All consultant psychotherapists should be sufficiently familiar with the three major branches of psychotherapy, to appropriately match therapy with their assessment of the patients' needs. This requires that specialist registrars training in psychotherapy acquire skills in psychodynamic/interpersonal, cognitive-behavioural and systems-based therapies.

While acknowledging the benefit for the trainee of being familiar with more than one model of psychotherapy the practicalities of incorporating different models in to training is likely to be problematic, at least initially, for both trainees and trainers.

Clinical implications In this article the experience of a senior registrar who completed a training in psycho-analyticpsychotherapy prior to gaining experience in cognitive-behaviour therapy is examined from the perspective of both the trainee and cognitive-behavioural trainer.