Brief psychodynamic counselling in a university setting

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.