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This book examines the training and supervision of psychotherapists, with a focus on psychotherapy efficacy and key issues facing psychotherapy training programs today. While some therapists are more effective than others, good training and supervision can provide all clinicians with the skills and tools to become effective practitioners. Considerable research has shown the broad efficacy of psychotherapy, but there are still many clients who do not fully benefit from therapy, some who don't benefit at all, and even some who get worse as a consequence of therapy. The overall goal of training and supervision, and efforts to study these practices, should be to enhance the current degree of effectiveness that has been reached in psychotherapy. This book offers innovative knowledge on how to better understand and improve training by relying on the reflections, research discoveries, and collaborative work of psychotherapy scholars who represent a diversity of theoretical orientations, methodological expertise, and levels of experience.

Many supervisors need help navigating the most challenging dilemmas and conflicts that arise in supervision of trainees, addressing skill deficits and competency concerns, working through role conflicts, and gender or ethnicity-related misunderstandings. Because these interpersonal conflicts can be so challenging, however, they often represent a golden opportunity for real progress. This book presents a process model with specific strategies—such as exploration of feelings, focus on self-efficacy, and attention to parallel processes—that together enable supervisors and trainees to successfully resolve the problem at hand and achieve lasting success in their careers.

This book is a selection of papers written over 25 years of practising psychoanalytic psychotherapy, of training and supervising psychotherapists, psychodynamic counsellors and supervisors. It reflects a preoccupation with the growth and diversification of counselling and psychotherapy, with the imperatives of training, supervision and regulation, and with the significant changes in the profession due to the invention of brief, time-limited, intermittent and recurrent psychotherapy. An overall theme is the conviction that what patients and therapists share is vulnerability, and that the therapist is a'wounded healer', whose reparative tendency informs his professional choice, his therapeutic empathy and his capacity to bear the rigours of therapeutic work. Thus an unconscious connection between the helper and the helped is the driving force of every therapeutic relationship, for better and for worse. Its responsible management requires thorough training, ongoing supervision and a firm frame in order to contain the powerful forces operating when two strangers meet for the purpose of therapy.