Challenges of Psychotherapy Training: Techniques or Presence?

Supervision of psychotherapy has always faced the challenges of technical training and/or increasing psychological capacities and mental health of trainees. Does a psychotherapist need to be a technically skillful person or need to have a high psychological capacity and mental health. Although it is obvious that both are necessary, a differentiation is needed between the naïve idea of psychologist as a super healthy human and the realistic idea of psychotherapist as a person with emotional capacity. Positive psychology formulation of mental health in two axes of symptoms-lack of symptoms and lack of wellbeing-wellbeing can help to make that differentiation. Psychotherapists do not necessarily need to be high in wellbeing/ virtues while they do need to be relatively free of psychological symptoms. Consequently, the boundary between doing supervision and doing psychotherapy for a given student is another challenge. Would a psychotherapist, having the deepest knowledge of a student, be qualified to address mental health and countertransference problems in the supervision of that student? Psychotherapists have learned, through experience, the importance of a clear boundary between supervision of a student as a learning process and attending of that student in a psychotherapeutic process. Creating of such a boundary make the process of psychotherapy training more challenging because it needs both technical and psychological capacity training. Training analysis, core-training, and close-circuit training as three models of psychotherapy supervision are discussed in the line of this challenges.

Keywords:

Psychotherapy , Supervision , Technical Training , Emotional Capacity Training