Abstract
This portfolio contains work submitted for the practitioner Doctorate in Psychotherapeutic and Counselling Psychology. It is the culmination of a three year training programme in Counselling Psychology and contains a selection of academic, therapeutic and research papers. Within the academic dossier, three essays are presented. The first essay explores the phenomenon of dreaming from a psychodynamic perspective and how dreams can be used therapeutically. The second essay presents an overview of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and explores one man’s experience of wilderness isolation through this framework. The third essay focuses on the diagnosis of borderline personality disorder (BPD) and how ACT therapists might work with clients diagnosed with BPD. This essay takes a critical stance to diagnosis from a counselling psychology perspective. The therapeutic dossier contains a description of my clinical placement experiences, along with a final clinical paper, which presents some personal reflections on my journey of development as a counselling psychologist in training. Two examples of clinical work are included as an attachment to this portfolio. The first client study/process report is a psychodynamic exploration into a young girl’s search for herself. The second client study/process report is a cognitive-behavioural exploration into a woman’s heroin addiction. Three pieces of research are presented in the research dossier. The first piece of research is a literature review, which focuses on dreams, how they can be understood from differing perspectives, as well as how they can be useful to counselling psychology. The second research project presents a qualitative exploration into how therapists perceive and work with dreams in therapy. Thematic analysis was utilised in order to generate some initial themes on this subject. The second research project explores the seemingly spontaneous eye-movements that accompany the recall process and how this behaviour might differ when recalling a dream memory and a waking memory. This was a quantitative exploration, using t-tests and chi-squared analyses.