Fit for Purpose: The Organisation of Psychotherapy Training

Compared with the libraries of literature on the practice and theory of therapy (psychotherapy and counselling), there is surprisingly little on the theory or practice of teaching or training therapists. Few of the founding fathers and mothers of psychotherapy wrote about the pedagogy of psychotherapy. A major exception to this was Carl Rogers, the founder of client-centred therapy, now more commonly referred to as the person-centred approach, who wrote a chapter on the training of therapists in his seminal work Client-Centered Therapy (published in 1951) and, later, a book on his philosophy of and approach to education, which is summarised in its title, Freedom to Learn (Rogers, 1969). He himself later revised this for a second edition (in 1983) and, after his death, a colleague, H. Jerome Freiberg, made further revisions for a third edition (published in 1994).