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Many justifications can be offered for a study of psychotherapists, not the least of which is the fact that therapists seem to be rather interesting people. When the developmental psychologist Paul Bakes and his colleagues (e.g., Baltes & Smith, 1994) chose to study the nature of wisdom, they selected psychotherapists as a group they expected to exhibit it-a choice that might elicit a wry if appreciative smile in many therapists. The hallmarks of wisdom that Baltes and Smith (1994) thought might be found among psychotherapists included the following: rich factual knowledge; rich procedural knowledge; life span contextualism, or knowledge about the contexts of life and their temporal relationships; relativism, or knowledge about differences in values, goals, and priorities; and uncertainty, or knowledge about the relative indeterminacy and unpredictability of life and ways to manage it.

In this chapter, we introduce readers to the varied groups of psychotherapists who participated in our study. In doing this, we have two aims in mind. The first is to provide a context for understanding variations in responses to the questions posed in the Development of Psychotherapists Common Core Questionnaire. Psychotherapists share certain basic characteristics, but they also differ in many ways from one another. A detailed description of our therapists' varied characteristics will help readers 27