| July 18 2007 | LEGAL | ARCHIVE | IPN | CONTACT | HOME | CONTENTS | ||||||
|
||||||
Bookmark with: | Delicious | Digg | reddit | Facebook | StumbleUpon [What's this?]
Aim gun at head: squeeze trigger NOW!
by Previn Karian
Brian Thorne calls this book 'coruscating'. I had to look that word up. He's right, but on the back cover of the book is a photo of the author. Allegedly, a picture tells a thousand words, as well as making good ID and security tags. This one certainly guides us into the thinking and construction within this book.
Regulation is not a topic that most counsellors or therapists want to get involved with. Unfortunately, Postle's book is an essential resource book for anyone who wants to continue working independently in the field of what he calls 'psychopractice'. We are slowly and reluctantly being made to wake up and realise that someone (usually our training institute, professional body or member organisation) is handing us a fully loaded gun and hypnotically asking us to blow our therapeutic brains out. If we resist, we experience speech paralysis, lack of vocabulary, and blank thoughtlessness leading to infantile diminishment, severe dyspraxia or catatonic inaction. Things have gone so far that we don't even know where to start or what to do, let alone how this happened in the first place.
Enter Postle. This is Act 3 of an unfolding tragicomedy which opened in Act 1 with Mowbray1, followed in Act 2 by the bad boys of therapeutic punk rock, House and Totton2. Mowbray's scholarly annihilation of regulation and the pluralist-democratic alternatives of House/Totton are selectively presented across the pages to give us a quick but accurate summary and positioning of their arguments. But Postle doesn't do music here. With a total of 8 years study in fine art concluded at the Royal College of Art, and a maker of over 40 documentaries, he leaves us with picture after picture of the grotesquerie that has been going on behind the scenes of regulation politics. Smart enough to realise that shouting protest isn't working, punk or otherwise, we are left with layer after layer of brush strokes and palette hatchings on a canvas. He does not repeat himself though it may appear that way - he is an artist who sees another colour, another angle, another twist of shape emerging from the corridors of power to which few of us have access, but all of us are ruled by, however independent or democratic we like to think we are.
This makes the chronicle style of writing (from 1990-Feb 2007) gripping but dense and detailed, in which the central arguments and thrust can get lost at times - there's a lot of variegated foliage going on here. His overall theme can be seen by first checking out 'The Regulation Journey' (ch. 31) which explains the title of the book, then 'The Alchemist's Nightmare' (ch. 6), 'Statutory Regulation' (ch. 10), 'UKCP's Love Affair with the State' (ch.29) and 'Guilt Hardens the Heart' (ch. 34). These chapters almost immediately give us the vocabulary and kick start the thinking that expresses the unease and ignorance which have kept the vast majority of practitioners silent for too long -independent, accredited or otherwise.
So what's his beef? Independence, freedom and innovation in counselling and (psycho)therapy are being lost quicker than anyone realises. He identifies three areas that contribute to this: the professional bodies, the government departments involved, and finally counsellors and (psycho)therapists themselves. The combination of these three has created a fourth field of unconscious collective momentum which is moving the profession into a potential 'fascist'3 machinery and 'trance induction'4.
Postle's storyboard is that professional bodies first approached the government for legally recognised status of their professionalisation. What began as 'statutory' registration slowly turned into 'state' regulation. Alas, the latter is dominated by the psychiatric profession and the medical model. Realising all this too late, the counselling and therapy bodies have tried to change (unsuccessfully so far) the criteria which the government will use for 'qualified' training and entitlement to practice. What was once an open 'meadow'5 of psychopractice has now turned into a territorial battle via the government for legal status in which there will be no winners but endless competition for supremacy.
Postle is at his darkest and most trenchant when he talks about the sell out of the professional bodies to the state. He disturbingly records how IPN have been consciously rejected from discussions and viewed with open contempt for their anti-regulation position6. The power mongering between UKCP, BACP and the BPS are simply grotesque, but recorded with steely nerves which have gathered historical and documented detail. At its most lurid is the recorded figure of £60'000 vied for by BACP/UKCP to fund their mapping process of the therapies7 which turns in the ensuing chapters into information bought and taken over by the DoH (Dept. of Health) and the HPC (Health Professions Council) to define the therapies hierarchically and medically. And so it goes on, with UKCP now attempting to gain supremacy by creating a rival PPC (Psychological Professions Council) to the HPC. Politics is renowned for inspiring behaviour from the depths of the gutter while masquerading as an angel of light. Postle shows that such politics has contaminated, infested and is now overrunning the fields of psychology and its practice.
It may then be Quixotic that Postle still takes his gloves off in bare knuckled fisticuffs with Pokorny, Van Deurzen-Smith, James Pollard (all UKCP), Sally Aldridge (BACP), Ros Mead and Prof Louis Appleby (DoH), Marc Seale and Rachel Tripp (HPC)8. He selects and splices the impossible lengths of their 'reports' and 'documents' with comment and query which would never be granted time or space for in a public meeting. But throughout his comic antagonism (Part 3 of the book), he cuts a path of critique, insights and hope (Parts 1 and 2).
He astutely warns of 'a genteel, competitive brutality' parading at the institutions under the smokescreen of protecting the public, when the real agenda is one of power in its economic, ideological, educational and hierarchical exclusions of anything that differs from or challenges it. The top down manipulation of numbers and statistics to create the illusion of mass consensus are highlighted, a very different process to ground up consensus building through dialogue. He foresees the looming oppression that is crucial to fight against because it deals with the most sacred and private aspect of human existence: definitions and interventions in mental health, human nature and the human psyche or soul. He makes many comparisons to the Nazi State, but oddly none to the former Soviet Union whose structures of state fear and state oppression extended for a longer period of time. Hegemony of the state, the creation of hierarchies with dependent but inferior sub-hierarchies, the use of media spin (used to such catastrophic effect in the WMD scandal with 'dossiers' and 'documents' claiming 'intelligence', 'evidence' and 'research') are acting out in the psy-professional bodies consumed with a love of power rather than the power of love9. Postle's exposé is skilful, precise and incisive - but is it enough?
If the institutions are moving towards Stalinism (a more accurate analogy to me than the crude appeals of Nazism), does anyone really give a damn? This is the hardest part of the analysis which Postle struggles to articulate - the almost absolute disinterest of psy-practitioners. He didn't initially realise the implications of the statement: 'the infinite easygoingness of the humanistic/integrative culture has led them into a loss of political will, a failure of nerve and/or courage in relations with the psychoanalytic tradtion.'10 He later developed this thread citing Totton who 'has pointed out a special form of silence that Germans call Totschweigen: ignoring something to death'11 which ushered in the golden age of Europe's depravity in two world wars and the Holocaust. Nearing the end of the book, the dimmer light switch is turning towards brighter when he writes:
'the majority of members of the mainstream psychopractice organisations pay their dues and keep their heads down, having…delegated their civic accountability to parent-like forms of governance. This apparent passivity and herdangst continues to be disappointing…Is it because if they stop to feel it, many practitioners know very well that something deeply unpleasant, and incongruous with their values is being done in their name, with their support? And they choose to look the other way?'12
Voila! It's a late realisation, but having laid the groundwork for alternatives to state regulation in Parts 1 and 2 with great eloquence and hope, invoking many hallowed and worthy humanist arguments, Postle finds at the end of Act 3 what Mowbray, House and Totton in the previous Acts 1 and 2 didn't quite get - the problem is not ideological but political. As the Germans did with Hitler, and as the Russians did with Stalin, most psycho-practitioners as yet either don't give a damn or dare not raise a whisper. Jobs, salaries, reputations, and complacent disinterest rule our inaction. Waking up to the implications of this could lead to suicidal despair or equally suicidal political activism.
Meanwhile, the collective momentum has grown and made the political situation even more difficult to shift. We are not, in my view, dealing with Nazi fascism but something much more sophisticated: the clever manipulation of state fear through massive bureaucratic aggression exemplified in post-Lenin Russia. The difference between Hitler and Stalin as fascists was that the former used personal cult and demagogy to generate mass compliance, while the latter used state terror and 'intelligence' hidden behind populist ideology spin. In his recent website entries, it is clear that Postle has connected with the nature of the beast. As he does so, I think his analysis will shift even more. Indeed, PCSR (Psychotherapists and Counsellors for Social Responsibility) are holding a conference inviting all member bodies and the public to an open discussion on this issue13, a chance for all of us to review our assumptions on the matter.
However, Postle has used this book and other public platforms to make his political point. When he does, he seems to be heard. The difficulty is getting heard in the first place. Perhaps he has to face the shadow he has avoided so far - and go political. I also wonder at his choice of media - the printed book. It took three episodes of Panorama with articles in The Observer before the government even vaguely acknowledged the SSRI suicides and issued warning guidelines about its dispensation.14 Given his documentary background, other media seem to be calling out his name: there are many ways into Whitehall, Parliament and the Lords.
So to the picture at the back of the book. It's a portrait shot with half his face in the shadow and the other half clearly lit up, with a thoroughly mischievous smile. Given the grim state of affairs, I wonder what he is smiling at. I eventually realise that Postle carries a wisdom and connection about love and life that I don't quite have. He can represent the situational light and shadow thoughtfully and even-handedly: but he optimistically knows that there are at least two more acts before the play ends and the curtains fall. More curious is the picture on the front of the book - a stuffed extinct dodo, demonstrating 'taxidermy: preserving outward appearances after the living organism has been removed.'15 Which of course could be a picture of you and me.
Footnotes:
1. The Case Against Psychotherapy Registration, Richard Mowbray,Trans Marginal Press, 1995
2. Implausible Professions, ed Richard House & Nick Totton, PCCS, 1997. One could compare Mowbray to Johnny Lydon's Public Image Ltd/PIL punk nihilism, and House & Totton to The Clash with their ideological optimism regarding social change potentials.
3. Looking up 'Wilkinson' in the index gives Postle's studied use of this word.
4. Another useful word in the index to look up.
5. A serious omission by the publishers in the indexing: 'meadow' is an important key to Postle's heart here and can be found on pages xiv, xv, 37, 45, 60, 61, 240.
6. A chilling demonstration of this is recorded in ch. 25 where an IPN query to a DoH civil servant was met with the response: 'Might you, IPN, not be making a huge mistake?'
8. See his very interesting update on www.ipnosis.postle.net .
9. His motto is 'facilitate the power of love, confront the love of power', ch.10, pg 99. Cue Frankie Goes to Hollywood?
11. Ch. 10, pg 100 - also indexed.
13. For more details of this November's conference see www.pcsr.org.uk/events.htm
14. Big Pharma, Jacky Law, Carroll & Graf, NY 2006, pgs 114-120