Walking the tightrope: developing an attachment-based/relational curriculum for trainee psychotherapists.

Abstract

I describe how the Centre for Attachment-based Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (CAPP) in London has gone about developing an attachment-based/relational curriculum for training psychotherapists. A key problem the training is meant to address is how to maintain a balance between enabling students to absorb research and clinical knowledge of psychological processes at the same time as they learn to maintain the flexibility necessary to address the uniqueness of each individual encounter in the consulting room. I describe the task of the training in terms of a linguistic metaphor: the training needs to ensure that students are theoretically multi-lingual while developing higher levels of fluency in the language of attachment-based/relational psychotherapy. In the pursuit of this approach, my colleagues and I developed a set of ten key propositions - the spine of the relational world - which we felt encapsulated the main theoretical assumptions of attachment-based practice that students need to understand and explore. This has been used to evolve a spiral curriculum, designed to help students engage constructively with the often confusing emotional aspects of clinical work, and with the multiplicity of clinical viewpoints that characterises contemporary psychoanalytic psychotherapy.