Graduate Diploma of Counselling and Psychotherapy

This course is designed for professionals who wish to acquire counselling skills for use in their work as health professionals, social workers, personnel officers, pastors, human service workers, psychologists or counsellors.

The course provides training in counselling skills and theory, and prepares graduates to develop a counselling role in the setting in which they work.

• Demonstrate currency with the theory of psychoanalytic technique as it pertains to individual counselling, including applied knowledge of the concepts transference and countertransference.
• Demonstrate advanced foundation knowledge of various psychodynamic and systemic couples and family therapy theoretical frameworks
• Synthesise key principles and processes identified with of psychoanalytically informed, cross-generational, and emotionally focussed approaches to couple and family therapy practice
• Review the developmental stages of the human life cycle from object relations and attachment theory perspectives
• Investigate, analyse and synthesise complex information, problems, concepts and theories in counselling and psychotherapy Demonstrate competency in individual psychodynamic counselling
• Employ principles of systemic theory as a framework for observing and conceptualising different dimensions of family functioning
• Those that complete the COU6121 elective should be able to: Demonstrate advanced foundation knowledge of various individual psychodynamic counselling and psychotherapy theoretical frameworks
• Those that complete the COU5210 elective should be able to: Demonstrate an awareness of countertransference including a capacity to employ it meaningfully in a psychotherapeutic context
• Critique and examine complex clinical material; deduce, distinguish and apply relevant theoretical concepts; formulate, implement and evaluate according to the process and practice of counselling and psychotherapy
• Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of ethical frameworks for counselling