About this course

This is the entry level course to our adult psychotherapy cluster of professional training programmes and is suitable if you are taking your first steps towards a qualification in counselling or psychotherapy.

It is also a popular CPD opportunity for people working in health care, education, social care or the voluntary sector who want to deepen their understanding of mental health issues.

For others who work in unrelated fields, it is an opportunity to begin a course of study that may open up new career opportunities, as well as new ways of thinking about the world we live in

Over the year, the course involves:

• weekly online theory lectures and reading seminars
• weekly online workplace discussion seminars
• opportunities to develop psychoanalytic observational skills, which are fundamental to therapeutic work
• engagement with video lectures available on our online system
• weekly set readings
• a weekly self-reflective journal
• termly online individual tutorials
• a workplace observation project (to be arranged by you)

The requirement to undertake a workplace observation project is a significant component of the course. Ideally, this should be in place before the course begins.

The project may be within your own current workplace if you work in a healthcare, education or other related profession. If that is not applicable, you will be required to organise a voluntary placement in a suitable setting.

It is strongly advised that placements are organised and secured prior to, or immediately following the commencement of the course to fully maximise your learning experience and opportunity whilst enrolled.

Examples of suitable placements include: a mental healthcare setting (local mental health or hospital setting), a charitable organisation or an educational setting (a school or youth centre).

The placement can be a purely observational experience, such as observing a support group in a mental health clinic or psychiatric unit. You could also opt for a more hands-on experience of becoming a befriender for clients who come to your chosen centre or service, or taking a group of children or young people for an activity in an educational or youth programme setting. A number of our students take up roles with elderly or homeless service users and find these roles very rewarding.

We ask that you put aside at least two hours per week for your placement. Alongside this, each week you are required to write a work observation report (1,500 words); you will take turns to present this in weekly work discussion seminars.

Term one

‘Introduction to the psychotherapeutic domain’ will be studied via the following units:

• beginnings
• thinking about observation
• introducing psychoanalysis – Freud and the unconscious
• therapeutic practice and the setting
• Klein and the paranoid schizoid position
• unconscious phantasy
• Klein and the depressive position
• transference and counter-transference
• projective identification

Term two

‘Human psychological development and the therapeutic process’ will be studied via the following units:

• infancy and early childhood
• the third object and the Oedipal situation
• later childhood
• adolescence
• adulthood and later life
• old age
• psychic pain
• trauma
• difference and diversity

Term three

‘Clinical applications of psychoanalytic thinking’ will be studied via the following units:

• depression
• personality disorder
• psychosis
• suicide
• risk assessment and risk management
• endings