Training as a cognitive behavioural therapist involves a considerable role transition for mental health professionals where they are expected to demonstrate competence in a range of new skills that emphasise collaboration and Socratic dialogue. This can be in stark contrast to the more didactic style that trainees are familiar with prior to embarking on their training. Guided discovery (GD) is an integral part of formulation and treatment, yet little is known at present about the experiences of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) trainees when learning this new skill; specifically, how they assimilate this with existing ways of working and the challenges this might involve. This research is a preliminary attempt to understand factors that help and hinder GD skill acquisition. Eighteen trainee CBT practitioners completed an online questionnaire with the subsequent data analysed using a grounded theory methodology. Three themes were identified: ‘Competing Selves’, ‘Style’ and ‘Active Engagement and Learning’. These themes were used to develop a preliminary model of factors that enable or inhibit skills in GD. The impact of previous professional roles appears to influence the acquisition of confidence and skill in GD. This paper discusses the implications of the findings for CBT trainers, supervisors and trainees.

The Socratic method, as an eminently verbal procedure, will be analyzed from a behavioral perspective in order to clarify how verbal conditioning works within. This work compares the verbalizations that expert and inexperienced therapists emit during Socratic method to find out which and why certain therapist verbalizations are most successful in changing client responses. The sample consisted of 113 Socratic method fragments from 18 cases, analyzed by observational methodology. The expert therapists had more than 6 years of experience, the inexperienced less than 2. Experts had fewer failure Socratic method fragments, but there were no differences in successful ones. The way of questioning had a different pattern: Inexperienced therapists suggested more the response, experts used more didactic verbalizations; also, experts used the aversive component more and contingently. The creation of guidelines based on functional description of verbal interaction and the need for novice psychologists training are some implications of these results.

In Plato’s Laches, Socrates ascribes knowledge of courage to his eponymous interlocutor and makes an attempt to reconstruct it in speech. His attribution of knowledge to Laches controls his discursive behaviour in the dialogue, requiring him to withhold judgements of error, construe apparent error as a failure of speech rather than knowledge, and search for the deeper truth underlying the overt content of Laches’ utterances. Socrates’ method in this elenchus can be described as a kind of ‘epistemic exegesis,’ which aims to draw out and give discursive shape to knowledge of virtue that it assumes that the interlocutor already possesses.