You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The EFPP is essentially a British initiative concerned with public sector psychoanalytic psychotherapy that seems to have touched upon a recognised need in our European neighbours and colleagues. Its origins are inextricably linked with the development of the Association for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in the British Health Service (APP).
The APP was founded in 1981 by a group of psychoanalysts working as Consultant Psychotherapists in the NHS. It rapidly became a multidisciplinary organisation with full members having completed training in specified training organisations and employed at senior levels within the public services. The main concerns of the APP stem from the limited amount of skilled psychoanalytic psychotherapy available in the public services in Britain, except in a few centres of excellence. Furthermore there has been a relative failure of the established professions of psychiatry and psychology to address seriously these issues in training and service provision. From early days the APP has also had in mind those members of the traditional caring professions who find the ideas and understandings of psychoanalysis (and techniques derived from it) invaluable in their daily work. The APP has encouraged and supported such persons through associate membership. The need for the APP is illustrated by its rapid growth such that after ten years there are 425 associate and full members.
As well as developing a journal Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy the APP has been organising important conferences in different parts of the country on themes relevant to work in the NHS. Appropriately for the aims of the APP, some of these themes have been related to the politics of the provision of public sector psychoanalytic psychotherapy. One example of this was a conference in November 1989 debating the issues for and against the development of a separate non-medical adult psychotherapy discipline in the NHS along the lines of the, now well-established a