Brief Psychodynamic Psychotherapy - Intermediate Certificate

Explore the Freudian model of the mind, detailing the id, ego, and superego, and the iceberg metaphor. See how therapy brings unconscious drives and moral rules into awareness.

Identify how character structure shapes reality testing across healthy, neurotic, borderline, and psychotic patterns. Use a coffee date scenario to demonstrate each structure’s distortion of reality and related anxious defenses.

Explore Malan's triangles of conflict as the core framework in brief psychodynamic therapy, linking feelings, anxiety, defenses, and transference with past figures, current figures, and the therapist.

Contrast psychoanalysis with brief psychodynamic therapy's active, problem-focused approach. Brief psychodynamic therapy articulates issues, pressures feelings, confronts resistance and transference, enabling rapid unlocking of the unconscious and childhood memories.

Explore optional initial steps for brief psychodynamic therapy, including introductions, consent, confidentiality, video-recording, and funding information. Also assess suitability, address biological issues, and establish a therapeutic frame and termination plan.

Engage in brief psychodynamic therapy to bring up feelings, tolerate them, and reduce anxiety, depression, and defenses by exploring the triangle of conflict and early attachments.

Therapists guide the patient in psychodynamic therapy to declare an emotional problem, explore its impact, and co-create a psychodynamic formulation with goals, informed consent, and strategies to work through resistance.

Treat each session as a first session in brief psychodynamic therapy, ask what problem they'd like you to help with, minimize small talk, and consolidate learnings for life outside therapy.

Explore core emotions—happiness, sadness, anger, anxiety, fear, surprise, disgust—and contempt as it relates to anger; distinguish fear from anxiety and note social emotions like guilt, love, jealousy, pride, empathy.

Learn how emotions feel in the body as activation patterns, with red signaling high activation and blue underactivation. Anger activates chest, head, hands, and feet; sadness shuts down the body.

Explore how early parental responses to anger, sadness, and guilt shape clients' difficulty tolerating these emotions and the anxiety and defenses from attachment injuries.

Explore present emotions in psychodynamic psychotherapy using emotionally evocative questions. Differentiate emotions toward self and toward others, notice sensations, and tolerate impulses to reduce anxiety.

Experience emotions in the body to guide change, including anger, sadness, and guilt. Notice anger’s bodily tension, recognize its boundary function, repair to prevent recurrence, and let go of rumination.

Explore Malan's triangles to show anxiety from mixed emotions and defenses. Regulate anxiety, identify bodily cues, and differentiate anger from anxiety to strengthen self-observation.

Explore three anxiety pathways—somatic, smooth-muscle, and central nervous system—and their linked defense patterns, from isolation of affect to repression and fragility, with symptoms forecasting therapy dynamics.

Frame depressed patients within the moderate anxiety spectrum using polyvagal theory, linking depression to the freeze response from parasympathetic activation in the triangle of conflict.

Identify high anxiety signs beyond sighs: observe fidgeting, leg shakes, and repeated tapping, assess for hyperactivity or ADHD, and consider fear, splitting, and projections if movements are absent.

Explore how defenses in the therapy room reduce anxiety, how to assess when they cause suffering, and how to challenge them with patient consent to strengthen the therapeutic alliance.

Explore non-verbal tactical defenses in psychodynamic therapy, including gaze avoidance, disengaged posture, smiling as a defense, and absence from sessions, with curiosity about countertransference and transference resistance.

Delve into verbal tactical defenses in brief psychodynamic psychotherapy, such as vagueness, diversification, hypothetical terms, distancing, and avoidance, and learn to block and address them to sharpen emotional focus.

Explore repressive defenses in psychodynamic therapy, such as intellectualization, rumination, suppression, and displacement, and learn to identify and challenge these defenses to connect patients with their emotions.

Identify and address character defenses such as self-neglect, pseudo incapacity, passive persona, externalization, perfectionism, and self-attack in psychodynamic psychotherapy to understand their impact on anxiety and progress.

Explore regressive defenses in fragile spectrum patients, including splitting, projection, and projective identification, and learn to regulate anxiety, address externalizing behaviors like defiance and discharge, and manage countertransference in therapy.

Explore somatization as a defense that foregrounds anxiety symptoms, with examples like psychogenic migraines, and address denials—primitive, psychotic, manic, regressive—using diffusion and latent-content analysis.

Block projection and avoidance, then name the defense and help patients differentiate it as a separate mental process. Seek permission to challenge the defense and turn it against itself.

Engage in experiential brief psychodynamic therapy to help clients feel their emotions and build emotionally close relationships, while challenging defenses, regulating anxiety, and addressing the triangle of conflict.

Therapists help patients move from defenses to feelings by tracing rising anxiety, uncovering underlying emotions, and exploring how these emotions are experienced in the body.

Review the dynamic sequence and the basic process of therapy: patient declares an emotional problem, provides a specific example, develops a psycho diagnosis, and expresses will to work through resistances.

Wrap up this course by covering the triangle of conflict and previewing the triangle of persons, transference, resistance, countertransference, and techniques for unlocking the unconscious and repression of memories.