IPNOSIS: a journal for the Independent Practitioners Network

I wanted to reply at some length to Malcolm Allen’s Open Letter to Denis Postle regarding state regulation (hereafter, SR) of the psychological therapies, and Denis’s report of the recent PLG meeting of 4 December 2008.

First, with regard to Denis’s graphic analogy invoking Vichy France: of course it is always highly unfortunate if anyone is personally distressed by a challenging analogy, and I’m sure that Denis didn’t mean to cause this kind of offence, least of all to anyone with direct personal experience of those historical events. But – and it is a rather big ‘but’ – one might be forgiven for invoking a further analogy, this time about people who are not personally affected by those appalling historical events ‘protesting too much’ (to quote the Bard). For anyone not touched personally by Denis’s challenging Vichy France analogy, one can only wonder about the strategic motivation that might underlie the well-publicised affronted reactions that it has precipitated – or for which it has provided a convenient vehicle, perhaps. It would be highly unfortunate if a ‘smokescreen of affront’ were expediently used to obscure the fact that people only tend to resort to such shocking analogies when they are subject(ed) to gross abuses of power, in the face of which very few impactful avenues of response are open to them. The latter is, for some of us at least, an accurate description of the complicit behaviour of those in the ‘psy’ field who have actively and enthusiastically co-operated with recent HPC regulatory developments in the field, and which many of us find to be totally unacceptable, and an abject selling-out of psychotherapy and counselling’s irreducible core values.

In his Open Letter, Malcolm invokes the shibboleth of ‘greater public regulation and scrutiny’ — yet can he point to any sphere of public life in recent history in which the manic ‘audit culture’ accountability regime, which New Labour has taken to new, previously unimagined heights since 1997, has led to an unambiguous improvement in the quality of public services or the helping professions? Because if you can, you would almost certainly be head-hunted before you could scarcely even utter the term ‘competency criteria’ by New Labour’s PR spin machine. (This is not in any way a partisan, party-political point, by the way; for ironically, the great majority of those who are challenging SR, and the ‘audit culture’ more generally, come from the political centre/Left, not the libertarian Right.)

Many of us are great admirers of psychoanalytic thinking — not least because of the insight it can give on these kinds of matters. So why are the kinds of devastating psychoanalytic critiques of the audit and accountability culture developed in detail by people like Andrew Cooper seemingly ignored by the likes of Malcolm, Peter Fonagy and their colleagues? Those challenging the SR of the psi field find this truly mystifying; and we suspect that it has pretty much everything to do with issues of status and power — which, again, a critical psychoanalysis is potentially excellently placed to deconstruct, but which many of its adherents and practitioners mysteriously seldom seem to want to.

Malcolm refers with apparent dismissiveness to ‘neo-Foucauldian critiques of the state, appeals to chaos theory and God knows what else’ — as if such superior-sounding posturing offers any substantive response to those many and varied critiques. Perhaps some of those inhabiting the rarefied world of institutionalised psychoanalysis don’t comprehend diversity — yet from the perspective of those critical of the SR of the psi field, the existence of a vaste swathe of varied critical responses to such disciplinary regulation of the field merely adds to our case, and certainly doesn’t detract from it.

But Malcolm’s Open Letter takes the biggest biscuit of all in his extraordinary claim that ‘There is a legitimate, honest debate to be had about the desirability of statutory regulation’. If he really is being genuine here, then where on earth have he and his SR enthusiasts been for the past 20-odd years, when Denis Postle and many others have developed devastating critiques of these regulatory developments, and which he and his colleagues have as yet never even attempted to respond to? We wait with baited breath (or maybe, on reflection, it would be ill advised for us to hold our breath!), and no little excitement, for Malcolm, and those who think like him, to begin the intellectually challenging task of engaging with our many and varied critiques. For the silence of Malcolm and many other SR supporters on these issues, until his Open Letter, has been unremittingly deafening.

Malcolm also goes on to assert that ‘society is not prepared to go back to a position where “the professions” write their own rule book’ (my italics). Leaving aside the fact that it is indeed Peter Fonagy’s rule book that looks likely to be written into the law of the land, his use of the theoretically vacuous and sociologically inept term ‘society’ takes me back to the early 1970s when the then Prime Minister, Ted Heath, was equally vocally, and equally spuriously, invoking ‘the national interest’ and ‘national unity’, as if just parroting the words somehow magically does away with any need precisely to specify and to argue what ‘society’ or ‘national interest’ might conceivably mean in this context.

Finally, to claim as he does that ‘failing to actively engage with Government’ … ‘is effectively to vacate the possibility of influencing an optimum outcome’ is an extraordinary capitulation to the fashionable trance induction that is the ‘New Managerialism’ and the manic accountability culture, whose practices have routinely — and with no little irony or paradox — brought about exactly the opposite of their professed intention throughout the public sphere in recent times. Malcolm and his colleagues might be prepared to sit at High Table and imagine that things will somehow magically be different with the delicate psychological therapies; but I can assure him that a rapidly growing number of therapists of each and every hue simply aren’t prepared to sup from the same cup of abject complacency and capitulation; so — watch this (potential) space!

Yours truly,

Richard House

Independent Practitioners Network; Senior Lecturer in Psychotherapy and Counselling, Roehampton University; author of Therapy Beyond Modernity, and co-editor of Against and For CBT, Implausible Professions, and Ethically Challenged Professions