ABSTRACT
Being a psychotherapist is a rather peculiar occupation. The author met very few psychotherapists who have claimed a happy childhood or to have grown up in a healthy family environments. Christopher Whitmont's statement rang so true to him as a young and inexperienced psychotherapist that it was never to be forgotten. But remembering something is not the same as truly understanding it. Personal psychotherapy is essential to becoming a competent psychotherapist, but it is no guarantee. Winnicott was a pediatrician who became a psychoanalyst. His writings were full of accounts of the mother–infant and mother–child relationships, characterizing them as the fundamental anchorings of human psychological and emotional realities in this earliest relationship. In keeping with Winnicott, Bollas emphasized that the therapist's tasks included the need at times to sooth and contain a client's distress, but there was a parallel responsibility to unsettle and disturb.
