Into the Depths

Course Content & Structure

The course runs over six weeks, with about three hours of study each week. Each week combines short videos with practising psychotherapists and Jungian analysts, readings, quizzes, discussions and private journal activities, and ends by adding new terms to your personal glossary.

Week 1: Introduction to psychoanalytic and Jungian perspectives on the mind
Meet your teachers and fellow learners, and explore the foundations: the unconscious, Freud’s image of the rider and the horse, the shadow, and how psychoanalytic therapy works in practice.

Week 2: Family: how the psyche is formed
Discover how our earliest relationships shape who we become, through ideas such as object relations, projective identification and Winnicott’s transitional objects, alongside a documentary on the bond between parent and baby.

Week 3: Dreams
Compare Freud’s and Jung’s theories of dreams, read a fairy tale as if it were a dream, and try interpreting a dream of your own.

Week 4: Love, desire and sexuality
Explore Freud’s ideas on sexuality and gender, the Oedipus complex, projection, the patterns we repeat in relationships, and a critical look at Jung’s archetypes.

Week 5: Trauma
Learn how psychoanalytic and Jungian thinkers understand trauma, how the mind protects itself, and how healing can happen, through the myth of Chiron, the “wounded healer”.

Week 6: Death, loss, mourning and transformation
Explore grief and endings, Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia, myths of loss, and Jung’s alchemical image of transformation. The week closes with a look back over the whole course.

Meet the Teachers

You will learn from seven experienced psychoanalytic and Jungian clinicians from the bpf, who share their thinking and clinical experience through a series of filmed conversations.

Training with the bpf

If you’d like to take your learning further, the bpf offers courses at every stage, from first introductions to full clinical training.

• Summer School: Foundations of Psychoanalytic & Jungian Psychotherapy: an intensive course, taught entirely online by senior psychoanalytic and Jungian clinicians. It explores human development across the whole lifespan, from infancy to later life, and is open to anyone with an interest, whatever their background. There is no written work.
• Foundation Course: Psychotherapy & Counselling: a part-time, one-year course for people at the very beginning of their journey towards becoming a psychotherapist or counsellor. It combines psychoanalytic and Jungian theory with a clinical module, through Saturday study days (in London or online) and fortnightly evening seminars. It is also the first year of the bpf’s psychodynamic psychotherapy training.
• Explore all bpf training, from short courses and reading groups to qualifying trainings.

How to Enrol

Into the Depths is hosted on FutureLearn, an online learning platform. Joining is free, and you can study entirely online, at times that suit you.

1. Go to the course page on FutureLearn: Find out More
2. Click Join course.
3. Sign in, or create a free FutureLearn account if you don’t already have one.
4. The course starts on 2 November 2026.

All you need is an internet connection and a device that can play video. You may also want a notebook, or a private document on your device, to use as your journal for the reflective activities.

FutureLearn may offer an option to upgrade, for example for longer access to the course or a certificate. See the course page on FutureLearn for current details.