European Association for Psychotherapy
The European Association for Psychotherapy (EAP) is a Vienna-based umbrella organisation for 128 psychotherapist organizations (including 28 national associations and 17 European associations) from 41 countries with a membership of more than 120,000 psychotherapists. Individual members may also join the organisation directly rather than through one of its member organisations.
Its President is currently Rodolfo de Bernart (Italy), and it has two Vice-Presidents, Adrian Rhodes (Britain) and Mony Elkaim (Belgium). The General Secretary of the EAP is Alfred Pritz (Austria), the founding rector of Sigmund Freud University Vienna. The EAP office is located alongside the University campus.
The association is based on the Strasbourg Declaration on Psychotherapy of 1990 whereby the EAP promotes the need for high standards of training on a scientific basis, and fights for free and independent exercise of psychotherapy in Europe. Important activities include:
- Creating a collaborative democratic forum for all European national and method-based professional associations in psychotherapy.
- Establishing pan-European professional post-graduate training standards consisting of a minimum of 2,400 hours, over a minimum of 4 years, of specialist training, with a significant component of supervised practice.
- Awarding the European Certificate of Psychotherapy (ECP): The aim of the European Certificate of Psychotherapy is to implement a comparable standard of training and mutual recognition of training across Europe.
- Building the Register for ECP Psychotherapists: creating a searchable database of the availability of over 5,000 psychotherapists in Europe
- Promoting EAP Ethical Guidelines: The EAP has developed ethical guidelines to protect patients and is establishing these across Europe
- EAP is also a founding member of the World Council for Psychotherapy (WCP)
- Publication of the International Journal of Psychotherapy ISSN 1356 -9082, a professional journal with 3 issues per annum.
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