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While there has been much recent interest in the impact of organizational structures underpinning psychotherapeutic training (e.g. Davies 2008; Kernberg 2006), there has been curiously little interest in the impact of interpersonal dynamics on the process of teaching psychotherapy. In this paper, I draw on my experience as a university lecturer and tutor on a postgraduate counselling and psychotherapy training programme to explore some of the unconscious dynamics underpinning the psychotherapy trainee's development towards a mature professional identity. The implicit expectations that trainee psychotherapists hold at the start of their training are initially discussed; I then turn to psychoanalytic writers such as Bollas, Winnicott and Jessica Benjamin in an attempt to articulate and explore how trainees may progress from relating, to constructive use of their tutors in their quest for personal transformation and professional recognition.