European Association for Psychotherapy

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The European Association for Psychotherapy (EAP) is a Vienna-based umbrella organisation for 128 psychotherapist organizations (including 32 national associations and 18 European associations) from 43 countries with a membership of more than 120,000 psychotherapists.^[1] Individual members may also join the organisation directly rather than through one of its member organisations.

The EAP has sponsored much of the European effort from the mid-1990s toward the professionalisation of psychotherapy and the formation of pan-European training standards, ethics and guidelines.^[2]

A submission to the European Commission to establish the Common Training Framework for the Profession of Psychotherapist is currently in process (2021).

The President of EAP is Irena Bezić (Croatia);^[1] the general secretary of the EAP is Tom Warnecke (UK)^[3]

The association is based on the Strasbourg Declaration on Psychotherapy of 1990 whereby the EAP promotes the need for high standards of training on a scientific basis, and fights for free and independent exercise of psychotherapy in Europe.^[4] Important activities include:

• Creating a collaborative democratic forum for all European national and method-based professional associations in psychotherapy.
• Establishing pan-European professional post-graduate training standards consisting of a minimum of 2,400 hours, over a minimum of four years, of specialist training, with a significant component of supervised practice.
• Awarding the European Certificate of Psychotherapy (ECP):^[5] The aim of the European Certificate of Psychotherapy is to implement a comparable standard of training and mutual recognition of training across Europe.
• Building the Register for ECP Psychotherapists: creating a searchable database of the availability of over 5,000 psychotherapists in Europe.
• Promoting EAP Ethical Guidelines: The EAP has developed ethical guidelines to protect patients and is establishing these across Europe.^[6]
• EAP is also a founding member of the World Council for Psychotherapy (WCP).