Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Consultation Program

The Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Consultation Program is a continuing-education course for experienced psychoanalytic clinicians who are developing the skills required to provide consultation and supervision to colleagues. It is widely recognised that being a good clinician does not automatically make one a good supervisor; the supervisory situation requires its own theory and its own craft, and these are what the programme teaches.

The programme opens with the question of what supervision actually is: how it differs from therapy (which it is not), from teaching (which it partly is), and from consultation to organisations (which it sometimes becomes). We work with the classical contributions on the topic — Ekstein and Wallerstein, Langs, Casement, and the more recent relational literature — and develop a working framework that participants can apply in their own supervisory work.

A central theme is parallel process: the way in which the dynamics of the patient-therapist relationship are often unconsciously re-enacted in the therapist-supervisor relationship. Learning to recognise parallel process and to make productive use of it is one of the core supervisory skills the programme teaches. We also address the ethical dimensions of supervision — the boundaries of confidentiality within the supervisory triad, the supervisor's gatekeeping function, and the handling of situations where supervision reveals clinical practice that raises serious concerns.

Participants present their own supervisees' clinical material (with appropriate consent) to small peer-consultation groups led by senior supervisors. The exercise is deliberately constructed as a second-order supervision: the primary clinician supervises a patient, the participant supervises the primary clinician, and the seminar examines the supervisory process itself. This is technically demanding and intellectually alive work.

The programme is delivered online over an academic year, with weekly seminar meetings. The IPAS Certificate in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Consultation is awarded on successful completion.