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In the context of psychotherapy training, case-based learning must be understood not as an ancillary pedagogical tool but as a primary epistemological structure—a mode of

knowing that privileges encounter, specificity, and situated complexity over abstraction

and prescriptive formula. It is through the disciplined engagement with particular cases

that the clinician learns to think, feel, and act in ways that are attuned to the irreducibility of the clinical moment. The case becomes not merely an example but a site of revelation. Psychological practice unfolds in a terrain marked by indeterminacy, ethical ambiguity, and symbolic excess. Case-based learning respects this terrain. It foregrounds the reality that clinical knowledge is not simply acquired, but co-constructed—emerging in the. reflective tension between theory and practice, between subjective encounter and intersubjective field. The clinician learns not by assimilating fixed models but by inhabiting the liminal space of the case, where frameworks are tested against lived process, and where the therapist’s own subjectivity becomes a site of inquiry

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Pedagogical Model: Case Based Learning

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The value of this learning architecture lies in its capacity to hold contradiction. A case

invites the clinician to track multiple layers simultaneously: diagnostic formulation,

affective tone, narrative structure, embodied gesture, contextual forces. It cultivates

a form of clinical reasoning that is recursive rather than linear, interpretive rather

than algorithmic. The movement is not toward closure, but toward a more capacious

understanding—an ability to dwell with ambiguity, to tolerate not-knowing, and to

act with ethical imagination. Crucially, the case functions as a mirror. The clinician’s

engagement with the material is never neutral; it elicits affect, projection, fantasy,

and resistance. In this way, case-based learning serves as a reflective crucible

through which practitioners encounter their own countertransference, positionality,

and moral commitments. It demands a reflexive posture—one that recognises that

therapeutic action is always situated, always entangled in systems of meaning,

history, and power.

 

Relationally, case work opens onto the intersubjective textures of the clinical

encounter. It makes visible the microprocesses of transference, the embodied

registers of attunement, the significance of silence, rupture, and repair. These

phenomena are not incidental—they are the very substance of psychotherapy. To

learn through the case is to learn how to be with the other in the conditions of

psychic extremity, to bear witness to suffering without collapse or colonisation. This

is especially vital in contexts where clinicians are working at the margins—

geographically, culturally, or institutionally.

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Case-based learning makes space for the specificity of context: the clinician working

alone in a rural community, the client navigating intergenerational trauma in a

postcolonial setting, the therapist confronting systemic erasure or ethical deadlock.

These are not deviations from normativity; they are the real-world conditions of

practice. Through case work, training becomes attuned to the actual lives, bodies,

and histories of those present in the room. Moreover, the case allows for a deeper engagement with the ethical dimension of therapeutic work. Clinical scenarios rarely present clean dilemmas with clear resolutions. Instead, they confront the practitioner with entangled responsibilities, partial knowledges, and the demand for judgment. Case-based learning rehearses this ethical complexity. It refuses simplification and instead calls forth the clinician’s capacity for moral discernment—anchored not in certainty but in reflective presence and practice.

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Why This Model Matters?

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In many parts of regional Victoria, clinicians are working at the edge of the system—often alone, under-supported, and managing complex trauma and risk without adequate infrastructure. This program is:

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• Advanced

  • Brings advanced training to rural clinicians on-site

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• Practical

  • Centres clinical material from participants’ actual practice

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• Community Based

  • Builds community of practice through relational and reflective learning

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• Regional

  • Responds to the ecological, systemic, and ethical realities of regional mental health care.