Stage Three: Advanced Clinical Training

What does Stage Three cover?

Having built your practice within Transactional Analysis, Stage Three sets TA alongside the traditions it grew out of and those it sits beside: psychoanalytic and psychodynamic thinking, relational and existential approaches, and the ecological turn in contemporary psychotherapy. You consider what each of them can offer the people you work with.

The content below is indicative. Topics and their order vary from year to year and between groups, as visiting tutors bring their own specialisms. Themes typically include:

• The therapeutic relationship: using the relationship itself as the instrument of change
• Working at relational depth: meeting clients with presence and openness, and staying with intense moments of connection that make deep change possible
• Depth and the unconscious: dreams, metaphor and symbolic communication, and using supervision to notice what is happening beneath the surface
• The origins of psychological difficulty: how early wounds and adaptations shape the people who come to you, and what therapeutic change is made of
• Working with greater complexity: clients whose difficulties run deeper, including narcissistic, borderline and schizoid personality structures, and understanding the protective function these patterns serve
• TA in the wider field: how Transactional Analysis sits among the other psychological disciplines and therapeutic approaches, and how to think and talk across them
• Working beyond the individual: seeing clients through a systemic lens, as part of the couples, families, groups and communities they belong to, and in the wider social and ecological context of their distress
• The body and embodied experience: how experience is held in the body, and working therapeutically with what clients bring through it
• Ethics and the frame: holding the boundaries that make deep work safe
• Professional identity: who you are becoming as a psychotherapist, and how you will build and sustain a practice
• Endings: how therapy finishes well, and how a training group says goodbye

Assessment

Two 2,500-word essays, which give you room to explore topics of particular interest, and a presentation on your personal style of TA psychotherapy and your growing identity as a psychotherapist.

Learning from across the field

Stage Three is deliberately not taught by one person. Alongside the course tutor, the year brings in visiting practitioners who each teach from within their own tradition and bring their own clinical experience into the room. You finish the year having been taught by several experienced psychotherapists with different voices, which is the best preparation we know for finding your own.

What outcomes can I expect?

You finish with the clinical skills, theoretical knowledge and self-awareness to work at depth with clients, while looking after your own wellbeing and professional boundaries.

Whether you go on to the Advanced Diploma for UKCP registration or to the CTA, you will be ready for confident, effective practice as a TA psychotherapist.