Guest editors' introduction

The idea, or seed for this special series on psychotherapy training originally grew from a panel that took place at the 2006 North American Society of Psychotherapy Research (NASPR) conference in Burr Oak, Ohio. Although adhering to different theoretical perspectives and representing diverse professional backgrounds, the contributors to this panel (the authors in this series) agreed that little more than a dearth of research has been conducted on psychotherapy training. This knowledge gap, to a certain degree, mimics the current status of psychotherapy research. Given that we know that psychotherapy works, it seems reasonable to conclude that something is working in the training of psychotherapists. We are, however, less confident in our ability to explain how psychotherapy works, and, similarly, we are less knowledgeable about what are the most effective (and ineffective) elements of training. In our view, just as we pursue the question of how psychotherapy works in the hope of improving treatment outcomes, we should also pursue a greater knowledge base regarding psychotherapy training in the hope of improving training programs, and ultimately treatment outcomes. One goal of this series is to offer a variety of perspectives on effective psychotherapy training based on empirical knowledge, theory, and clinic experience. Another important goal of this series is to provide directives for future research on training, in the hope of providing a framework from which to begin addressing the aforementioned gap in the field's knowledge base. Thus, each of the four following papers is comprised of two parts: one addressing important elements of a training program and another that is focused on future directions for research on training. In addition to the common structure of the papers in this series, we believe that each paper plays a complimentary role in relation to the others. Although the authors of this series agree on the importance of training, they all believe that much more needs to be done to better understand and foster the development of effective therapists. As such, our hope in putting together this series was to encourage the field to actively pursue better ways to think about and conduct psychotherapy training, as well as to devote more energy in research aimed at addressing some of the critical questions raised by this complex endeavor. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved).