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Competencies Based in the Psychodynamic Tradition
A) Psychodynamics
A practitioner is competent in the psychodynamic tradition when they:
1. Recognize that one’s psyche includes the interaction of competing conscious, unconscious and interpersonal factors.
2. Understand how they manage the inner conflicts between the: id (instincts, sexuality, aggression), superego (morals, rational thought), and the mediating ego (differentiating, pragmatic, relational self).
3. Understand that competing psychic drives interact with environmental and interpersonal factors
4. Are aware of how they manage their relationships with significant others, including the internalization of these as psychic ‘objects’.
5. Understand how they have structurally encoded the past into the present, including how we grew up, remnants of traumatic events, and developmental deficits
6. Recognize the specific ways in which they have individually interpreted, reacted and encoded these experiences
B) Psychodynamic Defenses and Evolution
A practitioner is competent in the psychodynamic tradition when they:
1. Recognize how they modulate conflicts through defenses, resistances, and ego structures
2. Understand psychodynamically how trauma, stress, or developmental problems gives rise to signs of dysfunctionality
3. Understand the functional versus dysfunctional nature of defences relate to their age and situational appropriateness
4. Identify how the unconscious encodes and modulates both personal historical experiences as well as transpersonal ahistorical experiences
5. Recognize how the unconscious encodes and modulates experiences and behaviours as threatening, dangerous, forbidden through cultural taboos
6. Recognize how the complexity of the psyche affects ones’ phenomenological experience, including our present existential situation
7. Experience how changes to dysfunctionality comes through insight into how the unconscious regulates ones’ everyday conscious self
8. Have significantly decreased their psychic dysfunctionality, including a lessening of the ways in which their life possibilities are limited
9. Recognize how the therapeutic relationship provides a container where the unconscious can mediate and express personal and interpersonal tendencies
10. Experience how these tendencies can be brought to consciousness through a therapist’s feedback or experiential exercises
C) Psychodynamic Dialectics
A practitioner is competent in the psychodynamic tradition when they:
1. Recognize the complementary, rather than just the conflictual, nature of opposites
2. Integrate their psychic tensions rather than collapsing into a single dominant polarity
3. Assimilate these opposites into an evolutionary dialectic third
4. Accept the paradoxical ambivalence that is basic to mature adult functioning
D) Psychodynamic Holistic Functioning
A practitioner is competent in the psychodynamic tradition when they:
1. Recognize that mental health is more than the absence of symptoms, instead, it is a person’s overall mental functioning, including: relationships, emotional regulation, coping capacities and self-observing abilities
2. Go beyond trauma recovery to a mature functioning life involved with the culture and the natural world
3. Not only experience an alleviation of symptoms, but are also questioning ‘what kind of person am I?’
4. Are able to evolve beyond the moralistic question of ‘how should I be?’ to the existential question of ‘how am I?’ and ‘how do I find myself?’ in relation to others and to the world
5. Recognize that psychodynamics not only addresses psychological issues, but also philosophical, anthropological and cultural issues
Common Themes Between the Psychodynamic and Humanistic Tradition
E) Psychological Defenses
A practitioner is competent in the psychodynamic and humanistic traditions when they have evolved beyond the common themes of:
1. Limiting their life through splitting off, self-restricting, self-deceiving, and self imprisonment
2. Being closed to their life by limiting ones’ perceptual faculties, and denying certain aspects of personal and social reality
3. Arrested development, such that present here and now experiences are coloured by rigidly encoded personality patterns from the past
4. Denying emptiness, meaninglessness, and despair resulting from a blocked flow of life’s emergence
5. Defensive expectations and attitudes that obscure the phenomenological and existential reality
F) Existential Themes
A practitioner is competent in the psychodynamic and humanistic tradition when they:
1. Persevere through the anxiety and anguish inherent in relinquishing outmoded identities in favour of confronting the essential openness of being
2. Recognize how they have choice and responsibility in the creation and evolution of psychopathology
3. Understand how their relationship with the world is co-creative and representative of their personal inner/outer attunement
4. Experience the ambiguous, complex, and perspectival nature of the their emerging reality, while also being able to find order and meaning through the attunement of experiential in-searching
5. Are subjectively centred while are also open to awareness of whatever emerges
6. Recognize that direct experience is the pivotal means of creating evolutionary change