Theoretical Considerations on the Way to Becoming a Psychotherapist

This paper aims to recount a shared experience of some psychology students – an intellectual adventure of exploring one’s own approach towards human relations and nature on the way to becoming a psychotherapist. To become practitioners, the students need to choose a certain psychotherapeutic training based on one of the main psychotherapeutic theoretical approaches. The following are mentioned in this paper: psychoanalysis, cognitivebehavioral therapy, humanistic/existential and the postmodern narrative approach. Exploring the assumptions underlying different modalities and practices is also considered here to be an ethical challenge. It is reckoned that the choice of a specific psychotherapeutical practice bound to a theory shapes the identity of the therapist and the patients, forms the language and behaviour through which the future therapist will express his own Self and influence the Other. Referring to postmodern inspirations, the author speaks in favour of making an endless effort of recognizing the assumptions underlying different practices – as the only way for not taking a potentially violent and impervious attitude in the relationship between the therapist and the patient.