A review of the research on pretherapy education for psychotherapy clients has found that pretherapy training has a positive impact on encouraging clients to remain in individual or group therapy. Pretherapy training has also been shown to contribute to improving client motivation and attitudes toward the therapeutic process. The evidence suggests that some form of pretherapy education should be made available to clients unfamiliar with psychotherapy, especially to highly defensive clients. Much research accounts for the positive results of pretherapy programs based on the expectation hypothesis which attributes premature terminations to the client's negative reactions to disconfirmed expectations concerning therapy or the therapist. This hypothesis has received only partial empirical support. A preliminary analysis of the content of pretherapy programs suggests that programs reporting significant results cover the major topic areas of process, role, and resistance. It appears that program effectiveness may be due to addressing client resistances instead of, or in addition to, inappropriate expectations. The fruitfulness of pretherapy research may therefore be enhanced by postulating a dual resistance-expectation hypothesis. Although longer term effects of pretherapy educations are unknown, resistance-oriented interventions are recommended, especially with clients considered likely to terminate their therapy prematurely. Five pages of references are appended. (NB)