Available online at www.sciencedirect.com 1877-0428 © 2010 Published by Elsevier Ltd. doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2010.07.252 Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences 5 (2010) 1151–1159 WCPCG-2010 Brief psychodynamic counselling in a university setting Adamo Simonetta M.G. a *, Sarno Irene a , Preti Emanuele a , Fontana M. Rosaria a , Prunas Antonio a a Department of Psychology, University of Milan “Bicocca”, Piazza Ateneo Nuovo, 1, Milan, 20126, Italy Received January 15, 2010; revised February 3, 2010; accepted March 9, 2010 Abstract The present work aims at discussing some clinical and methodological issues connected to our work in a Counselling Centre for University Students in Italy. We will initially give a short account of the history, development and characteristics of the counselling intervention. We will subsequently focus on the Italian context, describing the development of University Counselling services in our country. Then we will present the work that we do within the Counselling Centre of Milan University “Bicocca”. The aspects that we will consider are the following: - the institutional context; - the theoretical framework, methodology, and theory; - some data on the clients who came to the Centre (e.g. age, Faculty, provenance, drop-out, main areas of distress, etc.) in the first 10 months of activity. We will then provide some clinical illustrations and make few conclusive remarks. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Psychodynamic counselling, university setting, psychoanalytical framework, client’s population. 1. Origin and Developments of Psychological Counselling for University Students Counselling intervention was born in U.S.A. at the beginning of XX century, in the area of psychological evaluation aimed at academic and professional guidance (Valerio, 1993). In 1905 Frank Parson opened in Boston a Counselling Centre for young people who were uncertain about the kind of career they had to embark on. In 1913 the National Vocational Guidance Association was founded. Ever since its birth, counselling has been characterized by a clearly preventive rather than rehabilitative connotation, and its links with educational rather than medical contexts. Peter Blos (1962), a psychoanalyst expert in adolescence, was the first to set up in 1941 an University Counselling Service psychodynamically oriented at the Brooklyn College and to describe its specificities, aims and limits. The development of counselling took different characters in the North American and British contexts. In the United States, the training for counsellors began to assume a psychological connotation in 1949, when the American Counselling and Guidance Division organized a conference on the theme of training at the Michigan University * Simonetta M.G. Adamo. Tel.:+39.02.64483794; fax: +39.02.64483706. E-mail address: simonetta.adamo@unimib.it.