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The annual conference in January was the largest ever, attended by 96 delegates from 65 organisations. A number of important decisions were made by very broad agreement. Our rule of thumb is that no agreement is regarded as binding unless voted for by at least two thirds of the delegates. This year, as in past years, the really important decisions about the future direction of the Conference were agreed by well over the required margin.
Having spent a year from January 1987 trying to make the Sections work, it was agreed to keep the federal structure. Each Section will maintain standards of training and practice within its own boundaries. Any organisation wanting to join the Conference will do so by joining an appropriate Section. There is provision for the creation of new Sections for therapies as yet undiscovered, and we created a new Section this year for the Association of Child Psychotherapists and others, who could not fit into any of the adult psychotherapy Sections.
We agreed that next year at the January Conference we will inaugurate the Standing Conference for Psychotherapy and adopt the eight draft constitution. We had in the past had six drafts - the seventh was adapted to the federal structure, amended at a meeting in November 1987, and after some important fine-tuning at Canterbury it will be scrutinised by legal advisers and the Charity Commissioners. The eighth draft will be sent to all participating organisations as the blueprint for founding the Standing Conference. Of course, like all constitutions, it will need changes over time, at the annual general meetings.
This year, a lot of time was again given to the Sections to meet and to report back to plenary sessions. It is interesting to compare the differences and the similarities between the different Sections. There is no such thing as a group of therapists who are free from problems!
We now look forward to the start of the Standing Conference and the founding of the new profession of Psychotherapy.