Psychosocial Understandings and Reflective Practice

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 6
• Convenor: Sian Macfie
• Assessment: a 1000-word piece of self-reflective writing (0%) and 2500-word essay (100%)

This module focuses on deepening your understanding of psychodynamic thinking with an increased focus on psychosocial perspectives. Mini lectures and weekly readings are provided.

During the module you will continue to deepen your understanding of individual, group and organisational process and you will further develop your skills of personal self-awareness and professional reflective practice.

In the work discussion seminar you will further develop your capacity to interpret intersubjective situations through a psychodynamic lens.

In the Thinking Space group you will explore how the experience of identity and difference are socially constructed and you will develop your capacity for recognising issues of inclusion and exclusion and the operation of power within group and organisational space.

Indicative module syllabus

• The psychosocial: politics and psychoanalysis
• Psychoanalytic and psychosocial views of difference and inequality
• Difference and power: introduction to Thinking Space
• Thinking about specific themes from psychoanalytic and psychosocial perspectives (trauma; anxiety/defences; depression/loss/mourning)
• Organisational contexts
• Containment and thinking
• Values and ethics
• Applied psychoanalytic/psychosocial thinking in caregiving settings; working with diverse client groups; developing an inclusive practice
• Endings

By the end of this module, you will be able to:

• apply your understanding of the range of psychoanalytic theory and psychosocial perspectives to think critically about helping roles
• demonstrate a capacity for self-reflection and reflective professional practice
• demonstrate an understanding of the basic elements of the professional, organisational and social context of caring roles
• demonstrate an understanding of how psychosocial categories of identity and difference (race, gender etc) are constructed, experienced, negotiated and articulated in the Thinking Space group.