Copyright © The British Psychological Society Reproduction in any form (including the internet) is prohibited without prior permission from the Society Training and disillusion in Counselling Psychology: A psychoanalytic perspective Rosemary Rizq* Roehampton University, London In this paper, I argue* that Counselling Psychology’s professional identification with pluralism poses significant emotional problems for trainees. An important factor in such problems may be the trainee’s sense of disappointment and disillusion that the route to professional and personal self-transformation will not be achieved via a set of universal theoretical principles and established clinical ‘rules’. I draw on recent psychoanalytic theory to suggest that the task facing trainees involves balancing pluralism, characterized as an ‘external’ third position, with an ‘internal’ third space indexing an awareness of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Maintaining a dialogical-dialectical perspective on these two positions allows for a creative space in which the trainee may be transformed from lay helper into professional counselling psychologist via a personal engagement with theoretical, clinical and academic material presented during training. ‘Sometimes, I make a decision I’m going to use a particular model of practice with a client; I’m sure it’s the right one, I’ve thought really hard about it, I’ve read some of the papers. But then, when I start work, I’m progressively less and less certain of what I’m doing. I start thinking that I should be working in another model and then it seems to me that this alternative model is the most appropriate. How on earth am I supposed to know that what I’m doing is right? What do you think I should do? Can you give me some guidance here?’ (Counselling psychology trainee). Any psychotherapeutic training institution will be familiar with the difficulties experienced by trainees and novice therapists. On the basis of a number of empirical studies of counsellor development, Skovholt and Ronnestadt (2003) go so far as to describe the challenges faced by student counsellors as hardships (p. 45) and refer to the disillusionment many novices experience with their training programmes as well as the intense disappointment when mentors, supervisors and others fail to live up to expectations. They argue that: ‘[t]he major catalyst for the intense stress faced by the novice is the inherent, but often unknown to the novice, ambiguity of professional * Correspondence should be addressed to Rosemary Rizq, School of Human and Life Sciences, Roehampton University, Whitelands College, Holybourne Avenue, London SW15 4JD, UK (e-mail: rosierizq@tiscali.co.uk). The British Psychological Society 613 Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice (2006), 79, 613–627 q 2006 The British Psychological Society www.bpsjournals.co.uk DOI:10.1348/147608305X89964