ABSTRACT
Psychotherapy is always defined as a "talking therapy", but, for practical purposes, therapist should remember that "talking" is the patient's share, while their major responsibility is rather to listen and to learn how to hear what the patient is trying to convey to them. The essential quality required of a psychotherapist is that of empathy, but, ideally, he should also have a need to help others. On its own, the need or wish to help others is not enough to make a therapist. A therapist needs to gain some gratification from the experience of helping another person. Therapist will find that being a therapist represents a heavy burden and it can often be a painful occupation. It is said that a training analysis is really meant to help the therapist to discover why they want to be an analyst: this is a fundamental question they should attempt to answer before they decide to adopt psychotherapy as their career.
