| Abstract: | Recent research literature in the field of personal therapy for psychotherapists shows that therapists claim overwhelmingly positive outcomes with few negative effects (Orlinsky et al., The Psychotherapist’s own psychotherapy: Patient and clinician perspectives. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005). However, there has been little interest to date in the extent to which the personal characteristics of therapists might have a bearing on the way in which personal therapy is experienced in psychotherapeutic training. This paper reviews some of the current research in the field and then discusses a subset of results from a small-scale qualitatively-driven study (Rizq and Target, Counselling Psychology Quarterly 23(4):1–27, 2010b) suggesting that early attachment experience may be a relevant factor in understanding how a mandatory training therapy is perceived and experienced within psychotherapeutic training. Implications for psychotherapeutic education are briefly discussed and some directions for future research proposed. |
