CP-UK has been an active member of Partners for Counselling and Psychotherapy, PCP, set up as a response to the ‘SCoPEd’ project. The SCoPEd project is being driven by three psychotherapy registration bodies – the BACP, UKCP and BPC – and is elaborating a set of competencies. The SCoPEd competencies bring the three registration bodies together, but in such a way as to reinforce the pyramidal structure of the psychotherapy profession. The current banding of practitioners into A, B and C categories is iniquitous and pernicious, and it should be little comfort to psychoanalysts that they are at the top of the hierarchy in this grading system, or that psychoanalytic conceptions of the clinical relationship are used as a conceptual grid to assess the value of non-psychoanalytic forms of psychotherapy and counselling.
The PCP grouping has been showing, through its public alternative #UnderTheMicroSCoPEd meme interventions how absurd some of the assumptions are in ‘SCoPEd’, and we have also accumulated new organisational forces in the last year. PCP currently brings together: Alliance for Counselling and Psychotherapy; Psychotherapists and Counsellors for Social Responsibility; Psychotherapy and Counselling Union; Counsellors Together UK; The Person Centred Association; The College of Psychoanalysts; UK Person Centred Experiential; Surviving Work; A Disorder for Everyone; Free Psychotherapy Network; The Black, African and Asian Therapy Network; Pink Therapy; Aashna; Independent Practitioners’ Network. There are updates and critiques via the PCP website at partnersforcounsellingandpsychotherapy.co.uk/