Certificate in Advanced Psychodyamics

Qualification in Counselling, Psychotherapy or other helping professionals with therapeutic experience . Students currently in training will be considered, on the understanding that the Certificate qualification cannot be used until they have qualified.Entry is by application form.

Knowledge:

• Having completed this module, you  will be able to:demonstrate a competent understanding of the origins and development of the ego psychology, object relations and self psychology schools;
• critically discuss how primary relationships and their associated conscious and unconscious processes influence later life and development and how this is accounted for by each of these schools;
• demonstrate an advanced critical awareness of the usefulness of these approaches in terms of:the key concepts of each school;
• the process of and strategies of psychotherapeutic helping;
• the limitations and criticisms of the approach.

Skills

• Having completed this module, you will be able to:
• be aware of symptoms as deficits in the ego’s attempts to adapt to and master the environment;
• attend to the range, flexibility and developmental stage of ego defences;
• engage and work with the history of a client’s early relationships, and subsequent development of the ego;
• identify missing developmental needs and provide an attuned, reparative therapeutic relationship in terms of – for example: holding, mirroring, play and healing the split between good and bad inner objects;
• analyse resistance and work with transference disruption, regression and restoration.

Assessment
Trainees are required to write a critical essay of 5,000 words on one of the following:

(a)a critical appraisal of the post-classical psychodynamic approaches, and a discussion of how the trainee would propose  to include such skills or theories in their own personal psychotherapeutic style
or
(b)a comparative analysis between any two post-Freudian psychodynamic theorists. Specific reference must be made to the impact of the approach you have chosen on contemporary models of counselling and psychotherapy and on your own practice


Assessed Award:
PCI COLLEGE CERT IN ADVANCED PSYCHODYNAMICS

Fees: €750 (€500 for PCI College Students and Graduates)

Fees are non-refundable in all personal circumstances. All courses run subject to demand and the formation of a viable class cohort. A full refund will be given to all applicants in the event that the class does not proceed.

Dr. Barbara Dowds

B.A., Ph.D., Dip. Creat. Couns., Cert. Body Psych., Cert. Gestalt, MIACP, MIAHIP
Lecturer and Module Coordinator

Barbara was a university lecturer in molecular genetics. In 2002 she qualified as a therapist and set up a private practice specialising in identity, existential crisis and development issues. She has also been a teacher of co-counselling and has done training in Body Psychotherapy and Gestalt. Barbara is on the theaching faculty of PCI College, where she coordinates the psychodunamic, advanced psychodynamic and research modules. She is on the editorial board of Eistech, the journal of the IACP.