Commentary on State Regulation

The ‘talking cure’ has made rapid strides over the past few years. It has moved from being a cottage industry, practised by a few ‘knowing’ practitioners (post-war psychoanalysis), developed into a mainstream, as counselling skills were taught at colleges and universities, to now taking its place as a major industry, with potentially tens of thousands of Lord Layards' CBT practitioners, ‘assisting’ people back to work, and ‘curing’ them of depression.

In this sense, what is happening to us, as psychotherapists, has its parallels in what happened to the medieval guilds of weavers, whose profession was overtaken with the invention of the handloom. The handloom weavers were then swept away themselves by the advent of the power-loom. In the case of the weavers, resistance was sporadic, fierce, and bitter, but in the end technological progress and productivity won out. Mass-production, not just of cloth, of course, but of nearly everything else that we take for granted today, came into its own.

In those days, the technological advances were made in the tools of their trades. In our profession, the technological advances are in new techniques, such as EMDR and energy therapies; in more sophisticated CBT; in new understandings in neurobiology; and, simply and obviously, in our culture and our capacity to communicate with each other. In Freud's day, feelings were not discussed; emotional expression was through the subtle and often oblique messages of great writers. Relationships were created by unpredictable mixes of rational economic justification and sexual misadventure. The discussion of feelings in detail; the notion of choice about relationship, had no sophistry in language and few contexts in which to operate.

Today, talking about intimate feelings is the common currency of women's magazines; of ‘chick-lit’; of TV shows such as EastEnders; of radio programmes such as The Archers. It has even spread into the grittier tales of cops and robbers: Tony Soprano has a therapist