ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the themes that seem to play a major role in how the process of becoming a therapist is made intelligible by our contributors. The practice of psychotherapy is a quest for some kind of hidden or secret knowledge. Psychotherapeutic healing can be seen as comprising both homoeopathic and allopathic principles of healing. The psychoanalyst Ralph Greenson describes Empathy as a special form of nonverbal, preverbal closeness which has a feminine cast. The chapter suggests that the one feature in the process of becoming a therapist is the focusing of attention on to a particular domain, that of the inner world and the self, both in oneself and in one's patients. The primary feature in thinking about psychotherapy, namely that it involves a balancing of opposites and contradictions. Psychotherapeutic language borrows and transposes ideas, ways of thinking and metaphors from other traditions of thought in particular from religion, political and the narrative tradition.
