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  3. Psychotherapy Essentials

Psychotherapy Essentials (NURS90141)

Graduate courseworkPoints: 12.5Not available in 2026

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Overview

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Psychotherapy Essentials is designed to strengthen students’ mental health practice and complement existing clinical skills. This online subject incorporates consumer scholarship, psychodynamic concepts and introduces students to the common factors across psychotherapies from humanistic traditions. Psychotherapy Essentials equips students with a comprehensive, coherent and contemporary set of psychotherapy skills to support consumers personal recovery journeys. These skills are explored through topics integral to contemporary mental health, such as: trauma-informed care, recovery-alliance, attachment and neuroplasticity.

Intended learning outcomes

On completion of the subject, students should be able to:

  • Apply a foundational understanding of psychodynamic concepts informed by psychotherapy including origins and current directions
  • Understand trust in relationship, knowledge of self, and connection to people, as three core domains of psychotherapeutic engagement
  • Develop capabilities inherent in forming trust, knowledge of the self, and connection
  • Implement mental health care informed by psychotherapeutic practice, neuroplasticity, psychological trauma, and recovery alliance
  • Demonstrate a capacity to practice psychotherapeutically at a beginning level
  • Identify the common factors across psychotherapies and their role in optimising recovery
  • Critically reflect on their own psychotherapeutic practice and provide constructive evidence-based feedback to peers on their practice
  • Use psychotherapeutic theory and practice to develop a meaningful formulation

Generic skills

  • Critically reflect on their own clinical practice
  • Provide constructive evidence-based feedback to peers on their practice

Last updated: 19 November 2025