Reimagining Person-Centred Therapy as "This Learning We Call Therapy"

A Psyflix Masterclass with Professor David Murphy, hosted by Dr Brian Sreenan

What if psychotherapy was never meant to be a healthcare profession?

In this session, David will argue that person-centred and experiential psychotherapy has become increasingly shaped, constrained, and defined by the medical model, often in ways that sit in tension with its original philosophical roots. Rather than simply adapting to healthcare systems, this masterclass will explore a more radical possibility: That the true home of person-centred psychotherapy may lie not in medicine at all, but in a pedagogical and developmental paradigm, one grounded in growth, learning, and human potential.

The Masterclass will explore:

• how psychotherapy became aligned with healthcare, and what may have been lost along the way
• why the growth metaphor has been eclipsed by diagnosis, disorder, and deficit
• what it would really mean to reclaim a person-centred vision of psychological distress and development
• the professional, institutional, and personal implications of reimagining our work in this way

This session is for psychologists and psychotherapists who are willing to question taken-for-granted assumptions about what psychotherapy is, who it is for, and what kind of profession we are helping to create. If you’ve ever felt uneasy about how medicalised our field has become, this conversation is for you.