, necessity, and contribution. Although it is at least nominally practiced in many institutes, it is nonetheless fraught with difficulty. We explore some of the sources and nature of what hampers the function of evaluation of candidates, employing Bion's Basic Assumptions and their effect on institutional dynamics. Related issues include the ambiguity surrounding the role and authority of the supervisory role and the present theoretical diversity. The role and function of the supervisor is central to this evaluation and focal in our discussion. Our presentation draws on and makes use of the findings of the EPF End of Training Evaluation Project (ETEP).
British Journal of Guidance & Counselling, 2007
Grounded in a narrative account of the author's own development as a counselling practitioner, it is argued that a programmatic developmental path for therapy practitioners can be singularly inappropriate. Such a route to practitionerhood threatens to interfere with, and even fundamentally to undermine, the necessarily unique idiosyncrasies of practitioner development, and the often ineffable, unspecifiable nature of the therapeutic process itself. Some tensions lying at the heart of the attempt to professionalise the therapy field in Britain are articulated in this personal chronicled history of principled challenge to statutory regulation. The Independent Practitioners Network is introduced as an approach to accountability that strives to avoid many of the worst incoherencies of the 'modernist' bureaucratic institution, and suggestions are made as to how we might enable diverse, innovative practitioner development in Late Modernity. Introduction: the 'state of practitioner development we're in' 'Let us search. .. for an epistemology of practice implicit in the artistic, intuitive processes which some practitioners do bring to situations of uncertainty, instability, uniqueness, and value conflict' (Schö n, 1983, p. 49). In this paper I present discursive retrospective reflections on my own particular 'journey' as a developing counselling practitioner, as a vehicle for generating some more general propositions about the future of practitioner development in what is an emerging 'trans-' or 'postmodern' future for our field (House, 2008, accepted). As I have discussed at length elsewhere (House, 2003, pp. 277Á280, 305Á307), recent trends towards the institutional professionalisation of the field are fraught with difficulty and contradiction, and for a whole host of complex interrelated reasons.
Moving beyond modernist discourses of psychological therapy
European Journal of Psychotherapy and Counselling, 1998
This paper begins with a critical evaluation of British counselling psychology's aspirations for a scientific basis and considers some of the consequences in terms of theoretical assumptions and research practice. Through identifying certain empirical, theoretical and ideological problems inherent in the dominant tradition of quantifying inferred cognitive constructs (using the example of trainee self-talk), an alternative framework of discursive psychology is simultaneously introduced. The argument is made for a discursive study of storied meanings by trainee counselling psychologists about themselves and their work. This would potentially address two pivotal research areas. First, it affords both a personal and yet socially embedded framework for an increased understanding and more sensitive evaluation of the training process (with its acquisition of skills, knowledge, experience, competencies, etc.). Second, it offers an alternative approach to the problematic area of understanding unique and generic interactions between practitioners and their preferred psychological model(s) of therapy, thus challenging the theoretical and research cul-de-sac of competing modernist visions of purism, eclecticism and integration. Extending from these observations two research possibilities are suggested.
CREATING THE PSYCHOTHERAPIST'S IDENTITY IN THE TRAINING AND SUPERVISION PROGRAM
International Journal of Supervision in Psychotherapy, 2022
Psychotherapists are humans, and humans have different personalities and identities. So not all psychotherapists are the same, they develop differently; they have different perspectives in life and go through different training programs. Psychotherapists discover during training what motivates them in their practice, what they need to accomplish, how they need to behave with clients, with colleagues, with supervisors. Identity is also shaped in training being challenged by development both in theory and in practice, but also in supervision being challenged by the supervisory alliance and by the therapeutic relationship with the client.
Training and disillusion in Counselling Psychology: A psychoanalytic perspective
Psychology and Psychotherapy: theory, …, 2006
In this paper, I argue* that Counselling Psychology’s professional identification with pluralism poses significant emotional problems for trainees. An important factor in such problems may be the trainee’s sense of disappointment and disillusion that the route to professional and personal self-transformation will not be achieved via a set of universal theoretical principles and established clinical ‘rules’. I draw on recent psychoanalytic theory to suggest that the task facing trainees involves balancing pluralism, characterized as an ‘external’ third position, with an ‘internal’ third space indexing an awareness of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Maintaining a dialogical-dialectical perspective on these two positions allows for a creative space in which the trainee may be transformed from lay helper into professional counselling psychologist via a personal engagement with theoretical, clinical and academic material presented during training.