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Scott Alan Markham is a 2013 graduate of the PsyD Program in Clinical Psychology at Antioch University, New England.

Keywords

psychoanalysis, self, self-awareness, reflective practice, professional psychology training, psychology education

Document Type

Dissertation

Publication Date

2013

Abstract

The following theoretical dissertation used an object relational approach to consider integrating the self and professional psychology training. Professional psychology training once valued the emerging and diverse experiences of the trainee's self. However, the recent shift to competency based education models in professional psychology has emphasized self-competency rather than the processes that foster the integration of trainees' emerging identities. This paper argued that the competency-based education models based on positivistic science frameworks limited further dialogues of self-discovery, the processes of on-going self-reflection, and meaning making processes of self. The purpose of this dissertation was to continue the dialogue of self discovery and explore aspects of self missed by adhering to the competency model's reductionist perspective. A narrative paradigm was used to better address the constructivist and socially constructed aspects of an emerging and fluid self-experience. The project was designed to include both theoretical and personal essays on self in order to express the author's self experiences and the critical insights for training he discovered along the way as he gathered and was played upon by the literature of self and the experience of professional psychology education. The implications for the findings of this project suggested the self was located in the presence of the "other."

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