What competencies should therapists acquire and how should they acquire them?

Abstract

A rguably, the primary goal of training in psychotherapy is to help trainees develop and/or improve competencies. Competencies can be viewed as knowledge, skills, and attitudes that are components of acceptable clinical performance (Fouad et al., 2009) or, in the absence of clear empirical definition, of what is assumed to be acceptable performance. The goal of this chapter is to present a landscape of current training practices with regard to competencies that are being taught and methods that are used to do so. This landscape should be viewed as neither comprehensive nor prescriptive. Furthermore, it unveils no new territory. Our intention is to offer a brief overview, or primer, of a wide range of training practices that have been implemented, more or less systematically, and that programs might want to consider when making decisions about what competencies to foster in students and how to foster them. In doing so, we also aim to provide a conceptual context for the training and supervision practices that are presented in this book. In this respect, the current chapter is complementary to the empirical context provided by Chapters 3 and 4: While we address some of what has been done, Chapters 3 and 4 describe what we know empirically about what has been done.