Psychotherapy 2.0

...is the title of a newly published book by Karnac about the place "where psychotherapy and technology meet". I have a chapter included here with my erstwhile colleague Prof Digby Tantam, and a section written by Anne Stokes, which examines "training fit for the digital era". The message from Digby and myself is that e-learning is surprisingly well suited (and it was a surprise to us at the outset, back in 2002) to psychotherapy training. We concentrate on the kinds of emotional transactions which e-learning makes possible, or affords (I will come back to the idea of affordances in a later blog post), and in particular, the way that a fairly bog-standard online course set-up (hyperlinked course materials, discussion forums, chatrooms) can allow people to examine personal experience in light of theory, in a way they can't always do in face-to-face learning. We focus on how we used the e-learning programme to prepare people to do their own online teaching- other chapters in the book discuss e-therapy in greater depth.