Trainees today are buried beneath textbooks on theory, bombarded by lectures on current research, and taught to be experts in a variety of methods. But where and when do they learn who they are and how to use their own selves in therapy?

Most clients have automatic habits of thinking, feeling, and verbalizing experiences that imprison them in a world of gray sameness. How do we help them escape? The most immediate way is to ditch your logical analysis and help them experience a felt sense.

How do you help 200 teenagers who’ve had to flee their country find a path to peace in a new place? A psychiatrist who’s traveled across the world to help traumatized refugees from Tibet guides them to a source of wisdom and hope within themselves.

Garry Cooper and Kathleen Smith

This year, 3,000 practitioners came to our annual Symposium to explore the fundamental question: are we any closer to unraveling the mysteries of psychotherapy than when Freud became the first therapist to complain about client “resistance”?

Peer consultation groups offer all kinds of rich possibilities for learning and collegial support---as long as you set them up properly.

The pioneers in our field—Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Virginia Satir, Fritz Perls, Salvador Minuchin, and others—all recognized that they were providing something more than just technique. But does today’s short-term, empirically supported, manualized and medicalized psychotherapy really require its practitioners to be wise? Is wisdom even desirable?

It wasn’t their research results or bestselling books that set apart Freud, Rogers, Minuchin, and Satir. They seemed to have a sense of what really mattered. But today, have conceptions about clinical wisdom become obsolete?

There’s something about healing from the deep emotional suffering that feels like death and rebirth—not the quick kind that some claim to receive in religious conversion. It’s the kind that asks us to be open to changing our contract with life in the most fundamental way.

Excerpts from a series of interviews with some of the wisest souls in the field of psychology and psychotherapy on essential questions clinicians struggle with every day.