A ten week course covering the following:

  1. Philosophical treatments of morality and ethics: universal or conventional? Cultural and social factors in ethics.
  2. Key elements of professional ethics: consent and autonomy. Research ethics. Some great research scandals.
  3. Confidentiality non-maleficence
  4. Autonomy and power.  Capacity, and decision making. Advanced directives, powers of attorney
  5. Neo-Aristotelian approaches. Care, beneficence, and non-maleficence. Risks of exploitation and the role of an ethics code in protecting children and vulnerable adults. Parens patriae and safeguarding, Independent safeguarding agency.
  6. Social and political approaches.  Principles of justice and human rights.
  7. Society and culture.  Emic and etic approaches.  Big group and snall group sociology.
  8. Are there cultural and social universals, and therefore the possibility of a transcultural psychotherapy.
  9. Theorizing and practising between cultures.  Hegemony. Cultural competence
  10. Social institutions.  How to embed ethical awareness and cultural competence in professional practice.

A ten week course covering :

  1. Patterns of development: linear, cyclical, other
  2. Distress and disability: links with development
  3. Physical development and links with psychosocial development
  4. Stage theories and their impact on child-rearing customs and educational practice
  5. Social development
  6. Emotional development
  7. Aging, changing social expectations, and developmental challenges
  8. Developmental theory in psychology and psychotherapy practice
  9. Transcending development: crisis, trauma, and recovery
  10. Tackling some questions about development: what is its aim? What are we developing into?

A ten week course, covering different viewpoints on well-being and relationship to health:

  1. Introduction, definitions, and interrelations between topics
  2. philosophy
  3. health economics
  4. psychology
  5. medicine
  6. spirituality
  7. psychotherapy, counselling, and coaching
  8. values
  9. relationships
  10. being well remembered

A ten week course, covering different viewpoints on existential and human issues:

  1. Do people have a nature? What happens to it during crises or transitions, or when facing death?  What part do emotions play in resolving these crises?
  2. Anxiety in depth
  3. Sexuality: does sexual passion exist to provoke existential crises, or does it hold relationshiPTS together and so reduce crisis?
  4. Where am I going in my life? Meaning
  5. Life event theory and its link to crisis theory
  6. Large brains and large social groups: do they determine what is human about human nature?
  7. Intimate communication and bonding; anonymous communication and individuation
  8. Intimacy
  9. Loss
  10. How and when we find out who we really are: if we really are anyone, or if we really ever know

A ten week course covering:

    1. scheme for classifying and analysing psychotherapy and counselling approaches
    2. why interpersonal problems do not spontaneously resolve, and theories of people getting ‘stuck’
    3. addiction as an explanation of ‘stuckness’
    4. personality and its use as an explanation of resistance or inability to change, or as a source of resilience
    5. theories of how personality develops and how, if at all, it changes
    6. psychoanalytic theories of personality in professional practice and popular culture
    7. Schema theory and cognitive approaches to psychotherapy
    8. Group psychotherapy and theories of interpersonal change factors
    9. Narrative theories
    10. Synthesis