Training at the Guild of Psychotherapists

The Guild of Psychotherapists offers a Clinical Training in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and a number of Short Courses.

The Guild was founded as a pluralist psychoanalytic organisation and this tradition continues to today. Our clinical trainings reflect a spectrum of broad and diverse contributions in the field. We do not consider any one body of theory to hold ‘the truth’. Trainees are introduced to a richness of psychoanalytic perspectives on unconscious life, the sources of human distress and the psychotherapeutic encounter. We hope trainees will develop individually, finding the theories and practice that work best for them in their clinic. Seminar leaders and tutors are clinicians using the traditions we teach in the practice: Freud, Jung, Klein, Object Relations, Lacan, philosophy.

The Guild aims to involve trainees in the continuing evaluation and reformulation of psychoanalytic thinking. We emphasise a questioning approach that recognises the importance of the contexts – historical, cultural, political – in which psychoanalytic concepts have developed.

Trainees are actively encouraged to consider ethnocentric, gender-biased and anti-homosexual ideologies that may be present in psychoanalytic theory and to develop a clinical practice that is alive to historical harms, for example those wrought by a history of colonisation or patriarchy, in order not to repeat these harms within the clinic and to find ways to work actively to counter this legacy within our work.

Clinical Training in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy

Short Courses

The Guild runs three short courses each year, suited to experienced practitioners and people new to the field. CPD certificates are available for our short courses.