3 ..6
Jacques China
Is psychoanalysis in danger of being judged unfit to be practised?
The professions of psychotherapy and counselling are, in accordance with the wishes of both the government and many practitioners, currently being reviewed for proposed regulation by the Health Professions Council, as a regulatory agency of the state. Many other practitioners, while not opposed to effective regulation, are bitterly opposed to this particular form of regulation. Many psychoanalytic practitioners are rightly concerned about whether it will be possible, any longer, to engage effectively in the psychoanalytic encounter, under the proposed rubric of HPC. There are many aspects of such proposed regulation that might make this difficult, if not impossible, but none more so than the concept of fitness to practise. In pursuit of this principle by HPC, patients will be able and maybe even encouraged to bring almost any form of complaint against the practitioner they are seeing. We will explore the implications of this and consider whether such a worrying possibility will put an end to the therapeutic role of and insight into transference phenomena within psychoanalytic treatment and, as a result, entirely undermine psychoanalysis as the valuable resource and effective form of psychological intervention and means of understanding human experience that it has been until now.
Phil Mollon
Fitness to practice what? The destruction of psychotherapy in 21st Century Britain.
The combination, of the profoundly flawed NICE guidelines on psychological therapy and the moves towards state regulation of psychotherapy, creates a powerful and malign oppression of the life of the therapeutic encounter. There are several reasons why psychotherapy is not analogous to a pill or a standardised quasi-medical procedure – although NICE treats it in just this way. State regulation raises the following spectre: attention to the unique qualities and needs of the individual client will be proscribed, whilst what is prescribed is a small number of standardised ‘therapeutic’ protocols. This is to be done in the name of protecting the public!