LCP Qualifying Course in Psychoanalytic
Psychotherapy (including Analytical Psychology)

The importance of an intensive training

The LCP is committed to providing an intensive training. Trainees are expected to be in at least three-times-weekly personal psychotherapy, and the training patients they work with are seen by them at least three times a week.

The aim of psychoanalytic psychotherapy is to engage with the most deep-seated and difficult feelings a person may have in order to help them with longstanding problems and think about making some kind of change in their life.

These difficult feelings will usually have originated in childhood. They may be deeply unconscious and out of the reach of rational thought, though still powerfully influential in a person’s life.

For example, protective barriers put up in childhood against situations and feelings that at the time felt unbearable may in later life become a fortress inside which, without realising it, the person is caught.

We might ask, why is one person so cautious, to the point of impoverishing their life?  Why is another so reckless, to the point of endangering theirs? By discovering the unconscious, childhood roots of such patterns these questions may begin to be understood.

The therapist’s task is to try to help a person identify the patterns of feeling and relating that they developed with the earliest figures in their lives and which they may now as adults be unknowingly repeating in ways that cause them great difficulty.

Disentangling the feelings that a patient brings to therapy is a long and detailed process. It takes time and day-to-day continuity for trust and closeness to develop between the patient and therapist, for unconscious feelings to be identified in the relationship between them, for a maze of emotions to be worked through again and again. It is essential for a therapist to be able to work in this way that they have the experience of an intensive training.

Frequency of work

This does not mean that a psychoanalytic psychotherapist will when qualified always see patients several times a week. An intensive training is however very important in equipping a therapist to work in a profound way when seeing patients less frequently.