Retirement Therapy? Older People's Experiences of Existential Therapy in Their Transition to Retirement.

This is a portfolio containing academic, therapeutic practice and research dossiers in part fulfilment of a PsychD qualification in psychotherapeutic and counselling psychology. The academic dossier contains three papers. The first examines abuse, use, and misuse of power in the therapeutic relationship. The second examines whether collaboration in cognitive behavioural therapy is better considered in the light or in the shadow of power dynamics. The third examines the concept of narcissism and how counselling psychologists might work with narcissistic distress. The therapeutic practice dossier contains descriptions of three clinical training placements and a final clinical paper providing a richer account of my evolving identity and therapeutic approach as a counselling psychologist. The research dossier contains three pieces of research relating to the concept of retirement. The first is a review of the retirement literature, critiqued from an existential perspective, and includes an existential perspective on retirement counselling based around four themes: temporality, freedom, meaning and isolation. The second is a qualitative study examining older people’s experiences of existential therapy in their transition into retirement. Six retirees were interviewed and transcripts were analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis. Participants identified therapy as helping with choice and decision-making around their future lives in retirement, and identifying with their therapist on a deeply personal level as particularly influential in their therapeutic experience. The third is a qualitative study examining the experiences of five people from the babyboom generation transitioning to encore careers. Participants were interviewed and transcripts were analysed using narrative analysis. Three narrative forms were identified and termed: an adventure, a calling and a reclaiming of identity. Three commonalities across the five accounts were identified and termed: pioneering, giving back, and continuity through similarity