Celia Scanlan & Michael Wieser

Nouvelles de l’EAP/AEP

Comme à l’accoutumée, nous fournissons aux lecteurs un aperçu des rencontres EAP. Dans la mesure où, pour différentes raisons, aucun membre de la rédaction de « Science psychothérapeutique – Évolution de la profession du psychothérapeute » n’a pu participer à la rencontre de février 2012, nous publions une contribution en anglais, rédigée par Celia Scanlan et Michael Wieser. Dans leur article, ils expriment le point de vue des délégués de la FEPTO (Federation of European Psychodrama Training Organisations) ; leur texte avait été publié dans la Lettre d’information de la FEPTO (mai 2012). Nous le publions avec l’aimable autorisation des auteurs et de l’éditeur de cette revue.

Report of Vienna EAP Meeting February 2012

I attended the Meeting 17th & 18th February together with our colleague Michael Wieser who returned to EAP after several years of absence. I welcome Michael for many reasons including, his knowledge of EAP workings, his interest in research and in the journal. He has offered his services to the advisory panel of the International Journal. There is also the very practical reason, that Michael lives in Austria therefore it is relatively inexpensive for him to attend the two days.

We have both provided a report. We did attend some sessions together but also availed ourselves of this opportunity to represent FEPTO in several different forums.

There were two main issues running through the meetings. The first being clearly structured time to explore the future of EAP. The second was concerning the ongoing project on Core Competencies.

The future of EAP

I found myself wondering if the idea to explore this issue had come from events of the past year. It was only last February in Vienna we celebrated with our dear friend and colleague Serge Ginger, his retirement from EAP. Sadly Serge died in October 2011. Serge, a founder member of EAP had seemingly limitless energy for our work. He was however prudent and found a successor as registrar ahead of his retirement. I wonder how many of us have the courage to face that change and hand over of role. The first board meeting of 2012 began with a ten minute reflection on the life and work of Serge. The assembly then moved into small groups and we spent the next hour exploring the issue of the future of EAP. Our remit was to prepare a summary to present to the full board at our next session. We would have a limited time to do this presentation. I will summarise the small group where I participated. With 10 minutes left of our hour we had many ideas, 12 in total. The question was how to reflect this work in the large group. Sociometry came into its own when I suggested using this method, which to us psychodramatists is a tried and tested method. Not only did this bring order into our work I believe we were somewhat surprised by the issues which emerged as priority. I think this brief exercise opened the minds of several of my colleagues to psychodrama. I believe the outcome of the total exercise has given the executive a clear sense of the hopes and aspirations of EAP.

The Core Competencies Project

I have written in the FN in the past about this project. The first stage is well underway but it is still not too late to sign up to complete the questionnaire. I will not hide the fact that it is rather long, although there is the option of doing a shorter version. The full version will take I think a day to complete the shorter one perhaps 2/3 hours. This is an important project for the future of psychotherapy in Europe. If we as psychotherapists can define what we do, our competencies, apart from presenting ourselves professionally, we are less at risk of an outside agency deciding for us. That I believe would be very bad news. I said that this is the first stage. The second stage is to define specific competencies. At this point we as psychodramatists have the opportunity to define what it is that distinguishes us from other psychotherapists. This is vital as we may well be asked by health authorities and social security organisations to explain why our work is required rather than some brief intervention which is a less expensive option for the authorities. Please go to the EAP website and sign up for this project, www.psychotherapycompetency.eu/Practice_Analysis/index.php

Research Committee meeting

Some of the committee members will be reviewers for the International Journal of Psychotherapy and we will do research European wide. For research in training we will contact the Society of Psychotherapy Research. The importance of ethical research was stressed. In Latvia is a group led by Ansis Stabingis which is working on generic training and in Poland there is also a project researching training. A subgroup of FEPTO Research Committee with Ann Helleday, José Luis Mesquita and Sirkka Varonen is evaluating competence outcome this would go along with EAP tasks.

European Training Standards Committee

We addressed equivalent academic degree of Bachelor in psychotherapy. In UK there is even a new Master program in psychodrama (University of Worcester, led by Hugh Richard, and Peter Haworth).

In the field of child psychotherapy we like to define standards in training and practice. The question was asked “should this subject be taught to some extent in every training programme? Or could this be done as Continuing professional development of the psychotherapist?”, in a specific approach or generic? Brion Sweeney a UK registered psychotherapist and psychiatrist is currently forming a study group to look at this subject and Ken Evans is chairing a European Assoc. for Integrative Child Psychotherapy including four countries.

Celia already wrote about competences. In addition there are specialist competences like working with children, refugees …

EWOC (European Wide Organisations Committee)

I found it interesting how this committee set scientific criteria and how they process them. My experience goes back to 2005 when FEPTO applied. There are EAP requirements for scientific validation but in practice it seems EAP has just “to show that they are against sects”. I suggested guiding new applicants with examples of good application papers.

Board meetings

There is now a budget of 367.000 with 60 EAPTI’s (Training Institutes). This year’s conference will take place in Valencia in Spain from July 4 to 7. In 2013 there will be the conference in Russia from 5.-7.7 with a pre and post conference on trans-Siberian train. It was reported in the Board that EAP now have 6,000 ECP holders. The executive has been considering what might be done to involve ECP holders in the work of EAP. The executive is planning to hold a Conference for ECP holders in Vienna 2014. They also plan to create an e- newsletter which will be sent out to ECP holders. They envisage this happening three times a year.

Authors

Michael Wieser, Michael.Wieser@uni-klu.ac.at

Celia Scanlan, c.drama1@virginmedia.com