4/4/19
Core Course: European Clinical Psychology C
I can’t believe after today, we ONLY have ONE more class left for our European Psychology Core Course (on next Monday). I don’t want to imagine what the last class would be like, and I will definitely miss Christina and my classmates 😢The Aarhus trip, Vienna trip was just like happened yesterday…
I really love my core course, Christina is a very great instructor. She always prepares all kinds of case studies and activities for us to engage more with the class materials and enjoy the time in the class.
For class today, we had a LEGO activity (DANG, we are in DENMARK!!!) to discuss the therapeutic relationship for different psychotherapeutic schools’ perspectives. We were divided into five groups, each representing Psychodynamic approach, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, The Humanistic approach, The Family/ systemic therapy, and Group therapy. Each group had to build a model that can help explain the perspective or approach of the designated school to the therapeutic relationship.
We started with a warm up, each group had one minute to build the tallest tower! We (I) got aroused immediately (honestly I was a lille bit tired at that time lol), but the warm-up worked very well on me- it indeed warmed up my body and mind. Our group almost won, just one brick lower than the winning group.
Our group got Group therapy. For those who don’t know, group therapy is a form of psychotherapy that involves one or more therapists working with several people at the same time.
From the not-so-clear pictures above, we can see there are two psychotherapists in the middle (can be distinguished by the green tree hair). One above everything taking control, one under the elevated “platform” to give support. On the both sides of the elevated platform, are the clients represented by each figure. The clients in a sense share similarities (represented by the similar clothes or hairstyle), but can also be very different (we can see the human figure to the left on p.1, it is a very angry man holding a sword, so he is very defensive and aggressive, while the girl figure in blue on the right is totally the opposite, she is more withdrawn). The black hair girl steps up (the one with red cloth and white pants) is actively talking about the current issue which is represented by the skeleton with a crown (who is also facing towards the therapist). There are however more issues or fears underneath- represented by different things like skeleton, tiger, wheel, the thing with a shield covered on top etc…
Can you guess which model represents which therapy?
Christina said it was the first time doing this activity for this class but I really enjoyed it. Using this kind of visual expression, we can also find the differences across each schools and what each school has in common quite easily.
This session is definitely on my top 3 list for this course.
Tianyi in DIS Copenhagen 