The damaging effects of work-related stress on doctors and teachers, for example, have been particularly prominent recently with ‘stress in the workplace’ being cited as a major factor in the high numbers of teachers currently opting for early retirement. In this context, stress refers essentially to external pressures exerted on the individual by the work environment and it follows that by attending to these factors - for example, by decreasing the hours worked by junior doctors, curbing class-room sizes and so on - intolerable levels of stress can be reduced. In the field of psychotherapy the origins of stress cannot be conceived of in such a straightforward way because the