ABSTRACT
What is it that makes someone want to become a psychotherapist? Even Freud, the father of psychotherapy, described it as an `impossible' profession (Freud, 1937). The process of training is often deeply unsettling and involves sacri®cing large amounts of time, energy and money. Practising as a psychotherapist involves sitting with people in the depth of their despair, and leaving ourselves open to feeling all kinds of unpleasant and disturbing emotions, and hearing ®rst-hand stories of profound inhumanity and even torture. Why would someone want to do this? Maroda suggests `We are there because we want something that goes beyond earning a living and beyond a commitment to social service or intellectual inquiry. We seek to be healed ourselves and we heal our old ``af¯icted'' caretakers as we heal our patients' (Maroda, 2004: 37±8). Clearly becoming a therapist is a deeply personal matter, and one which is in¯uenced by our own life experiences and our script. The effective and ethical practice of psychotherapy requires that therapists repeatedly revisit their reasons for training as and becoming psychotherapists and examine honestly what of their own needs their work is seeking to meet, to reduce the potential for exploitation of clients. The therapist's experience, sensitivities and script can impact their work in many different ways, for example therapists who came from volatile families, or even families where expression of feeling was inhibited, may ®nd it extremely dif®cult to tolerate and contain their client's anger.
