A Note on ‘Core Professions’

Anyone interested in the development of psychotherapy in the UK must be grateful to Jonathan Pedder for his excellent summary of the recent history and current situation in Courses in Psychotherapy: Evolution and Current Trends (1989). It is splendidly lucid and informative.

I should like, however, to pick out one theme from his paper which I think needs very careful attention. It is the suggestion that ‘entry to the practice and profession of psychotherapy should be via the core professions’. By core professions he means: ‘obviously’ medicine, clinical psychology and social work; apparently less obviously, ‘nursing, occupational therapy, educational backgrounds and so forth’.

This suggestion, he says, ‘I first thought rather conservative but am coming round to think is perhaps right’.

As a first point, let me comment on the word conservative. The reality is that the great majority of the existing psychotherapy trainings have no tradition of regarding medicine, etc, as ‘core professions’ in the sense that there is any necessity to enter the training by way of them. Even Dr Pedder's own organisation, the British Psychoanalytical Society, accepts people from other backgrounds quite readily, and I am not aware that they are regarded in any way as less equipped, having done the training, than the medics and others. Of all the trainings, the only ones whose tradition would be ‘conserved’ by this (in fact) radical innovation would be the adult training of the Tavistock Clinic, certainly an excellent body but unique because of its special relation with the NHS, and perhaps some of the university diploma courses.

Dyne and Figlio (1989), responding on behalf of the ‘independents’, make a second important point: that many excellent therapists come to training in middle life and without such backgrounds. It would be pointless and counter-productive to require them to do massive preliminary trainings of such limited relevance to their mature goals.

In the Question of Lay Analysis, F