The verification of university training: a research methodology.

Abstract

The research we are presenting contributes to the debate over university training for the clinical psychology profession, taking verification as its standpoint. Issues of professional training in the clinical area of psychology are dealt with in debates, at times harsh, that can be found in the American and European literature. The recurrent theme, which is particularly critical, is the separation, if not the outright split, of theory from clinical practice. Even more problematic appears the coexistence of profoundly different theories and practices of intervention that tend to ignore each other, as we see happening in the Italian situation. This helps to weaken the credibility of our profession, which has difficulty defining the specificity of its models of intervention and copies models of other disciplines, like the medical model in the psychiatric area. To this can be added the employment problems the profession is currently experiencing in Italy, which can in part be attributed to the problems of university training which seems to refrain from training professional clinical psychologists, since there are no shared theories and training models for this task. The issues of the scission between theory and practice, the coexistence of approaches that at the same time avoid debate and are conflictual, have a central place in our training strategy, so as to enable students to face and discuss these questions.

The article is made up of three parts. In the first we explain our vision of clinical psychology and the verification methodology used in the research we are presenting. In the second we look in detail at the training methodology we call “emotional lessons” with a report on the experience verified in the research. In the third we present the data on the verification of the lessons.