27/08/2026
I’m still on annual leave, but apparently I’m not very good at completely switching off from psychotherapy. 📚
Over the next week, I’ll be reading about the Hinshelwood Method, the research approach I’ll be using when I begin my Professional Doctorate in Psychodynamic Counselling at the University of Essex Dept of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at UoE this autumn.
My research will explore trans and gender non-conforming people’s experiences of therapist self-disclosure in psychodynamic therapy.
There is something particularly fitting about using this methodology at Essex: the approach itself originated within the University’s Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies (PPS), developed by R.D. Hinshelwood, now Emeritus Professor there.
The method takes seriously the single clinical case and the subjectivity of the therapeutic encounter. It asks how experiences within the consulting room — including interventions, responses, transference and countertransference — can be examined systematically and used not simply to illustrate psychoanalytic ideas, but to question and develop them.
That feels especially relevant to my research because therapist self-disclosure is not simply something a therapist “does”; it becomes part of the therapeutic relationship. Its meaning depends upon what is disclosed, when, by whom, how it is experienced, and what subsequently emerges between therapist and client.
For trans and gender non-conforming people, these questions are particularly important given psychoanalysis and psychodynamic therapy’s historically complicated — and at times pathologising — relationship with gender diversity.
So my question isn’t simply “Should therapists self-disclose?” but something much more interesting:
What does therapist self-disclosure come to mean within the psychodynamic relationship for trans and gender non-conforming people?
A little annual-leave reading before the doctorate begins. 📖🛋️
