Teaching Therapy
The training therapy is the counterpart to the training analysis and an integral part of the Austrian Psychotherapy -Education. In the second part of the Psychotherapy Act , the subject specifics , “teaching therapy, training analysis, individual or group self-experience lasting at least 200 hours” is required.
Teaching therapy is a type of psychotherapy in which the future therapist is himself a patient. Teaching therapy differs in some points from curative treatment, but in the best case it should enable the students of psychotherapy to be able to empathize with people seeking help and to understand them better. The important differences between psychotherapy and teaching therapy are:
- As a rule, there are no illness-related disorders in the teaching therapy .
- The primary goal of teaching therapy is self-awareness , while psychotherapy is the processing of psychological stress.
- The teaching therapy must be fully financed by the analysand himself . Cash grants or full assumption of costs are excluded.
- The teaching therapist repeatedly interrupts the process to explain the intervention that is currently taking place .
The main difference between a training analysis and a teaching therapy is that the student lies on the sofa during the analytical work , while in the teaching therapy the student sits across from the teaching therapist and there is eye contact .
Before the law came into force in 1991, there were very different regulations for the various forms of therapy: For psychoanalysis , the training associations often demanded years of (and unlimited) training analyzes lasting many thousands of hours, but the behavioral therapy training guidelines did not recognize any form of self-awareness . The legal regulation now reduces the lengthy training analyzes, while other therapy schools have had to develop concepts of self-awareness and teaching therapy and integrate them into their training plans.