Basic Psychodynamic Competencies and Professional Attitude

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 7
• Assessment: coursework (100%)

This module is practical and experientially based. You will take part in personal therapy, which is key to professional growth. You will 'become' a client and so experience at first hand how therapy works, and in so doing develop a capacity for self-knowledge and self-reflection. Through this there is ‘modelling’ in which you experience at first hand issues of technique such as ‘boundaries’, confidentiality etc. During this stage of the course, clinical work and supervision contribute greatly to a growing sense of professional identity.

Indicative module content

• Enhanced understanding of issues of confidentiality
• Understanding liaison
• Professional boundaries in counselling
• Working with self/other disclosures
• Linking understanding to child protection/safeguarding issues
• Self-reflection in the counselling context
• Personal processes
• Appropriate communication to others
• Building on  psychodynamically formulated awareness of impact of self on others and vice versa
• Developmental issues arising from early childhood through to adolescence and adulthood
• Applications of practice-based clinical and organisational issues to experiential learning

By the end of this module, you will have:

• skills in thinking psychodynamically about counselling/therapy issues, and making professional communications about counselling/therapy work
• increased capacity for self-reflection, especially knowledge of your inner world and how it impacts on counselling/therapy work, and your role in groups and institutions
• developed the capacity for professional and ethical thinking in counselling/therapy
• experience of clinical practice - establishing a therapeutic alliance, formulating a psychodynamic assessment and understanding of presenting cases, understanding the psychodynamics of a number of disorders
• awareness of transference/countertransference phenomenon and its impact on counselling/therapy work
• understanding of the role of the counsellor in a specific setting.