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2nd October 1999
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INTRODUCTION
000
It is addressed both to members of the various Professional Registers of
Psychotherapy and Counselling and to those excluded or standing deliberately
aloof from those registers.
000
First let me set out my credentials as a commentator on this decade in the
history of the development of psychotherapy in the U.K. and explain why I
believe both the professionalizers and the anti professionalizers should give
my observations serious consideration.
000
I am a Director of the Oxford School of Psychotherapy and Counselling Ltd and
have been so since the inception of the school in 1989 almost 10 years ago.
000
This school has developed in parallel with the U.K. standing Conference for
Psychotherapy and achieved full member status of this body at the same time
that it was changing its own status to become the U.K. Council for
Psychotherapy.
000
Our school decided to join the planned U.K.C.P. in 1991 in response to our
students wishes to have a national recognition and accreditation for their
training. The history of the development of our school runs in parallel to the
development of U.K.C.P and as such provides some kind of mirror to that
development. In examining the development of our school I hope to show good and
bad things about the development of
U.K.C.P.
000
1) The idea of joining with others to explore and develop standards, curricula,
assessment methods etc, especially with other more experienced trainers from
different schools as well as my own colleagues, was an exciting and apparently
worthwhile challenge. (However my co-directors had many misgivings and doubts,
to the extent that the work of developing our school along lines that would be
within the parameters being steadily set by the national body was virtually in
my hands alone.)
000
2) Being a member of the Humanistic and Integrative Section of the national
body would provide us with a valuable reference point and place of belonging in
the world, rather than being an isolated entity. Our philosophy of openness to
many models of theory while insisting that no model is adequate on its own,
supported us in enriching our work by contact with the source points of several
such models. The values of openness and inclusion, consensus politics and
heterarchy nominally espoused by H.I.P.S. meant for me that I could lead us in
wholeheartedly rather than as part of a political compromise.
000
3) Joining a larger body which had already given much consideration to the make
up of a psychotherapy school would help us avoid the task of re-inventing the
wheel.
000
4) We would have a yardstick for examining the success of our work in terms of
feedback from outside assessments from other H.I.P.S. schools.
000
5) The creation of U.K.C.P./H.I.P.S. seemed to me to be a great advance for
psychotherapy from the old dynamic of each little faction/school cleaving to
its own ideas as Right and attacking all others as Wrong. I believed that
psychotherapy might be growing beyond the state of the three month old baby
dominated by the primitive mechanisms of splitting and projection. The prospect
of working towards collaborative enquiry and away from suspicion denigration
and backbiting was very appealing.
000
In addition to humanistic methods our school was also teaching the work of
Freud and other psychodynamic practitioners.
000
My co-directors and I also had credentials in Psychodynamic and psychoanalytic
Psychotherapy:
000
I qualified as one of the first members of the Institute for Psychotherapy and
Counselling, the school created by Westminster Pastoral Foundation, in1980.
000
Westminster Pastoral Foundation had deliberately set out to create a new cadre
of
Professional Counsellors anticipating by some time the creation of a
Psychotherapy
Profession along similar lines. I had wanted to practice full time as a
professional after
leaving university and the Westminster course gave me this opportunity. This
Westminster institute soon changed its name from the Institute of Pastoral
Education and Counselling to the Institute for Psychotherapy and Counselling
and opted to join the PP Section of U.K.C.P.
000
The Philadelphia Association, the parent body of my O.S.P.& C. co-directors,
Mary Duhig and Leon Redler had also opted to be in the psychodynamic group.
000
We chose to join the H.I.P. rather than the P.P. section because it more
closely equated to our value system. The parameters of the P.P. grouping are
simply too narrow for us. But we believed that our background understanding of
psychodynamic principles would make a valuable contribution to the integrative
development of other H.I.P. groups.
000
My own personal history in therapy has straddled several professional barriers.
I was in psychotherapy 3 times a week for several years with a Jungian Analyst
and Psychiatrist. My analyst, Ruth Hoffman was not only an analyst and member
of the royal college of psychiatry but was herself an analysand of Michael
Fordham, editor of Jung's collected works and the first leader of the Jungian
group in England.
000
(My tongue is slightly in my cheek as I announce this as "an important
credential", because I do not attach great significance to it. However, the
cognoscenti from the analysts group will already have observed that I was in
only 3 times a week psychotherapy rather than 4 times a week analysis.) (Only
the Freudians do 5 times a week I believe). Moreover my training was with a
junior organisation, the I.P.& C not the senior Jungian one, the Society for
Analytical Psychology. My status is thus reduced in the eyes of psychoanalytic
practitioners. I do value my Jungian connections, especially the personal
friendship I made with Michael Fordham, which grew out of the seminars he gave
at our school and the many hours of gossipy chat we enjoyed long into the
nights afterwards, when 1 drove him home. Such personal relationship
connections are far more valuable to me than bureaucratic place holding. The
other major influences on my early practice have all been Jungian Analysts like
David Holt, Neil Micklem, and Helen Plaut, and I still consider myself a
Jungian of sorts.
000
While I trained as an analytical counsellor and psychotherapist I was already
training and indeed working as a humanistic practitioner in psychodrama, drama
therapy, and groupwork. I worked for 5 years on the executive of the
Association for Humanistic Psychotherapy in the 1970's. I also attended some of
the first meetings of the Association for Humanistic Psychology Practitioners
Group, but was too heavily committed elsewhere at the time to follow through
with them.
000
I do hope readers uninterested in all this material about pecking orders will
bear with me in spelling out these details. I do so as an illustration of the
hierarchical system which dominates psychodynamic therapy in this country. I am
inclined to believe that British Institutions are impervious to criticism from
outside. In terms of my personal history as a schoolboy at a British Public
School I believed it was important to succeed at the system before rejecting
it. The danger of this is Institutionalization. I can only hope that my
criticism of the Psychotherapy profession is not itself institutionalized by my
years of membership.
000
When I trained at Westminster Pastoral Foundation it was still called a
counselling training and indeed remained so until someone noticed that it had
rather more substance to it than one of the London Jungian Analytical
trainings. One of my teachers there, Bani Shorter, a Jungian Analyst, described
the counsellor as the handmaiden of the analyst! It was very clear that our
status was lowly. Yet after 5 years of group, individual and family-marital
training I had far more dynamic theory and client hours practice behind me than
any ordinary psychodynamic psychotherapist trainee. It was not just quantity
but "quality" since my teachers were all high status members of analytic groups.
000
A fundamental reason for avoiding the P.P section was to stay clear of the
pecking order politics which dominates this grouping and has led to a section
of this grouping splitting off from U.K.C.P. in a bid to establish or hold onto
a putative superior status. This power and status seeking process in terms of
lineage (descendance from Freud or Jung) and hours of analysis is described in
Postle and Young's pages.
000
There is immense insecurity for both the individual psychotherapist and the
psychotherapy organisation in being able to be confident that he/she/it is
doing a good job. There really are no objective or scientific parameters of
measurement. No outcome research has been able to demonstrate the superior
efficacy of any method. This leads to a nearly ubiquitous tendency to appeal to
Authority, the authority of a Patriarchal figure. This figure is predominantly
Freud, less often Jung. Even modern prenatal therapists appeal back to Otto
Rank! (Ludvig Janus 98)
000
The sociological pattern is much more a religious structure of organised belief
than a scientific discipline. Robert Young, a psychoanalytic psychotherapist
and Professor of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalytic Studies at Sheffield
University is quoted by Postle as claiming that the hierarchy runs down from
Freud through his personal analysands. Freud established this pattern by
ignoring the work of Nietszche who had made many of "his" discoveries before
him, refusing to let Jung analyse certain of his dreams in case this threatened
his authority over the movement, (see Jung's Memories Dreams Reflections) and
establishing dogma and doctrinal obeisance. The most senior analysts hold their
credentials straight from Freud They analyse, supervise and train others among
the analysts who in turn are the analysts and trainers of members of lower
status psychodynamic organisations.
000
This thesis was confirmed by Haya Oakley, a member of the P.A. and past
secretary of U.K.C.P., now a leader in the warfare and status battle between
U.K.C.P. and British Confederation of Psychotherapists ( B.C.P.), in a special
address to the H.I.P. group in 1994 in an attempt to enlist support against the
Confederation. I attended that presentation as a member of H.I.P. S.
000
I have practised as a professional trainer, counsellor, psychotherapist and
groupworker now continuously for over 20 years with scores of students
completing 3 and 4 year training courses, some to the level of U.K.C.P.
membership, many to the level of B.A.C. Professional Membership. I have also
been a board member and training committee member of the Westminster Institute.
000
So much for my credentials as a Professional and a professionalizer.
000
The second part of my introduction is to establish the reverse credentials as
an antiprofessionalizer.
000
In the process of making our training in Oxford fit in with the parameters of
national accreditation generated by U.K.C.P. something went profoundly wrong
for our school
and its students, as well as for me personally. I believe that this has little
or nothing to do with any failings of competence in our staff or students.
000
Joan Evans, a chair of the H.I.P.S., and Courtney Young of the Association of
Humanistic Psychology Practitioners gave positive assessments of the school,
and Arthur Jonathan, another chair of H.I.P. S. gave positive external
assessments on our work for 3 years. Arthur Jonathan was both our external
assessor and chair of H.I.P.S. in 1994 when he proposed us, as H.I.P.S. chair,
to full member training status of the Council.
000
There were a number of aspects to our training which made it at least special,
if not unique. Maybe it comes down to human relationship, which would be right,
given that that is what the whole thing is about. Mary Duhig, my co-founder and
I had a very warm challenging creative relationship which brought the best out
in both of us. We had a shared theoretical ground in Laing and Jung, but we
also shared our own vision of a place where people could learn to become their
own kind of therapist rather than fit into someone else's mould or pattern. We
built the school on the values of respect for the integrity of the other,
compassion and love. We were able to "walk our talk" as the native Americans
put it, to the extent that all the numerous outside teachers who came to us
enjoyed the students and wanted to return to do more.
000
Our focus was on personal learning (as distinct from Rogers' person centred
methodology) rather than training. We insisted that no maps were adequate to
the territory and that therapy was to do with making relationships rather than
using techniques. We made very strong relationships with our students which
sustained the great majority of them through the crises of being in training.
000
What we failed to do was to ensure things continuing in the same way after
Mary's retirement. What we had was a sordid power struggle between myself and
Mary's designated self replacement, Leon Redler, with junior staff joining in.
Students were dragged into it. Rivalry became war between methodologies. The
raison D'etre for the existence of the place was lost.
000
In the midst of this deeply painful splitting of the energy of the school I
myself began a sexual relationship with one of our fourth year students. We
allowed this to become public knowledge in the summer of 1995
000
A crisis arose in our school over this and less central personal relationship
issues. I asked for Arthur Jonathan's support. He took many months before
eventually replying to my letter as follows. "As I commented to you and Mary on
my last visit, although there is a specialness unique to Ochre, there was no
doubt in my mind that Ochre would need to change to meet the parameters set by
U.K.C.P. and H.I.P.S. Of course there is a grave danger that the specialness of
Ochre could be destroyed in that process, but this does not necessarily have to
be the outcome. It might be possible to make certain adjustments and
alterations which will meet the stipulated criteria whilst retaining those
elements , both in content and approach, which would result in the major
aspects of the "specialness" referred to being maintained. It would certainly
need a detailed and somewhat objective re-examination of syllabuses, curricula
and approaches, if OCHRe intends to continue with U.K.C.P."
000
None of our school policies changed between 1994 and 1995, yet the man who
formally sanctioned them that year felt they needed "somewhat objective
re-examination"
just one year later. Gordon Law, the H.I.P.S. Complaints officer, and our
external assessor for 1995, also gave a positive external assessment of our
students in 1995.
000
I myself had been elected to the job of External Relations Officer for H.I.P.S.!
000
On our election to the U.K. Council for Psychotherapy,( nem con incidently),
the Tavistock delegate, Gill Gorrell-Barnes, congratulated us on the quality of
our curriculum. Moreover, as a new member of the Council, we had been exposed
to more evaluation and assessment than all the longer established members, who
joined before some of these parameters were established.
000
In 1996, at an extraordinary general meeting, we were expelled from the Council
for failure to comply with some of the rules of Council membership.
000
The key to the problems that led to our expulsion from U.K.C.P. lies in a note
to us from Arthur Jonathan prior to our being admitted to the Council. In that
letter he suggests that something special about our organisation would be
jeopardised by our trying to fit in with the Councils parameters and suggesting
that we might be better not to attempt to conform.
000
In 1996 we were invited to leave the council, but refused on the grounds that
we felt that everyone else was out of step! We hoped to be able to continue to
be part of the body as a fringe critic, attempting to moderate the excesses of
the council from within rather than from outside. Instead we were made a pariah
organisation on the grounds that I had formed a relationship with a fourth year
student at the school. At the time this was not even contrary to the ethical
guidelines of the Council. We were formally adjudged to be infringing a few
minor rules of the club, yet we were overwhelmingly voted out of membership on
the behest of the executive, almost as overwhelmingly as we had been voted in
just 2 years earlier. H.I.P.S. had reported that we did not fulfil its
requirements for membership.
000
The reality of the time, 1995/6 was that a wave of "moral panic'1 was running
through the country in general and psychotherapy at the Council in particular.
Our organisation had been a flash point for that panic and that conflagration.
2 Junior staff had complained to the council about my leadership and behaviour.
No such complaint was admissible under H.I.P.S. rules at the time, but new
rules were rushed through to enable H.I.P.S. to investigate major concerns
about an organisation. This legislation also operated retroactively.
000
This could have been a very positive thing, outside agencies coming to the help
of a colleague agency in distress. The H.I.P.S. ethos statement is relevant. I
quote from it.
000
The criteria ( of membership) do not act as a means of exclusion, but as
positive encouragement to organisations seeking to find common ground with
their colleagues.
000
That change often emerges from the voice at the fringes and that any
organisation, if it is to stay alive and in step with life's evolving
processes, needs to be sensitive so as not to ignore or disenfranchise those
that bring other points of view.
000
That the professional community in which we all operate is made up of many
different points of view. An openness to the variety that is offered within
this larger context holds a high value, and respect for the integrity of
colleagues is necessary and fundamental.
000
That the principles of empowerment of both individuals and organisations within
which individuals are either working or training are high valued and are
embodied in the structures and systems of the organisation.
000
It is my contention that neither Maura Sills, nor Arthur Jonathan nor Alice
Stevenson nor Gordon Law acted in line with the H.I.P.S. ethos statement in the
process of investigating our situation. I believe they behaved with great
cynicism in a damage limitation exercise to protect themselves, and their
organisation, H.I.P.S. from criticism in U.K.C.P., and U.K.C.P. itself, from
public criticism. (I recall Maura Sills offhand remark, "It may be all right,
but it is not psychotherapy.")
000
I have been accused by my peers of "betraying the profession".
000
In this article I want to assert the right of myself, my colleagues, students
and graduates to practice professionally, that is to say, receiving a fee in
reward for our work with people, without being Professionals in terms of these
emergent U.K.C.P. parameters. It is my case that U.K.C.P. and H.I.P.S. have
betrayed their own original aims and ethos in the pursuit of power and status,
specifically in the pursuit of an unwarrantable Statutory Registration power.
000
More than this I claim that in the pursuit of this "power over" as opposed to
"power with" (see Postle reference to the writing of Starhawk which I was
teaching our students at this time) these parameters have continued to change
in ways that are damaging to our work, and that the goal of attaining the
status of a Profession is profoundly misguided.
000
It must be all too easy to believe that I am merely the wolf from the fable
crying 11sour grapes". It is well over 2 years since the last of these events
and I believe this has given me time to put things into a reasonable
perspective. I am in a process of continuous reassessment of our training with
my new colleagues, none of whom are connected with U.K.C.P. and one of whom is
very active in the Independent Practitioners Network.
000
By 1994 my own ideas were already out of line with attitudes of my Council
colleagues, even if I was not persuaded by my fellow director, Leon Redler that
it is not possible to have categories of assessment for trainees!
000
The teaching material that was inspiring me, the Shamanic ideas of Arnold
Mindell and the esoteric doctrines of Starhawk (for so long eulogised by John
Rowan) were leading me away from the bureaucratic boundary making of the
professionalizers. The creation of more and more rules to fence in and control
practice only seemed to restrict and tie down the practitioner while denying
the client the wide variety of skills my students possessed.
000
The truth is that not only does our practice change as we learn and grow but it
will naturally deviate from the patterns we were first taught. The idea of
having to re-register our conformity with our training body every 4 or 5 years
now seems outrageous. People bring in acupuncture, massage, zero balancing, I
ching, Tarot, Alexander technique, Voice therapy and so many other things into
their work, both as students and graduates. Should all of this be weeded out in
the name of good ethical professional practice? Must a professional training be
a process of shrinking to fit?
000
All these schools claim the fundamental importance of theoretical model and
methodology, yet there is simply no evidence that these things are what count
in terms of client outcome.
000
There is no Body of Knowledge, upon which the existence of a Profession can be
based. The profession would not even be able to agree about the significance of
transference.
000
Professions are employed to proffer advice based on their specialised
Professional Knowledge. Yet one of the major Codes of Practice for our work
actually condemns advice giving as unethical! (The fact that this is itself
ludicrous is neither here nor there in this discussion.) Psychotherapists do
not proffer any specialist advice.
000
A key exploration point in the creation of a Profession, for me, has been the
government's attempts to create National Vocational Qualifications in
Psychotherapy.
000
I was invited to contribute to this process as part of the Department of
Education and Employment's consultation with representatives of all
constituencies within the profession.
000
The consultants asked my group of representatives to identical core statements
about the work and to post these on the walls for affirmation or negation from
all the other members.
000
This revealed a set of fundamental divisions that have existed in psychology
for fifty years and are unlikely to disappear in the foreseeable future. The
key beliefs of behaviourists, psychoanalysts and humanistic practitioners are
not merely different but opposed. What one side regards as essential the other
regards as bad or even unethical.
000
Attempts to move towards integration have been and are likely to remain futile.
There were not even enough people willing to attend a planned conference on
integration for it to go ahead.
000
Very few people have the breadth of mind to encompass the fields of medicine
psychology and sociology, and the disciplines of analytical existential
phenomenological and humanistic thinking, as well as the practice of individual
group and family therapy. One such was Ronnie Laing. He is one of the few
people I know who have given thought to the fundamental requirements for a
theory of psychotherapy which he outlined in "The politics of Experience. " I
quote "...we need concepts which both indicate the interaction and
interexperience of two persons, and help us to understand the relation between
each person's own experience and his own behavior, within the context of the
relationship between them. And we must in turn be able to conceive of this
relationship within the relevant contextual social systems. Most fundamentally
a critical theory must be able to place all theories and practices within the
scope of a total vision of the ontological structure of being human."
000
Laing's approach can relate to analytic and humanistic methods but cannot be
reconciled with the behaviourists. For him "Behaviour therapy is the most
extreme example of such schizoid theory and practice that proposes to think and
act purely in terms of the other without reference to the self of the therapist
or the patient, in terms of behaviour without experience, in terms of objects
rather than persons. It is inevitably therefore a technique of non-meeting, of
manipulation and control. Psychotherapy must remain an obstinate attempt of two
people to recover the wholeness of being human through the relationship between
them."
000
The U.K.C.P. advances and grows in numbers on the basis of coalitions of power
blocks in the pursuit of power, without consideration for commonality of values
beyond the business ethics of a trade association. At least the rival group,
the British Confederation of Psychotherapists has some kind of conceptual
integrity on the basis of shared values and methodology.
000
Those who have risen to positions of power in the current trade associations
have not shown the kind of respect for human relationships that would remotely
indicate that they can create the basis for a psychotherapy profession. To the
contrary they show all the symptoms of creating one more dominator hierarchy in
a world of similar institutions the like of which psychotherapy was created to
remedy.
000
There is so much more to say in this area. But I hope I have said enough to
give the reader some sense of my reasons for moving away from
professionalization. The whole thing was certainly giving me, as a Director of
a Training Institute, more and more power over people, but I had a decreasing
sense of power with them.
000
THE ALCHEMISTS QUESTIONS
000
& SOME ATTEMPTS AT ANSWERS
000
Denis Postle's article raises a number of questions.
000
Should psycho-practice ( variations on the theme of psychotherapy) be
restricted to those people registered by a national or international body as
"competent" and "ethically sound."?
000
Is the creation of such a body in the interest of all or even most members of a
supposedly free and democratic society?
000
Would the existence of such a Professional Body and Authority provide a real
protection for psychotherapy clients?
000
Can psychotherapy really help its clients with their struggles in the social
world if it is itself an authorised institution of that society?
000
THE QUESTION OF ETHICS AND COMPETENCE
000
U.K.C.P. very sensibly( in my view) does not have a code of ethics, but has
stated ethical principles and a set of ethical guidelines. It is an
organisation of organisations, each with their own codes of ethics. What may be
ethical in one school may not be so in another. Someone outside the profession,
let alone anyone with a degree in philosophy like myself will find things being
ethical in one place but unethical in another at the very least perplexing.
Surely something is either eithical or not? We are not really talking about the
Good, what is ethical, here but what is allowed in different codes of practice.
It is a fact that what is banned as unethical and morally bad in some schools
is seen as good and even necessary in others, for example physical contact.
However each ethics document must conform with the guidelines of the umbrella
body.
000
All the schools are united in their approval of codes of ethics that comply
with the guidelines. It is what unifies the "Profession". In my view this is a
sham and a deception. These ethics are neither the ethics of philosophy nor of
a profession like the Law, but rather they are the "business ethics" of a trade
association, which is what the U.K.C.P. actually is.
000
As part of joining the club our standards and ethics committee produced a
statement of ethical principles and code of practice, which was assessed as
acceptable for our membership. Our committee took 2 years to produce it and put
a great deal of time and attention into the job.
000
Our document was later adjudged to be defective by Christopher Coulson of
000
A.H.P.P. ,( who had assessed it as adequate initially) when it became evident
that under it a teacher might be able to have a sexual relationship with a
student without breaching the code.
000
Guidelines had been issued to the effect that codes were to be amended so that
sexual relations between staff and students should be outlawed by 1997. But
this was
1996.
000
One of the basic principles of Law and Ethics generally in liberal democracies
is that laws are not made retroactively. This principle does not seem to hold
for our brave new world of Authority on Professional ethics and competence.
Their actions look like serious incompetence and ethical shabbiness to me in
terms of such basic principles. But in our dealings with H.I.P.S./U.K.C.P. we
have been accused of nit picking and dwelling on legalistic niceties rather
than substantive issues.( letter from Gordon Law 1995). 1 want Internet readers
outside the profession to be able to be the judges.
000
Our school has an umbrella body, the Oxford Centre for Human Relations. One of
its core ideas is that you cannot codify ethics. We operate in an existential
phenomenological tradition which places great emphasis on conscious
responsibility and choice. Ethical choices are a matter of personal
responsibility and cannot be defended in terms of following commandments.
Ethics are always situational. Each life situation is potentially unique
requiring individual evaluation and judgement. From our viewpoint we consider
that other organisations' Codes of Ethics are not ethical, since they provide
only a set of rules which deprive the individual of personal responsibility and
freedom of choice. They are of no help when ethical rules lead to conflict or
contradiction as they inevitably do.
000
Some people regard me as a scoundrel and our ethics document as a scoundrel's
charter. In our discussion with the two woman investigative team from H.I.P.S.
who offered us all of two hours of their time following major conflicts at our
school in relation to U.K.C.P., one useful thing that emerged was the
observation that our system puts a higher moral demand on its students than
other schools and that in their opinion our intake should be limited to very
mature individuals. My view is that training should help to develop such
maturity. In fact our document is far more demanding in practice than other
codes. I am expected to show" wise use of my power in the interest of students
and clients", quite a tall order.
000
In 1995 1 was formally charged by a number of students under our disciplinary
code, and due process was followed meticulously. There was no question of
adjudicators not finding me unwise in some of my decisions. I accepted it. I
have been found to have breached our code of practice. It was all done
carefully and competently in accordance with our formal procedures. The
adjudicators did not recommend that I cease to practice or to teach. The panel
of adjudicators consisted of2 senior figures within the Profession and a
lawyer. None had connections to the school.
000
One of the formal reasons for our being excluded from H.I.P.S. and U.K.C.P. was
that students were being asked to adjudicate on their teachers. That is quite
simply false. Students had membership of the ethics committee, but no ethics
committee members are allowed to be adjudicators. If the H.I.P.S./U.K.C.P. team
who investigated us could not differentiate the functions of ethics committee
members and adjudicators they were merely incompetent. I believe they were
being either deliberately negligent or politically expedient and acting in bad
faith. I believe that any competent investigator from outside the profession
would have been able to confirm that. Neither Gordon Law, nor Maura Sills, nor
Alice Stevenson, who were involved in investigating the situation in our
school, showed either thoroughness, accuracy or personal integrity. (of which
more later)
000
I need to report one more piece of malpractice and incompetence. The H.I.P.S.
Complaints Officer, Gordon Law, produced a report to U.K.C.P. about our
organisation based on what he claims were two reports sent him independently by
Maura Sills and Alice Stevenson , the H.I.P.S. investigators. He claims his
report was a composite report drawn from the other two. I have found no
evidence the Maura ever wrote a report. We later gained access to Alice
Stevenson's report from U.K.C.P., a report riddled with inaccuracies, which
Gordon will have known to be inaccuracies from his involvement with the school
as external assessor. Good practice would have required him to step down as
Complaints Officer because of his recent professional involvement with and
employment by the school. He did not complain about our procedures while
working for us, yet was happy to endorse complaints sent to him by Stevenson.
In fact he chose to continue to do the Complaints Officer job, concealing the
inaccurate report of Alice Stevenson from us and replacing it with a
generalised summary of his own, indicating our failure to understand the
"principles of malfeasance"!
000
In 1995 the U.K.C.P. executive attempted to drive through proposals for
sweeping changes to codes and disciplinary procedures with almost no
consultation with membership. Most of the articles in their house journal at
the time were about tyranny. These proposals were rejected by the membership
but their response to our organisation was as if these changes had been
accepted and were already in place. It was publicly stated that I was guilty of
serious professional misconduct without any administrative/legal parameters
being in place for such a charge.
000
In ordinary employment law it is not possible to be convicted of serious
professional misconduct without a hearing and an opportunity for self defence.
There was no hearing, no formal allegation and no opportunity for self defence
in my case. I stand convicted in my absence of an offence that did not even
formally exist. The behaviour was more that of a private members club
black-balling a member than a would-be Professional body doing its duty.
000
I believe I have caste more than a little doubt on the ethics and competence of
senior officials in H.I.P.S. /U.K.C.P. But it may appear as no more than a
criticism of individuals rather than a criticism of the Institution they were
serving.
000
This brings me to Denis's next question
000
IS SUCH A BODY IN THE INTERESTS OF ALL OR EVEN THE MAJORITY OF THE GENERAL
PUBLIC?
000
To the best of my knowledge and belief the U.K.S.C.P. was not set up to achieve
Statutory Authority over a Profession of Psychotherapy. Its structures were
democratic with the aim of discussion and debate leading to consensus
agreements. It met quite literally in the round at Canterbury where all voices,
at least of the organisations delegates, could expect to be heard. I have great
respect for people who were able to bring so many disparate groups together and
by long discussions start to achieve some order out of seeming chaos. From
acrimony and paranoid defensiveness between organisations it was possible to
move towards a sense of collegiality and even warmth between some sections and
section members by the time our group became involved in 1991. However, even
before we attended our first conference in 1993 a fundamental split in the
organisation had occurred.
000
Conversations with senior U.K.C.P. members have confirmed to me that it
happened very much as Young and Postle describe it. The longest established
Institute in the country insisted that its pre-eminence in the field entitled
it to a "star chamber" status with one of its members on each committee or
board. This was a naked bid for power over, which went totally against the
ethos of democracy and consensus. It was rejected. The subsequent withdrawal of
the Institute of Psychoanalysis, dragging with it allied bodies into a rival
body, The British Confederation of Psychotherapists, left the organisation
weakened and the "Profession" disunited once more.
000
The British Government has clearly stated that it will not consider statutory
registration unless the profession can demonstrate unity. The logic of this
profound splitting of the field into warring factions again, indicates to me,
and hopefully to you the reader, the practical necessity to put on hold any
schemes of statutory registration while the disunity is sorted out. That the
reverse has been the case is another demonstration of poor leadership acting in
bad faith.
000
I was stunned into silence when Emmy Van Deurzen-Smith opened her address as
Chair of the Council with the audacious claim that Statutory Registration was
now the raison D'être of the Council, that this was absolutely necessary as
part of integration into Europe and that negotiations with the government
indicated that it was only just over the horizon. With hindsight we can see
that such statements were grandiose nonsense, but at the time any of us in the
room who held different ideas probably felt as isolated as I did. The
atmosphere of triumphalism would have graced a Nazi rally.
000
The A.H.P.P. delegates said not a word. Yet that organisation has now claimed
it was never in favour of statutory registration. Some have claimed their board
were in bad faith, others that they were misrepresented by their delegates.
However, it may be that they, like me, were overawed and rendered speechless.
There was no debate. There was no space for contradiction. The voice of
Authority, the voice of Power had spoken. Dissenters like myself simply felt
that we were in the wrong club, or rather that this was no longer the club that
we joined.
000
Postle's article focuses on the security consciousness of the British people
and the vast expense put into attempting to bolster a sense of security. I am
not convinced about this. The European Union is removing the solid or rather
liquid borders of this country that have been firm for a millennium. The
channel tunnel has literally undermined those borders. But I do not believe the
nations security, at least in the structure of its institutions has yet been
significantly eroded.
000
Broadly speaking there are two traditions in European Political Philosophy,
best known to the British through the writing of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.
In Hobbes' world view the natural life of man is famously described as "Poor,
mean, brutish, nasty and short." The only way to avoid this state of affairs is
through the creation of the "leviathan," a monstrous all embracing set of
social shackles binding everyone tightly together into a common destiny. This
is the philosophy of Big Government, of totalitarianism, of Germany's Third
Reich.
000
The British have followed the other way, that of Locke. This is a view of man as
a more or less convivial social animal capable of free association and economic
competence in creating and maintaining a social system with minimal centralised
authority. This is the philosophy of small government based on individual
liberties under
a common law created by tradition and precedent rather than legislation.
000
The most significant factor in all this in terms of the practice of
psychotherapy is that while in the Hobbist European societies of mainland
Europe people are forbidden to do things unless formally given permission by
the Leviathan to do so, in the British, Lockeist society we have long been free
to do as we think fit unless specifically forbidden to do so.
000
Even today anyone can call themselves a doctor and practice medicine. Only the
prescription of certain drugs is controlled by law. I believe that this is a
fundamental political freedom. How very curious that it should be a pressure
group of psychotherapists which is agitating to overturn this liberty.
000
Many of us have been drawn to the practice of psychotherapy out of a sense that
the individual is often so badly impinged on by social pressures to conform to
oppressive societal norms, that she needs intensive help to be enabled to
pursue an individual destiny. How bizarre that people who one might reasonably
be expected to be committed to individual liberty and self-determination should
actually be so determined to generate significant measures of social control.
As Mowbray indicates in his erudite book against psychotherapy registration,
once you have a law giving authority to a psychotherapy registration board,
only a small amendment turns that power into something really coercive. It
could all too easily gain control of all psycho-practice, to use Postle's term.
000
This focuses my attention on Postle's argument from human nature.
000
THE ARGUMENT FROM HUMAN NATURE
000
Freud's view of human nature is fundamentally pessimistic. His early picture of
the human being as an ego heroically struggling to balance the demands of a
repressive society or superego, and the antisocial and/or destructive forces of
instinct in the Id, became darker with the passing years and the rise of Nazism
in Germany. His philosophical writing or meta-psychology took him away from
sexuality, or rather the principle of Eros, the love energy that connects
people and creates life and even "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" itself into an
emphasis on compulsion repetition and the triumph of destructiveness over
creativity, in the form of his death instinct, Thanatos.
000
Freud was a typical Hobbist, a normal product of his cultural environment, the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was a pretty standard nineteenth century
European Patriarchal Authoritarian regime. His is a fundamentally pessimistic
philosophy, a gloomy conception of human nature. His picture of society is that
of the uneasy rule of the Primal authoritarian Father constantly vigilant
against the rebellion of the sons. It is a version of Zeus and Chronos. This
picture is developed into a psychology through the Oedipus Complex. At the
centre of the whole scenario is castration anxiety, made very real and
personally explicit for Freud in the profound threat and warning of castration
that is circumcision. (We might come to a better understanding of Freud if we
thought of his psychology as the outcome of circumcision trauma than castration
anxiety, in my view.) This assertion of the control and dominance of the Father
is made ritually explicit in the Jewish culture from which Freud comes.
000
One of the core elements of political philosophy is the relation of Man with
his maker, with God. And behind the philosophy lies Myth, explanatory story
telling. Psychotherapy is an outgrowth from a Christian value system or
worldview. The individual human being is seen as made in the image of God and
as such of immense value. But the creation is also fundamentally flawed. It
falls short. It is sinful. This contrasts strongly with middle eastern
philosophies where the individual has very little intrinsic value, or the
eastern view that Man is actually already perfect, but has lost the
understanding of this perfection which can be regained through meditation.
000
The world of perfection for our Judeo-Christian world is the garden of Eden,
from which we have been expelled for disobedience to the Authoritarian father
God. (For the ideal world of psychotherapy Freud took on God's mantel and
sceptre and then bequeathed them to his heirs, the Institute of
Psychoanalysis.) Eden is a garden and its God is a gardener. The institute of
Psychoanalysis withdrew to a new and higher heaven when its members were not
welcomed as Patriarchs in the second Eden of U.K.C.P. Suddenly, as Postle
describes it, the open meadow of British psycho-practice is to be turned into a
walled garden. The successive chairs of the council, Van Deurzen and Tantam
start to make considerable use of the gardening metaphor.( Self and Society 96)
Did they even begin to notice how they were turning themselves into Patriarchal
Gods and rulers of the new Eden by reversion to such mythic language.
000
This is a new version of an older struggle that many of us fought with the
Behaviourists, the academic psychologists of the 60's and 70's. Keith Paton's
paper" Rat, Myth and Magic. 1969" exposed the political realities behind an
earlier generation of behaviour therapists bid for power. B.F Skinner wrote
"Beyond Freedom and Dignity" as a light on the path to a brave new world of
scientific control of deviant human behaviour through programmes of
reinforcement and the shaping of new more acceptable behaviours.
000
The doyenne of the British version of such totalitarian thinking, Hans Eysenck,
is now welcomed onto the world stage of psychotherapy, as an ethically
acceptable member of the first world congress of psychotherapy. Must we be
reminded again of the importance of Noam Chomsky's discovery that human
language has an essentially world open quality, that it can generate an
infinite number of sentences, that it cannot be reduced to a set of
reinforceable behaviours. As a user of language the human being is free to
create. There is never likely to be a science that can predict and control that
creativity.
000
The current refuge for the Patriarchs of psychotherapy is Science. The new
European Association of psychotherapy insists that psychotherapy is and must be
science. This is another version of the myth of the therapist God as gardener.
It actually defies the discoveries of modern science. Quantum mechanics long
ago discovered that the observer impacts on his own experiment. There is no
Euclidean point outside of physical reality from which to make objective
judgements. Even less is there an objective place outside of a relationship
between two human beings to make any scientific judgements about psychotherapy.
The only important finding of outcome research in psychotherapy is that it is a
positive relationship between client and therapist which makes for success and
not methodology.(Yalom and Lieberman.)
000
The only person I know who has yet made an attempt at a science of persons and
relationships is R.D. Laing, who has been long expelled from the garden of
ethical practice. Even Laing was forced to give up this project in the face of
too much complexity. His next work after" the interpersonal perception method
", which was his attempt to create a scientific system for description of human
interaction patterns, was his little book of polemic "Knots". He abandoned
science and accepted the reality of his art, without ever explicitly and
publicly making this decision.
000
There are powerful technologies of communication like
neuro-linguistic-programming and process oriented -psychology, but even these
have been found by their own exponents and teachers to fail in psychotherapy
without a spiritual base.(see Amy Mindell. Metaskills.)
000
Making claims for science in psychotherapy is an attempt to revert to an
outmoded paradigm, that of Newtonian mechanics, with humans as solid isolated
billiard balls whose movements, inner and outer, can be gauged by some set of
equations. Science shares the goals of the psycho-bureaucrats, prediction and
control. Control all the variables in therapy and you can start to predict the
outcomes. Control all the variables in society and all you have is
totalitarianism. Already the political pendulum is swinging away from
confidence in changing people through environmental influences. We may soon be
facing a new wave of eugenics as science sets out to control personality. The
attempt to place psychotherapy into the domain of science is a piece of
disturbing sophistry. It looks attractive, seems appealing, but is based on a
philosophical fallacy. Psychotherapy is about value and values. It involves the
discussion, the exploration of value and values. And as any student of
philosophy and ethics can tell you, there is no way to move from the domain of
values to the domain of facts. Science is concerned with facts.
000
Postle suggests that a negative pessimistic Freudian philosophy has shaped and
tainted the development of U.K.C.P. He argues his case strongly. However I find
his juxtaposed humanistic model as naively optimistic as the Freudian is dourly
pessimistic. He talks about both approaches beginning with birth. Sadly this
leaves out of consideration all events before birth and during birth.
000
What happens if we look at both these philosophies in the light of what we are
learning in terms of pre and perinatal psychology. Both approaches, despite
appearances are very concerned about dealing with bad stuff But the bad stuff
is not a phantasy of a bad breast but the historic fact of toxins transmitted
through the umbilicus into the foetus. In the pessimistic scenario the badness
has been projected into the foetus. It has eaten of the tree of knowledge, the
umbilicus, and been poisoned by it. The mother/environment has pushed its bad
stuff into the child. So the world environment or matrix needs to be protected
from the child's wrathful revenge. Society needs protection from the
destructiveness of its individuals, the psychotherapy client population must be
protected from the destructiveness of its psychotherapists.
000
In the optimistic humanistic scenario time is regressed before the dreadful
invasion of badness. But somehow there is a hidden knowledge of the possibility
of the bad stuff The bad stuff is kept projected in the environment. Badness
from outside is seen as distorting the basic goodness of the foetus who would
otherwise be true, pure, lovely and of good report. One of the plenary papers
at the 1998 congress of the International Society for Prenatal and Perinatal
psychology and Medicine was given by Thomas Verny on the theme of the goodness
of the prenate, providing evidence of behaviour interpreted as altruism.
000
Is it really possible to go beyond this polarisation and splitting? The
Christian Church tried to escape this polarisation by saying that evil did not
really exist and should not be given ontological status. They did so because
for evil to exist in its own right would compromise the existence of the One
good God. In the face of the current level of atrocity in the Balkans not so
many people find it convincing to think of evil as no more than a relative
deprivation of the good. Human behaviour is sometimes quite inhuman. But can a
trained psychotherapist seriously consider accepting the current British
propaganda that the Serbs are bad and the Cosovo Albanians are good innocent
victims. There is a war on. Tremendous social pressure comes into play to
project all badness into the enemy while reserving all that is good to our
side. The famous Milgram social psychology experiments are just one of many
examples of how people can behave with far greater cruelty to others when
encouraged and sanctioned by group membership and authority within a social
grouping.
000
I believe it is a sound observation based at least in part on research into
group behaviour, that an individual tends to act with more moral responsibility
than a group, that a small group tends to behave with greater responsibility
than a large group and that the least morally and socially responsible group is
the nation state. Membership of larger and more bureaucratised groups serves to
reduce individual autonomy and moral responsibility rather than enhancing it.
On this basis I cannot see how the existence of a large controlling institution
for psychotherapy would provide any real protection for the potential client.
000
The stress of war recapitulates the stress of being born. The persons capacity
to hold onto a unity of being that is neither good nor bad but just is, becomes
overwhelmed in both situations. In war I can feel good when I kill my enemy and
rape his wife, for my cause is just. In birth the suffering is such that if I
am to feel good in myself I am likely to perceive the world as very bad. Primal
unity is shattered and the world is split into goodness and badness.
000
I would like to make a plea for a psychotherapists view of human nature that is
about Being and Personhood rather than mechanistic processes, about the core
value of an individual human being rather than the collective, about human
rights and responsibilities rather than fixed codes of behaviour, about
artistry and creativity rather than scientific prediction and control, about
plurality and diversity as opposed to moulding and conditioning. I note that
this is the opposite of the value system proposed by Van Deurzen, the U.K.C.P.
chair. "We have to transform what used to be a craft or an art based on moral
or religious principles into a scientifically based accountable professional
expertise" ( Van Deurzen as quoted by Postle) I find this all the more
distressing from a supposed existential phenomenologist and philosopher and
member of the humanistic and integrative section of the Council.
000
Postle shows very clearly the dominant influence of the pessimistic world view
on members of U.K.C.P. He suggests that the " infinite easygoingness of the
humanistic/integrative culture has led to a loss of political will, a failure
of nerve and/or courage in relations with the psychoanalytic tradition." I do
not believe this is generally the case though there may be truth there as well.
Humanistic therapists have tended to focus on human potential rather than human
weakness, but when over an extended period they discover and get bogged down in
transference phenomena they tend to feel out of their depth and turn to
psychoanalysis for help. Too often I have seen sudden changes in practitioners
resembling Paul's on the road to Damascus. In recent years I am finding
supposedly humanistic practitioners more analytic than the analysts. While
analytic practitioners I know grow critical of their long experienced
methodology the less experienced humanistic people become the naive advocates
of the more established way of working. One of my major concerns is the newer,
less established groupings attempting to be more establishment than the
establishment, more elitist than the elite. Take the example of the Association
of Humanistic Psychology Practitioners moving towards severance with the
Association for Humanistic Psychology itself, since the latter is opposed to
professionalisation.
000
This article is only a partial response to Denis Postle. I will write more
later. I have provided the readers with plenty of data to help them make up
their own minds about the answers to some of the questions that Denis Postle
and I have posed. I hope 1 have at least contributed something to the debate
about the future of psychotherapy in the United Kingdom. My own sense is that
both the Oxford Centre for Human Relations and the U.K. Standing Conference for
Psychotherapy were noble and worthwhile ventures which have been hugely damaged
by the dynamics of the emergence of Institutional Power and Control. This
writing seems to me to leave open the question of whether wiser, more mature
individuals could have done a better job, or whether it is another simple proof
of the old adage that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
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