Esther Linder, Editor, CA Magazine

Dr Peter Richard-Herbert is a registered counsellor, analytical psychotherapist,
clinical hypnotherapist, psychoanalyst and couples relationship counsellor. He practices in Bowral, in the Southern Highlands, and was the 2025 recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award at the ACA’s Excellence Awards. He spoke to ACA about his life’s work.

ACA: How would you describe your career in retrospect – where did you begin and how did you get to be where you are today?

PRH: I would class my training as privileged – I’ve been trained by some really good people and had some fantastic tuition. My initial background was in psychoanalytical psychology, but also counselling and behavioural psychology in London. When I first came to Australia, psychoanalysis was not the thing at that time, it was behavioural science. From it, I ended up with a blend of counselling which is a bit between Carl Rodgers and Sigmund Freud, so it worked out alright. I was trained in dream analysis and interpretation, which still comes into the work – Freud said “dreams are the royal road to the unconscious”, which I find to be true.

I’ve been in practice for 42 years, I have over 80,000 face-to-face clinical hours and five degrees – one’s a doctorate. Over that period of time, I’ve worked through a lot of areas, from family disputes, mediation. But I finally settled working with relationships, and here in Bowral [where I practice now] I’m known as the relationships doctor. I like that work, it’s good – it’s a privilege to work with people. They’re sitting down and telling you their deepest, darkest secrets, and that in itself I class as a privilege that they’re trusting with you that they can do that, and that’s where the work comes from – looking at what’s underneath. When people first come in, I give them some questionnaires which tell me their internal, external and emotional stress levels. Then I take a case history, and from that I can work out what’s going on, why it’s going on and where to go from there. I find it really exciting.

I get paid for my work, but I always keep two hours free a week for people who can’t pay. In counselling and psychotherapy, you can learn it, but people need to have that connection and trust with someone, otherwise you’re not going to get anywhere. I’m very comfortable with people, and they pick that up – it doesn’t matter if they’re coming in from New York or down the road. I also developed a therapy called Metaphoric Symbolised Imagery (MSI), which is the use of symbolic analysis and what I term as sublinguistic language. My work is a compilation of several disciplines, but it gets results for people, which is the main thing and is very satisfying.

ACA: What brought you to Australia from London?

PRH: I practised part-time in counselling while I was a student. What brought me to Australia was I was fed up with London – I went to New Zealand then came to Sydney and just fell in love with the place. It was beautiful, blue skies and just nice people. I settled in very quickly and started my first practice in Mosman, in the White House Medical Centre, where I stayed for 13 years. I shifted to North Sydney then Macquarie Street opposite Parliament House. I left there on the Friday before the Lindt siege happened on the Monday [in December 2014], and I don’t know how to explain it – I could feel it in the air, there was something happening.

ACA: You’ve worked extensively with the corporate sector – what was that like?

PRH: Yes, I worked a lot with people in advertising and marketing, and got some really good results. They’re intelligent and motivated people, good fun, and they’re quite achievement-based, so it was fairly easy to work from a self-development perspective. I was part of designing ATMs for NAB, and was brought to analyse magazines from a colour schema – how different colours cause neurotransmitters to react differently in people, that sort of thing. My doctorate is in personality analysis, and I’ve always had a knack for reading people’s faces and micro-expressions, gestures and body language, so I started to work in the field of law. I went into companies looking at aggressive takeovers, and worked with relationship training with the NSW Law Society. It flowed from there – I find that work very interesting.

Which means, whether it’s corporations or couples, you’re still working with relationships. My concept is that there are three entities within a relationship: there’s the two people, and then there’s the actual relationship structure in itself. So I work with these three components even in corporate, because a lot of the problems that happen in companies are actually within relationships between staff members, management, et cetera. To me, it’s very similar. I work with, what I term, Composite Personality Theory, being that personality is not one whole thing – it’s made up of lots of different parts that people develop throughout their life. For example, when you’re a child, that’s the primal self, versus the adapted self later in childhood life. All these different stages produce different coping, compensationary and protective mechanisms – so when I’m working with people, I’m looking at what effect those mechanisms are having on their relationships. It’s a very thorough way of looking at a relationship and its structure.

ACA: Your doctorate thesis is in Ego State Therapy – how would you describe that and its application?

PRH: Yes, it started there with Ego State Therapy. I’ve always been aware of different parts of personality – I grew up smack bang in the middle of London, which is a pretty rough place. You get to work people out very fast for personal survival, so when I started my practice I still had that concept of personality, defence mechanisms and emotional survival.

I trained originally in Ego State Therapy with Professor Gordon Emerson, and we’ve become good friends and colleagues since 2009. He has a very good heritage in Ego State Therapy, tracing back to Paul Federn, and then Gordon trained me. He’s now moved it into Resource Therapy, which I am trained in too. I’ve been developing my own theory, called Behavioural State Analysis which I presented at the ACA conference in 2023. I have presented the remedial part of this theory, Metaphoric Symbolised Imagery (MSI) at congresses all over the world, from Germany to Montreal since 2012.

A large part of my doctoral thesis is about service-oriented personality, which is the concept that some people are innately service-oriented because they’ve grown up with certain parental requirements on them. It’s something I love doing because you’re teaching people about themselves and how they tick, which from a psycho-education point of view helps them. I love the work, I can’t help it – it’s my life’s work.

ACA: What advice do you have for counsellors entering practice now?

PRH: I was a Senior Lecturer in the counselling faculty at the Australian College of Applied Professions (ACAP) for five years, and I used to say to my students: “Find out what you’re very comfortable with and very good at – whatever you’re naturally good at. And then find at least two other scopes of therapy that go with it, and learn them too.” For example, you may use one form, and then come up against an unconscious block, so then you switch to Gestalt therapy. Then something else comes up, and you switch to narrative therapy. It’s getting skills to deal with anything that comes at you.

I emphasise to student counsellors that you have to have rapport and therapeutic connection with the client – or therapeutic alliance, as it’s called now – as well as empathy and compassion. No judgement whatsoever: you listen, remain neutral, and you try to find out what’s underneath. That’s what I ask myself: “What’s sitting underneath all this?” Then I bring it up and drop it into the person’s lap, and ask questions from an analytical point of view directly. It’s not only listening to someone’s words, it’s also looking at their facial expressions, body language, and eyes. I call it analytical counselling; taking everything into account. You miss so much if you’re listening only to the words, rather than taking their entire body and micro-expressions into account. If someone’s uncomfortable talking about something, it means we need to talk about it further within the therapy.

ACA: How have mental health concerns changed from when you began practising to today?

PRH: It’s changed a massive amount. When I first came to Australia, I thought: “How am I going to make a living here?” Because people would just go to the pub and have a beer and chat with a mate. But it has changed a great deal – now people will tell you their full life story off the cuff. Recently the ACA and PACFA have got recognition for qualifications in counselling and psychotherapy, which will make a huge difference and this is fantastic. There’s a definite change in people’s needs – before, it was a stigma around mental health issues. Now, everybody’s got a therapist, which is good because it means people are addressing their problems, particularly in relationships. What people don’t realise is that their personality over a period of years can alter – a 19-year-old going into a relationship is a completely different personality at 30, and so is their partner. Relationships need to be looked at, examined and reset to match what the present personalities are. A lot of people don’t know that, they think it’s the same person.

ACA: What’s next for you?

PRH: I’ll be returning to teaching in 2026, including my theories such as MSI, as well as psychotherapy techniques, advanced diagnostic and remedial tools that I’ve been developing for over 12 years. I’m also working on a book about stages of life development coming in 2026.