The psychodynamic and psychoanalytic organisations in this country are already regulated by two main bodies (UKCP and BPC) which have been developed through the profession over the last twenty-five years. Each of the member organisations of UKCP and BPC has strict codes of ethics, practice and complaints procedures, and is inspected periodically by the regulatory body. Yet the new developments will render the existing regulatory structures for the most part obsolete. With this comes a new vision of what psychodynamic and psychoanalytic work actually is.
For HPC and SfH, psychoanalytic work is seen more as an intervention to be applied – like a drug – TO patients than a long and painstaking work done BY patients. This view of therapy as an external intervention is reflected in the government’s plan to ‘give’ therapy to young Muslims they suspect of harbouring aspirations to terrorism: psychotherapy becomes a tool of social control rather than a choice made by the individual to explore their own life.
A consultation process was begun by SfH in 2007, and the results just published in draft form.More than 450 rules have been listed for psychodynamic and psychoanalytic therapy. They dictate every aspect of how therapists should organise their sessions, how they should ‘monitor’ themselves and how they should carry out their work. They go into minute detail about the timing of interventions, the setting of the therapy, its aims – and even the expression of appropriate ‘feelings’. Such an application of externally-imposed rules – most of which were expressly contraindicated by Freud, Jung and the analysts who followed, such as Klein, Lacan and Winnicott – removes the very foundation on which such therapies are based, namely the freedom of both parties to work together authentically and creatively. If these rules are accepted, then it will no longer be possible for analysts – and many therapists – to work in this country.
The SfH project shows how analytic work is being forced into the current culture of outcomes, where everything can be predicted in advance and evaluated in relation to the expected results. Analysis, however, involves an open-ended relationship, where results may emerge that were never predicted or even thought of by the person in analysis. The very distinction between conscious and unconscious motivation that lies at the heart of analytic work is ignored by the proposed regulations which encourage a ‘false self’, a box-ticking clinician, always fearful of being watched by the authorities and anxious to please them. If analysis has an aim, it is to help patients free themselves from irrational forms of authority, exactly those that now threaten to constrain the work of analysts.
According to the government roadmap, HPC will establish a list of reputable practitioners, which will mean effectively those who adopt their particular formulations as to what psychoanalysis is about. All the documentation published to date by HPC shows a serious misunderstanding of the nature of analytic work, together with a new insistence on ‘good character’ defined in highly rigid ways. If this goes ahead, then members of the public will no longer have the freedom to choose their analyst. Rather, they will have to select a practitioner from a list which only includes those who practise a particular form of therapy.
