What it really takes to train as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in the UK

“If you truly want something with all your heart, you will find the energy and means to make it happen.” Those were my analyst’s words at a moment when I was close to giving up. I can still hear his calm, steady voice. I was lying on the same old couch, absent-mindedly tracing the embroidery on the throw with my fingers, staring at the ceiling. 

I had run out of patience. Powerlessness, fear, and frustration were rolling around inside me. My clinical training in psychoanalytic psychotherapy felt endless. After five years of seminars and assignments, years of intense analytic work with patients, almost two years spent in the corridors of a psychiatric hospital caring for those too unwell to be in the community, and hundreds of hours in personal analysis and supervision, I felt I’d reached the end of the tunnel - only there was no light. And the journey was not yet over. 

How was I going to see this through? How would I carry the cost, financially and emotionally, of such an arduous training? 

Part of me wanted to rage - at the universe, at my training organisation, at my analyst, and most of all at myself for choosing such a complex and lengthy path. And yet I knew I could not quit or turn back. 

I was especially cross with my analyst: how could “wanting it” possibly summon the energy and the means? If I didn’t want to complete it after all those years, who did? 

What I couldn’t see back then - despite already being five years into both my analysis and my training - was that no one else could carry this for me, and I was not yet ready to step out of the safety of being a trainee and take on the full responsibility of standing alone in the world as a psychotherapist. Becoming a therapist is not just an academic pursuit; it is about being prepared to hold the emotional and mental lives of others, which demands maturity, self-awareness, and inner readiness.

I already had a BSc in Forensic Psychology, and still so many questions felt unanswered. A fierce curiosity drove me: to inch closer to what felt true in me and to understand the human condition more deeply. That is why I chose to commit to the long, demanding road of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy.

So, what does psychotherapy training actually involve in the UK? While pathways differ depending on modality and training body, the core elements are always rigorous: theoretical depth, clinical experience, and one’s own therapy. I can speak most honestly about the path I took - psychoanalytic psychotherapy and analytical psychology with the Association for Group and Individual Psychotherapy (AGIP) in London.

My clinical training took nine years in total, including a foundation year. Throughout those years I was in my own analysis – most often three times a week, and for several years four times a week. To this day, I see personal analysis as the master teacher in my profession. I do not believe we can become good, ethically responsible psychotherapists, entrusted with another person’s inner life, without undergoing our own sustained process of self-knowledge. Truly knowing oneself happens in relationship: sharing one’s thinking and inner world with another and allowing oneself to be vulnerable and seen.

Alongside personal analysis, the training combined several strands:

·       Four years of theoretical seminars in psychoanalytic theories and thinking.

·       A minimum of one year in a psychiatric setting, to encounter severe mental distress within the system that holds it.

·       A year of infant (baby) observation and seminars, to witness development and early relationships with reflective attention.

·       Intensive, long-term clinical work with patients under close supervision, week in, week out, over years.

·       And woven through it all, hundreds of hours of supervision and reflective writing to deepen and test one’s clinical mind.

It is demanding - of time, of money, of one’s capacity to think when it would be easier to react. It asks you to tolerate uncertainty, to stay with not-knowing long enough for something true to emerge. It requires humility: you learn quickly that techniques are useful, but it is the quality of attention, the steadiness of the therapeutic frame, and the depth of your own self-knowledge that become decisive.

Why do it? Because when someone sits in front of you, you are asked to think with them when they cannot; to help them make sense of what feels unbearable; to hold hope when hope is temporarily out of their reach. And it demands that we, as therapists, keep doing our own work too.

So, if you are considering this path, know that the journey will test you and shape you. The light at the end does exist, but it is not a spotlight of triumph. It is quieter and more human: the moment a patient says something they have never been able to say before. In that moment, all the years of study, observation, placements, supervision, and analysis make a different kind of sense. The training does not end but it becomes part of how you live, and how you listen.

by Simina Simion, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist