University Certificate in Person Centred and Experiential Psychotherapy (CU in PCPE)
Contextualization
Following the split of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KULeuven) and the Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain) in the 1970s, a post-master's training programme in PCPE was continued at both universities. From 1987 onwards, following the death of Prof. R. Volcher, the French-speaking training was taken over by the Training School of the Association Francophone de Psychothérapie Centrée sur la Personne et Expérientielle (AFPC asbl, https://www.afpc.be/). In 2016, the Belgian legislative framework regulating mental health care ("De Block" law of 18 May 2016) restricted the offer of training in psychotherapy within colleges and universities. As a result, psychologists and physicians no longer had curricula that allowed them to train in person-centred and experiential psychotherapy, even though it is a validated and scientifically based approach (see meta-analyses and literature reviews, Elliott, Greenberg, & Lietaer, 2004; Elliott, Watson, Greenberg, Timulak, & Freire, 2013; Zech, 2008), practised and taught worldwide.
In the French-speaking world, the Person Centred Approach is widely known in the world of teaching and training but is currently still neglected in clinical and health psychology programmes, fields dominated by the psychiatric, psychoanalytical, systemic or behavioural-cognitive-emotional paradigms. There was a strong need for training in CSLP. In 2018, the creation of the CU in CSLP at UCLouvain/PSP re-established the full university training in CSLP that has been going on at the KULeuven and that exists in many countries in the non-French speaking world (e.g., UK, USA, Canada, Australia, Italy, Japan, Russia, at master and/or post-master levels) The humanistic foundations of the CSLP correspond particularly well to the values promoted by UCLouvain, which has thus become the only French-speaking university in Europe offering this type of continuing education.
Description
The course consists of a specialisation and deepening of the training in psychotherapy of 105 ECTS spread over 3 years of training at a post-master level (see https://uclouvain.be/fr/etudier/iufc/formation-continue-pcpe.html). The CU aims to train exclusively psychologists and psychiatrists (according to the legal accreditation criteria in Belgium) in CBPP for various target client/patient groups (adults, children, couples, groups). It includes theoretical and clinical teaching (seminars by experts and by therapists in training, readings) as well as practical experiments in psychotherapeutic relationships (debriefed role plays, experiential meeting groups, e-learning site helpingskills), psychotherapy practice, individual or group clinical supervision and in training groups, personal therapy, intermediate work and an end-of-training paper. Its components will allow for a thorough articulation between the knowledge, skills and attitudes of the psychotherapists in training. The CU aims at the acquisition of knowledge and skills enabling the practice of psychotherapy in an autonomous, ethical, responsible and interdisciplinary manner with clients/patients suffering from various problems, including those defined in the international psychodiagnostic classifications. It aims above all and very explicitly, thanks to an offer of empirically validated active teaching methods, at the development of therapeutic skills involving the development of the psychotherapist's person. The face-to-face modules are given over 8 weekends per year, thus offering the potential to welcome international therapists.