Ethical problems with expelling a trainee from psychotherapy training

There are times when trainees do not fulfil the criteria for the completion of a psychotherapy training. In the rare cases where it is not possible to achieve consensus, trainers may have to expel trainees against their will. In this paper I focus on ethical problems that arise in such demanding situations. Since trainees are supposed to develop the needed capacities in the course of the training, such decisions come down to the trainers’ judgments of the trainees’ estimated developmental capacities. This theoretical paper focuses on the problems involved in such situations and scrutinises which procedures and ethical approaches can be helpful for trainers and training institutes. Trainers can never have sufficient knowledge about the rightfulness of their decision, neither at the time of decision-making nor in the future, but such decisions may still be necessary and inevitable. This paper is about how this can be done in an ethically acceptable way and which ethical principles can be useful in the process. Keywords Gestalt training, personal development, criteria, exclusion, expulsion, ethical decision-making