Rugby Psychotherapy Conference 1986

We met from the 10th-12th January, 1986 at Stanford Hall Co-operative College in Leicestershire and had an interesting and constructive Conference which has brought us another step nearer to formulating coherent ideas about bringing psychotherapy practitioners and their organisations together in a formal way. In view of what had happened last year and the year before, this Conference was conducted mainly in plenary sessions and the actual content of the Constitution was the bread and butter of the meetings having, in the past, been rather relegated to Sunday morning when there has not been that much time.

We had the usual Friday evening talk followed by discussion. This time it was on the question of the so-called core professions and their relationship to psychotherapy which, of course, also raises the question of whether or not it would be a good idea for psychotherapy to form itself into a distinct and separate profession. In discussing the Constitution, we essentially found that broadly speaking the fourth draft Constitution is widely acceptable and that the issue now is one of precisely what kind of structure we want for the Standing Conference. On a straw poll we found interestingly that, although a minority of us were actually mandated to commit our organisations, just over half felt their organisations would join the Standing Conference as presently formulated and of the remainder half thought their organisations would not and the other half actually did not know. This led us to discussions of just what kind of structure might be more widely acceptable and I discovered during the course of this that I had got very hooked on to the notion of a single unifying professional identity which is not actually the majority view and which, if stuck to too vigorously, could even hold up the progress of the Conference.

What we need to ask our member organisations now is what level of federal structure they are looking for, what degree of autonomy amongst the Membership th