You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Might psychotherapists and psychoanalysts be sleep-walking to disaster in their collusion with the rapid progress towards state regulation? Powerful structures and processes have been set in motion that could reduce psychotherapy (including psychoanalysis) to a set of prescribed, manualized procedures. Sanctions may be applied to practitioners whose practice does not conform to these ‘National Occupational Standards’ set by the state appointed Health Professions Council (HPC). Furthermore, any practitioner using the state protected title psychotherapist could be the subject of legal action if they are not registered with HPC. This state control would replace the regulation that has been developed by the professional organizations themselves.
The state action proposed, involving surveillance and control, should correctly be referred to not as statutory regulation, but as state regulation. Statutory regulation may be viewed as a more general, self-organizing principle by the field in question, often involving a protected title registered with the government authority (Hogan, 2003; Parker & Revelli, 2008). The British government has decided that the statutory model should be rejected as they consider it is biased towards the practitioner grouping (Leader, 2008).
At this crucial time for psychoanalytic practice, we believe that an ethical stance requires all practitioners carefully to consider and assess the evidence base for, and likely implications of, state regulation of psychotherapy based on a medical ‘health care’ model. While fully respecting the democratic processes within the psychotherapy member organizations, we believe this process can be enhanced by highlighting a range of concerns that have been expressed regarding the potential hazards of state regulation.
In the 1970s, the Foster Report (on Scientology) suggested regulation of all