Vision

Bath Centre for Psychotherapy and Counselling (BCPC) aims to maintain excellence and innovation in the provision of counselling and psychotherapy training, and to provide ongoing professional support to qualified practitioners. We remain committed to furthering our standards and continually developing as an organisation to remain at the cutting edge of therapeutic work and theoretical perspectives.

History

BCPC was among the first humanistic therapy trainings to be set up in the Southwest, and was founded in 1984 by Peter Hawkins. Peter was soon joined by Alix Pirani, Judy Ryde and Anthony Elman. Together, these founders wanted to provide a professional training embedded in humanistic traditions and integrating psychoanalytic approaches. Our founders were also involved in the establishment of UKCP, the first national body established to unite and regulate the profession of psychotherapy.

Since 1990, students can choose a training path of either counselling or psychotherapy, and both are aligned with the original educational intent – a humanistic emphasis on learning experientially that leads to authentic theoretical integration. Our training remains an integration of humanistic and psychoanalytic approaches. Since 1995 the psychotherapy training has also embraced Intersubjective Systems Theory seeing this as the modern expression of the original founders’ intentions.

Our founders also ensured the continuing development of the training by creating a constitutional structure whereby the graduates own the organisation, and interact professionally throughout the institution.