8 ..9
I am certainly not claiming that psychoanalytic practitioners should, for their own benefit alone, be in a different or more privileged position, compared with other therapists, in relation to regulatory issues. What I am claiming is that the fitness to practise regime, as it has now evolved, should not apply to psychoanalytic practitioners without important safeguards, purely in order to preserve and protect the discipline of psychoanalysis itself: as an effective mode of psychological intervention that should continue to exist for the benefit of all. Such safeguarding is what would be in the public interest: not the effective killing-off of the discipline in order to comply with principles that have not been properly thought through, in relation to the needs of members of the public who seek to pursue the psychoanalytic encounter.
Arguably, there is nothing faced by members of the public, as consumers of psychoanalysis, that threatens them more than this concept of fitness to practise: not only in terms of their perception of the professional authenticity and integrity of those they consult but also in the freedom of those members of the public themselves to engage in the very pursuit of psychoanalysis.
How, under such a regime, could we ever contemplate challenging a patient about what might be going on within their unconscious or internal world, where there is repression or resistance? How could we ever contemplate raising significant sexual issues, without encountering the possibility of being profoundly misunderstood: as possibly inviting the very thing that is being talked about, particularly when this arises within an erotic or eroticised transference? How could we contemplate using anything but the most anodyne and remote clinical language in referring to sexual matters? For that matter, how could we ever be confident that making a transference interpretation would not be misunderstood and used against us? How could we challenge issues surrounding acting-out and malign regression and how could we possibly hope to persuade patients to own for themselves their introjections, their indentifications, their projections and their projective identifications?