Training in Psychotherapy - Paperback

Reflections on training, demystification, internship experiences, and research This is a book about training, desire, and setting. But it is also a somewhat biased book. For once, it takes the side of psychology trainees and their tutors, grappling with the vicissitudes of their human and educational journeys, and who continue to do an enormous amount of unpaid work in Public Services. It is thanks to them that many patients have been able to receive, often in absurd settings, listening, a glance, and very often psychotherapy. But how much are internships supported by the Services, the Universities, the Ministry of University and Research (MUR)? What are the relationships between Psychotherapy Schools, Institutions, and Tutors? What the trainees do is never known, but how many hospitalizations have been avoided thanks to their youthful passion, made available to certain patients that no one would have ever followed? And how many medications and psychiatric visits have been saved? Internships expose the many issues related to the psychologists themselves working in public realities, and more generally our professional image and our status. The book is therefore also a way to talk about those who have already been trained and those who have training duties. Are we good teachers? Is training a matter of training or bildung? Is psychotherapy a profession or a liberal art? The book tries to address the issue of the "craft" of the psychotherapist, today more than ever in conflict between the standardization of a profession ordered by the State and the creativity and subjectivity, which are learned only in the workshop. Indeed, the old adage holds that "psychotherapy is learned but not taught." Is the training we propose applicable with the patients that young people encounter today in the Services or at the beginning of their activity? We aim to glimpse what we believe to be the essence of therapeutic training and the "real" effort that the young psychotherapist must face. From this point of view, internships in the Services are for the trainee "a good place to test the desire." Initiation places, where one confronts oneself and where much of the learned theory is "tested." One arrives at graduation with an imaginary about the profession that is sometimes disarming. The internship cuts the umbilical cord: Institutions do not make concessions, and patients, with their typical public service pathology, do not "help" to remain a student. Training and effort are also discussed by three "former trainees" who experienced the Fatebenefratelli with the author, hoping to sensitize young colleagues not to "get lost" in the varied world of training and not to be influenced by false knowledge and bad mentors. Thanks for the collaboration: Roberto Doronzo, Francesca Petrillo, Milena Spera. Authors: Franco Merlini