ABSTRACT
Psychotherapeutic training involves many styles of learning, each being thought to contribute to the total education of the practitioner. The temporal arrangements of training institutes are often more coherent and less chaotic than the spatial arrangements into which these styles of learning fit. For instance, psychotherapy training is rarely undertaken within a bounded institute. All psychoanalytic trainings request that every candidate first undertake at least one year of individual psychotherapy before entering theoretical and clinical seminars at the institute. Official training rationales as to why pre-training therapy is essential to becoming a therapist, differ in emphasis from institute to institute, although Abram and Morgan did identify a general purpose in their official guide to psychoanalytic trainings. When surveying the practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapy many details that may appear inconsequential to an outsider actually have great significance for the psychotherapist. The therapist’s task is to analyse the transference and to provide a ‘corrective relationship’.
