GCAS: We hear congratulations are in order! Can you share more about the recent award your work received at the conference?
Dr. Pearl Brock: Thank you. The conference was the PCE 2026 World Conference in Cologne, where I presented my doctoral research in a poster entitled “The Storyteller’s Couch: Fairytale, Shadow, and the Person Centred Journey Through a Changing World”. The poster was awarded second place, which was genuinely lovely and also quite unexpected.
There is a slightly funny story attached to that. The first place award went to a group working within the science section, so in my own very unofficial accounting I like to say that I came first in the individual category! More importantly for me, I was the highest placed practitioner presenting practice based work, so it genuinely felt like a win for the practitioner voice within the conference.
What made it particularly meaningful was that the work originated directly from my PhD research at GCAS. The research explores the use of fairytale, symbolic writing and narrative within psychotherapy, particularly through a Jungian and depth psychological lens. I am interested in what becomes possible when we move beyond the assumption that everything psychologically significant can be reached through direct language. Sometimes the symbol, the image or the story can hold something that the individual is not yet able to say in ordinary words.
Receiving recognition for that work at an international conference felt particularly affirming because the project began with what was, in many ways, quite an unconventional research question.
GCAS: This milestone comes shortly after you completed your PhD with GCAS. How was your journey in the PhD programme, from when you first started until receiving your doctorate?
Dr. Pearl Brock: My PhD journey with GCAS was genuinely transformative. I came into the programme as an experienced psychotherapist and lecturer, but the doctorate gave me a much wider philosophical and intellectual framework within which to think about psychotherapy, subjectivity, narrative and what it means to be human.
One of the things I valued enormously about GCAS was the permission to think differently. My research sits across psychotherapy, Jungian psychology, philosophy, narrative inquiry, hermeneutics and the humanities. In a more traditional doctoral environment, I suspect I may have spent a great deal of time trying to make the work fit neatly into one disciplinary box. At GCAS, interdisciplinarity was not simply tolerated. It was actively encouraged.
That changed the research, but it also changed me as a clinician, researcher and teacher. I became increasingly interested not simply in whether an intervention works, but in questions of meaning, symbolism, language, subjectivity and the philosophical assumptions that sit underneath clinical practice.
Completing the doctorate felt less like arriving at the end of something and more like arriving at the beginning of a much bigger body of work.
GCAS: Last year, you also joined GCAS as a lecturer in the BA programme. Can you share more about your teaching philosophy and the GCAS BA?
Dr. Pearl Brock: Teaching at GCAS has been a particularly enjoyable part of the journey because the educational philosophy resonates strongly with my own.
I teach Applied Ethics, and my approach is very much centred on developing the student as a thinker rather than simply asking them to reproduce information. I am interested in what happens when students encounter an idea and begin to question their own assumptions about it.
For me, education within the humanities and social sciences must retain the human subject at its centre. We are teaching in an extraordinary period in which knowledge is immediately accessible and generative AI can produce sophisticated language in seconds. The challenge for education is therefore no longer simply the transmission of information. The challenge is helping students develop judgement, intellectual curiosity, ethical responsibility and an individual voice.
That is one of the things I particularly value about the GCAS BA. Students are encouraged to engage with difficult ideas, philosophy and contemporary questions while also finding their own intellectual position. There is a genuine emphasis on dialogue and critical inquiry rather than simply arriving at the correct answer.
GCAS: What would you tell someone considering GCAS to help them make the right choice?
Dr. Pearl Brock: I would say that GCAS is particularly suited to someone who is curious and who does not necessarily want their thinking confined by traditional disciplinary boundaries.
You have to be prepared to engage. It is not a passive educational experience. You will encounter ideas that challenge you, people who think very differently from you, and questions that sometimes remain questions for quite a long time. For me, that is one of its greatest strengths.
What I did not necessarily anticipate was how much the experience would influence what I went on to do beyond the doctorate. It gave me the confidence to think more broadly about where psychotherapy sits philosophically, academically and professionally, and that has also contributed to my setting up the Irish Association of Person Centred and Experiential Psychotherapists. That grew from a very similar belief in creating spaces where different ways of thinking about the person, therapy and human experience can have a voice.
If you want an education that simply confirms what you already know, GCAS may not be the obvious choice. If you want an education that changes the way you think, and perhaps even changes what you decide to do with that thinking afterwards, then I think it is a very interesting place to study.
GCAS: What else is important to know about your work, and what is next for you?
Dr. Pearl Brock: Alongside my academic work, I am Clinical Director of Think Well Psychotherapy Clinic in Mullingar, where I work as a Consultant Clinical Psychotherapist and lead a large psychotherapy team. Keeping a strong connection between scholarship and actual clinical practice is really important to me.
Much of my current work continues to develop the ideas that emerged during the doctorate, particularly the relationship between fairytale, symbol, narrative and individuation. I am interested in how psychotherapy can create more space for the symbolic life of the individual at a time when so much of contemporary culture encourages increasingly standardised ways of understanding ourselves.
I am also developing this work for publication, including The Storyteller’s Couch: Writing Towards Individuation, and continuing to write and teach around psychotherapy, depth psychology, ethics and the humanities.
More broadly, I think the next phase of my work is about protecting the individuality of the human subject. Whether we are talking about psychotherapy, education or artificial intelligence, I keep coming back to the same question: how do we make sure the individual symbolic world is not lost within systems that increasingly categorise, quantify and predict human beings?
I have a feeling that question is going to keep me busy for quite a while.
Short Bio
Dr Pearl Brock is a Consultant Clinical Psychotherapist, lecturer, researcher and Clinical Director of Think Well Psychotherapy Clinic in Mullingar, Ireland. She completed her PhD in Humanities and Social Science at GCAS, with research drawing on Jungian and depth psychology, narrative inquiry, hermeneutics and the therapeutic use of fairytale and symbolic writing. She lectures in Applied Ethics on the GCAS BA programme and is also involved in psychotherapy education, clinical supervision and professional development in Ireland.
GCAS profile: https://gcas.ie/pearl-brock
Think Well Psychotherapy Clinic: www.thinkwell.ie
