Couns Psychother Res. 2019;00:1–10. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/capr | 1 © 2019 British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy 1 | INTRODUCTION What core skills are needed to be an effective psychotherapist? Because of the large variety of existing psychotherapies, this ques‐ tion probably needs to be answered differently with regard to dif‐ ferent forms of therapy. Different forms of psychotherapy may have widely different goals. For example, whereas some therapies aim to solve acute problems in living, the aims of other therapies may be increased self‐knowledge, or the development of personal potential. Patients may use psychotherapy in very different ways, as seen in reports about what has worked for them. For example, when Adler and McAdams (2007) analysed the psychotherapy stories of 76 adult patients, they identified four different categories of nar‐ ratives, of which the two most salient involved the following main themes: (a) the patient actively using the therapy to solve a personal problem and to re‐assert personal agency; (b) the patient relying on the therapist and the therapeutic alliance as the mechanism of treatment. If patients make use of therapy in such different ways, it Received: 13 August 2018 | Revised: 15 May 2019 | Accepted: 16 May 2019 DOI: 10.1002/capr.12244 SPECIAL SECTION ARTICLE Three modes of psychotherapy and their requisite core skills Lars‐Gunnar Lundh Department of Psychology, Lund University, Lund, Sweden Correspondence Lars‐Gunnar Lundh, Department of Psychology, Lund University, Box 213, 221 00 Lund, Sweden. Email: lars‐gunnar.lundh@psy.lu.se Abstract The field of psychotherapy suffers from the lack of an integrative meta‐perspective on the large variety of existing psychotherapies and on the therapeutic skills involved. In the present paper, it is suggested that the development of a more comprehensive view of this field may be facilitated if we differentiate between three modes of psy‐ chotherapy, which require different therapeutic core skills: (a) an educational mode, which requires teaching skills; (b) a reparative mode, which requires analytic‐concep‐ tualising skills to identify some kind of disordered functioning, in combination with specific relational‐technical skills to repair this dysfunction; and (c) a developmental mode, which involves engaging in a therapeutic relationship with patients to facilitate their personal growth, and which requires non‐directivity skills. In addition, some therapeutic skills (e.g., awareness and communication skills) may be more or less im‐ portant in all modes of treatment. Concrete manifestations of the three different modes of psychotherapy are discussed in terms of five different theoretical perspec‐ tives on psychotherapy: the common factors, humanistic‐experiential, mindfulness, cognitive‐behavioural (CBT) and psychodynamic perspective. The common factors model is criticised as being insufficient in several respects. Finally, it is argued that if personal therapeutic skills are essential to the effects of psychotherapy, then empiri‐ cal research on psychotherapy needs to be re‐oriented towards a person‐oriented study of therapist skills in action, in the context of a study of the interaction between therapist and patient. KEYWORDS psychotherapy, therapeutic skills, therapeutic relationship, integration