Abstract
This portfolio contains work which was submitted as part of the Practitioner Doctorate (PsychD) in Psychotherapeutic and Counselling Psychology at the University of Surrey. It consists of three dossiers which reflect the academic, clinical and research work undertaken as part of this degree. The academic dossier contains three essays. The first essay explores a Winnicottian perspective on how depression can be conceptualised and worked with therapeutically. The second essay examines the variation within the CBT tradition with respect to how emotion is attended to and worked with in clinical practice. With specific reference to depression, the third essay explores the possibility of a second-wave CBT approach to practice that would be more compatible with the principles of counselling psychology than the standard CBT treatments which have adopted the medical model of distress. The therapeutic practice dossier gives an overview of my clinical practice during my training. This dossier contains descriptions of the clinical placements I have undertaken, and also includes my final clinical paper which provides a reflective account of my journey toward becoming a counselling psychologist. Finally, the research dossier contains a literature review and two empirical research studies. The review explores the historical context of contemporary theory of emotion within psychotherapy, by examining the theories of emotion within influential philosophical works from the history of Western thought. The first empirical piece is a Foucauldian discourse analysis of how emotion is constructed in contemporary CBT self-help literature. The second empirical piece is a conversation analysis of the recordings of therapy sessions conducted by A. T. Beck, seeking to illuminate how emotion is dealt with in the practice of Beckian cognitive therapy.