Following footsteps. It is one of society’s time-honoured mechanisms; the way one grocer begets another, the way the next ward sister is inspired by her mentor.

Look past the faceless high street franchises and there are still signs outside butchers’ shops and carpet showrooms that advertise ‘Bowden and Sons’ or ‘Reckitts – family firm since 1954’, testimony to how the next generation become their professional selves because of the model they were gifted in childhood. Beyond the family bond, there are more public examples being set. Doctors, salesmen, public servants can often cite the individual who inspired them to choose their particular career. 

When President Obama was asked what or who motivated him, he could reach out and quote Martin Luther King and John Kennedy and thank his mother for believing in him. But what if Obama had become a counsellor or psychotherapist. What could he have said then? 

There is a problem identifying counselling role models. Even the therapist’s daughter is denied access to her mum as role model, though mum is practising in the home where they live! She might ask mum how work has been going, but mum can’t say because there are issues of confidentiality. And if the model is not available to family, it certainly isn’t available to the public.

No. At the end of an often baffling, always challenging year – in answering the almost ubiquitous question – what am I doing? What or who brought me here? I turned up a pleasing answer, not in real life but in fiction. As there are film doctors and lawyers providing more material for students in those fields to ponder, so there are counsellors, on film and in books, who I realise have been genuine influences.

The realisation was prompted by reading about In Treatment, originally an Israeli production, now a flagship programme for HBO in America which has dramatised the therapy hour using one therapist (Gabriel Byrne in the US version) and five clients – one for each night Monday to Friday. 

I haven’t watched In Treatment (though as soon as I can get it on TV rather than through YouTube, I will), but it did make me think of all the therapists I was aware of in other fictions: Good Will Hunting, Ordinary People, Analyze This, The Sopranos, Border Crossing, Regeneration and to reflect on what they might mean to me.

I could glean something of my theoretical leanings from them. Naturally, there is a bias towards the psychodynamic end of the spectrum – in that it serves up more story, but there are also arguments against other approaches that can be quite compelling. Dr Yealland, set up as the therapist-villain in Pat Barker’s novel Regeneration, tells a patient suffering from war neurosis and unable to speak, ‘You must speak, but I shall not listen to anything you have to say.’ It is a damning indictment of a purely behavioural approach. On a lighter note, De Niro’s gangster Paul Vitti delivers the most eloquent critique of person-centred counselling in Analyze This when he asks his therapist, ‘This is what I’m paying you for? I say something, you say it right back at me?!’

Our therapist-hero in Regeneration, the Humanist Adlerian Dr Rivers, on the other hand, is compassionate. Faced with a different patient who has also been mute, he explains his theory quietly: ‘Mutism seems to spring from the conflict between wanting to say something and knowing that if you do, the consequences will be disastrous.’

There are attractive traits held commonly by all the good therapists in the above fictions which are easy to aspire to. They are all scripted and are therefore, like Dr Rivers, articulate, insightful and – of vital importance to the nervous student – they move the client’s life script profoundly; they make a difference.

The other appeal is less straightforward but no surprise – to me at least. Because these counsellors are fictionalised and need to earn their corn as characters as well as just therapists, they also have their own life scripts which are often confused and conflicted and it is this fallibility as much as anything that provides the appealing and perhaps reachable model. Interestingly, part of the feedback from the Israeli In Treatment came from real-life clients who had seen the show – which allows us a window on the therapist’s troubled private life – and now wanted their therapists to be more open, non-conformist, ‘human’. 

In the absence of real life models, maybe the ones we have been making up are nearer the mark than we might think.
Some details have been changed.

Some details have been changed.