ABSTRACT
Paulo Freire's dialogic model of teaching is particularly relevant to the field of psychotherapy training in that it rejects the notion that the teacher should be accorded a privileged status as the possessor of superior knowledge or the one who imparts wisdom. It is essential to work with the incremental nature of learning when undertaking the teaching/learning of psychotherapy. The learning involved in becoming a psychotherapist highlights the birth/death metaphor referred to by Chilton Pearce—a learning that is often so personally challenging. Teaching includes a performative element: the individual who places herself in front of a group of students promises to convey knowledge to her audience, or to communicate something of her own learning or experience. The challenge of teaching, and the difference between the practice of psychotherapy and the practice of psychotherapy training, is to tread the subtle and indeterminate line between supporting the developing capacities of the fledgling trainee and judging a trainee to have passed or failed.
