European Association for Psychotherapy

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

The European Association for Psychotherapy (EAP) is based in Vienna and brings together about 430 European psychotherapy groups from 43 countries. This includes 33 national associations, 18 European associations, and 80 EAP-accredited training institutes, with more than 120,000 psychotherapists in total. Individual members can join the organisation directly too.

Since the mid-1990s, the EAP has helped push for the professionalisation of psychotherapy in Europe. It works to create common training standards, ethics, and guidelines across the continent. Today, it has representatives from 41 countries and supports around 30 different modalities of psychotherapy.

In 2014, ESCO recognized that a psychotherapist is different from a psychologist. In 2021, the EAP began a process with the European Commission to establish a Common Training Framework for the profession of psychotherapist.

The current President is Irena Bezić (Croatia) and the General Secretary is Tom Warnecke (UK). The association is guided by the Strasbourg Declaration on Psychotherapy (1990), which promotes high, science-based training and the free, independent practice of psychotherapy in Europe.

One of the EAP’s key activities is publishing the International Journal of Psychotherapy (ISSN 1356-9082), a professional journal that appears three times a year.