Perinatal, Child, Adolescent and Family Work: a Psychoanalytic Observational Approach MA

Entry requirements

To undertake this course, we ask that you have:

• a minimum of the equivalent of twelve months full-time experience of working with children, young people and their families. Approximately half of this work must have been completed within the last five years.
• an interest in learning about unconscious processes, emotional development, observation, and psychoanalytic thinking
• a willingness to engage in thinking about the way that culture and individual/group identity shape emotional development
• a willingness to engage in experiential learning
• a first degree or the ability to demonstrate that you can meet the academic demands of the course and/or have completed one year of the Tavistock and Portman course, Emotional Care of Babies, Children, Young People and Families

For the duration of the course, you have to be working directly with children, young people, parents or families, usually for a minimum of one day a week for students with considerable prior experience or two days a week for students with the minimum of prior experience.

In order for you to be able meet the academic requirements of this master’s programme your work must be in an organisation with a safeguarding lead.

You must be in a working role which meets all the course requirements prior to enrolment.

Months of entry

September

Course content

This flagship course aims to provide professional development to people working with children, young people and families. The focus is on learning how to notice and reflect on the different emotional dynamics, conscious and unconscious, that underpin development, and impact on our work.

There is a central place in all the studies in the course for considering the impact of feelings of sameness and difference, and about cultural diversity, within ourselves, in our treatment of each other, and in our professional relationships.

This course will provide you with the opportunity to explore unconscious processes which occur within, and between, people across the age range and within, and between, organisations. The infant and young child observations take central place on the course and are rooted in experiential learning about the processes set in motion in the earliest stages of life, which we understand as underlying and informing our later psychological development.

You will take modules in infant observation, work discussion, psychoanalytic theory, child development research, young child observation and experiential group (PG Dip only). To achieve the MA award, students in the third year will write a dissertation. The course will develop the professional and reflective capacities of students working with children of all ages and with families.

In 2023, we changed the course title to explicitly include perinatal work, reflecting the strong emphasis placed upon very early experience. At that point, we augmented the course curriculum with new theoretical content relating to the perinatal period. This additional material enhances your learning from the two-year infant observation, contributing to the opportunity for in-depth understanding of the baby’s changing modes and patterns of communication and their developing personality in the context of their family and the people around them.

The enhanced course, with its renewed focus on the developing mind of the baby, is highly relevant to those working with any age group, and will also benefit those who are working directly with children under the age of five.

Successful completion of this course is a prerequisite for our clinical course in Child and adolescent psychoanalytic psychotherapy (M80).

This course is also delivered in London as a Monday and Wednesday evening and Saturday version, as well as in Belfast, Birmingham, Bristol, Florence, and Milan.

This course is for anyone working with children, young people and their families with an interest in emotional development and in the complexities of the relationships that form within such work.