Confused or Invisible

Dear Sir

Here is a letter which you can publish if you want to, or send to Camilla Bosanquet if you want to. I just had to write it.

I've been feeling invisible again. It happened once before, and I wrote to this Journal about it, and it led to an interesting correspondence with Bob Hinshelwood which was later published (Vol. 4, p. 142). This time it is as a result of reading the article by Camilla Bosanquet entitled ‘The Confusion of Tongues and the Rugby Conference’ (Vol. 5, p. 228). Now I have been a pretty regular attender at the Rugby Conference (now of course transmogrified into the UKSCP, an uninspiring set of initials) and I looked forward to a good article living up to the fascinating title.

After all, the Rugby Conference is, or should I say was (these changes of title are a bit confusing), more or less the only place where you could see eminent psychoanalysts playing encounter games, or gestalt therapists smiling over their beers at some of the more fascinating analysts. To say something about the difficulties of communication in such circumstances would be difficult but probably worth reading.

This is particularly so since there is not only the relationship between psychoanalysts and humanistic psychotherapists, but also the even more complex relationships between both of these and child therapists, family therapists, cognitive and behavioural therapists, hypnotherapists and so forth, all grist for the mill, one might have thought.

The one which interests me most, of course, as a humanistic and transpersonal psychotherapist is the relationship between the analytic sections and the humanistic and integrative section. The former comprises twenty-eight organisations (in the uncorrected edition of the Yellow Pages for ) and the latter fourteen. None of the other sections is anything like these sizes so this represents a major division within the conference. (Of course, as they never cease to point out, the behavioural psychotherapy section comprises about 2500 me